• WARNING: Tube/Valve amplifiers use potentially LETHAL HIGH VOLTAGES.
    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

3a5 output stage advice

I have an oddball 211 amp here, it was a 1980s UK cottage industry product that was very short lived, and has an odd design, I think it has a 12au7 into a 5687 and then the 211. Its been a long time since I pulled it out of storage. Sounded good but I think the design means it doesn't shine at its best. It had a habit of blowing the rectifiers on the heaters - and in truth thats another one that could do with a coleman reg!

The other valve amps I have are all push pull
 
I put together a simple CCS using a 10m45s supplying 4mA to the plate - this gave quite a jump in sound quality..... which of course has me wondering what a cascode one would sound like!

I'll get some bits together to try out.... the sound quality is pretty outstanding.

As always, thank you all for the help, it is much appreciated.
 
Felipe is right about Ale's Anode-Load - this is a very good implementation for horizontal load lines.

And with an anode current of 4mA, there is another reason to use it - it's difficult to build a cascoded depletion FET CCS that will work well at 4mA. It would need dissimilar FETs, with the lower part having an Idss much lower than the upper part.

Further explanation here:
Cascoded DN2540 CCS down to 0.3 mA