• 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.

high gain pre, heater elevation, humdinger, and DC

tl;dr
ultra-high gain guitar preamp. Heater supply, 1st stage. Which one(s) would you do?
a) DC supply
b) humdinger
c) heater elevation

---

I'm building a preamp, focused entirely on heavy metal using 4 ECC83 gain stages. From Merlin's (aka valve wizard) design book, the suggestion is to have the 1st gain stage use a DC heater.

Earlier in the book, under noise, he shows this with a humdinger. And if I'm already doing that, why not elevate it, it's just two more resistors and a cap.

Doing all three seems overkill. I mean I could, but...
 
tl;dr
ultra-high gain guitar preamp. Heater supply, 1st stage. Which one(s) would you do?
a) DC supply
b) humdinger
c) heater elevation

---

I'm building a preamp, focused entirely on heavy metal using 4 ECC83 gain stages. From Merlin's (aka valve wizard) design book, the suggestion is to have the 1st gain stage use a DC heater.

Earlier in the book, under noise, he shows this with a humdinger. And if I'm already doing that, why not elevate it, it's just two more resistors and a cap.

Doing all three seems overkill. I mean I could, but...
They are used in different environemnts:
-DC filaments , best, provided the DC is good
- humdingers - used when AC is used for filement to "nullify" remaining hum
- raised filement - used when a cathode is at DC level above some arbitrary

level ( 75Volt ?) . but not to have elevated filaments on other tubes where
cathode is close to ground. This usually means that one needs several filement
windings