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    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
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    the safety precautions around high voltages.

Low DCR Chokes: Will it improve transients/dynamics?

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#61
banpuku said:
My Ilumnia Magister speakers are single driver from 30hz to 5khz. Then a super tweeter kicks in. So in essence, a single driver. BTW: These are fantastic speakers and I hope to someday elaborate with a full review. The "floating", spiderless driver (patented) is very very good in my opinion.
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Don't bother. If your review has half the vodoo nonsense of your other posts it will be useless. If you want more snap add some 3khz.
 
#63
Ilumnia Magister

Ilumnia Magister - Marknadens finaste musiksystem

ELECTRO MAGNETIC SUSPENSION

"Adaptable damping of the cone (5 selections) in relation to the damping factor of your amplifier for a perfect marriage

We have included the possibility to choose between 5 possible damping factors. For instance, on powerful solid state monoblocks recommend 3 (basic setting). On a class A triode tube amp we recommend selection 4 because the tube amp has wonderful 2th harmonics but lacks some control over the driver due to low damping of tube amps. On a 300B tube amp some will even select position 5."
 
#65
The other interesting data:
"8 ohm (min. imp. 4 ohm @ 15khz)"

Class A type low power SET amplifiers usually don't like much lower impedance load than expected.

You should try temporarily driving this speakers from 4R output of OPT.
 
#69
Your speakers have biwire terminals: remove the tweeter cables if biwire - or remove the bridge to the tweeter terminals and tell us if your speakers may sound different with no tweeters ?
The crossover of your speakers is 5.5 Khz
Are you kidding us a little bit ?

I am just diyer not tube tech expert:
In the psu you use caps and chokes for dropping down the AC ripple, every LC stage makes the psu cleaner but also slower.
You have to find the right ballance for a fast and quiet psu and not too loud ripple hum on loudspeakers.
At C1 you psu is faster than on C2, but it is much to noisy to be used on tubes. Now your C1 is 10µF = ca 10V AC ripple voltage.
Swap the caps: C1 Kemet 550µF(+0.2µF bypass) and to C2 the Wima 10µF. (or better the Wima 30µF to C2 and the Wima 10µF to C3 at R11K / Slaggle IT)
On C1 Kemet you will have ca 180mV AC ripple. This is low enough for B+ of the output tube. The triode 45 has µ of 3.5 (no EML datas for 45B) The ripple will not be amplified much - no hum.
The C3g in triode has a µ of 40, add 3.5 from tube 45: 40 x 3.5 = 140 amplified factor for the psu AC ripple. This would make a loud 120Herz hum on your speakers. The C3g needs a quiet B+ voltage.
My explication of this tube psu is very simplified and has surely faults - other may correct me.

Johann
 
#71
Lauscher said:
every LC stage makes the psu cleaner but also slower.

You have to find the right ballance for a fast and quiet psu and not too loud ripple hum on loudspeakers.
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This thread sounds like a huge pile of nonsense.


I have a 70+ yr old push pull amp with choke input filter power supply LC (actually it's an identical pair of 60W monobloc amps) and if I remember smoothing capacitor is something like 8uF at 600V.

It's so quiet you have to put your ear to the speaker to detect any hum whatsoever.
The transformers are excellent quality and OEM, more than 70yrs old.

The output stage is DC coupled and runs in AB2 & the screen supply is C-L-C.


Nobody would ever dare to describe the amplifier in any way as really quite astonishingly powerful, - in fact they describe it (after a substantial redesign) as TOO CLEAN. 😛


I deliberately changed the output valves from 807 to KT8C in hope of detecting an improvement.

(same basic valve as KT66 original GEC-MOV build and those days retailing for anything over 1500 USD for 4.)

ZILCH.
I literally couldn't tell any difference.
Which again shows if I can't tell the difference between a genuine KT66 and a 6L6/807, or even repro 6l6GC, sure as anything nobody else can!

All this stuff about 30% wider sound stage, deeper bass, low DCR chokes, "slow" or "fast" PSU- that's rubbish & seems to me simply plain straight forward fantasy land.

At 600V the DCR difference of 100 ohms in a choke is sweet zero, just like the difference between 4.7 and 10ohms in the cathode is undetectable.
 
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#73
Lauscher said:
In the psu you use caps and chokes for dropping down the AC ripple, every LC stage makes the psu cleaner but also slower.
Click to expand...

Technically you can have a few "fast" LC stages than one "slower", if we look it from the view of impulse response.

From the point of view of sounding, my experience dictates that smaller choke-capacitor LC stages, despite being critically dampened, are giving me a faster kind of timbre. A huge capacitor huge choke single stage gives me the feeling of a slower, more massive sound.
Both supplies carefully simulated within PSUD2 with observed dynamic behavior.

From latest experience, my best empirical correlation so far is the overall mass of capacitors and chokes vs timbre. Many clients report the same.
 
#74
my experience dictates that smaller choke-capacitor LC stages, despite being critically dampened, are giving me a faster kind of timbre. A huge capacitor huge choke single stage gives me the feeling of a slower, more massive sound.
Click to expand...


sounds very much to me like the overwhelming mass of those "clients" reporting don't have the slightest clue what they are on about.

I am used to this phenomenon by blind testing exactly those kind of people with tests to prove they cannot hear what they claim.

In one case, when blind tested they couldn't hear the difference between high rate 24-48 PCM in a live recording and mp3 versions of the same, constantly giving higher scores to the worse quality audio.

Unconscious bias was responsible for giving a stradivarius the highest possible marks, especially by audiences but when blind tested by the best soloists was completely the reverse.

masking tests are my favourite, it takes highly trained ears with years of experience to weed out compression of scarcely audible masked tones.

I would rely on 99% of "audiophiles" scoring close to zero on such tests, proving beyond doubt their claims to be able to detect PSU based anomalies as entirely fictitious.
 
#75
Lots of narcissism in your posts. Lots of I's, lots of my's and me's without valuable helps towards the thread author. As most of your posts are, not much with the wish to help with genuine advice, but mostly thirsty need to show and justify your own self.

You can believe anything you want with blind testing, although the only thing you can prove is that a particular person or group of people within a particular situation did not succeed discerning a difference during the unsighted test.

However this is not absolute proof an audible difference doesn't exist. You can of course, believe it is a proof. But it's your and only belief. It is also your belief to call audible subjectively shared opinion between audiophiles "rubbish" and "fantasy land".

Describing conclusions of people, methodologies and phenomena because of your beliefs is not much differently adequate than people sharing subjective audible differences.

P.S. "99% of audiophiles" - when using an objective number, you're a bit expected to show its objective relation, in this situation could it be a statistic? Do you have something documented?
 
#77
Banpuku, I’m suggesting this again because you might of missed it the first time; have you looked into employing some sort of loudness control? When you turn music down from your preferred listening level you are changing not just the acoustic sound level but the perceived tonal balance at your ear as well. This is precisely what the Fletcher-Munson curves describe and is exactly what the loudness control was made to correct.
 
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