• 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.

Tube buffer 6H6P after a DAC

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I am currently just taking one of the balanced outs on a CS4397 DAC straight to my amp via a capacitor (like lampizator without tubes!). It works very well but I wonder if adding a buffer (brilliant examples a few posts back, thank you for those) will actually not improve things overall as we are adding active stages. I guess it's a trade off between having the full signal (x 2) and lower noise floor against the loss of clarity by adding a stage or stages to do the conversion from balanced to unbalanced. It's also down to how good the single ended output are on the DAC.
The way forward has to be to try both and compare.
 
Go for a transformer! Use a LL1544A at 2:1 for the real thing. Or even better the LL1676. You get rid of both DC and caps at the same time as you do the bal/unbal conversion.

You haven´t heard your DAC until you have gone balanced😉.
 
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