• 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.

What tubes for a OTL tube amp?

BHD: I totally agree with you, and I do have homebrew tube mono-block amps with OPTs and preamp for my listening pleasure. OTLs can sound spectacular; all I am saying is that they are quite inefficient, since driving a low impedance load from a high impedance source just clobbers efficient power transfer.
 
This is the most power hungry beast I have ever constructed, but also the best sounding, so it remains in the chain...
OTL.jpg
 
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This is the most power hungry beast I have ever constructed, but also the best sounding, so it remains in the chain... View attachment 1015153
Beautifull work!

I have a pair of Amphion Kripton 2 that are a hard load on bass region for any amplifier, but my DIY Atma sphere monos can control the Amphions like no other amplifeir i tried before, tube or transistor, and i don't even use any feedback on these amps. I never expected these level of performance with these speakers. I made these amps for my electrostatics.
 
Beautifull work!

I have a pair of Amphion Kripton 2 that are a hard load on bass region for any amplifier, but my DIY Atma sphere monos can control the Amphions like no other amplifeir i tried before, tube or transistor, and i don't even use any feedback on these amps. I never expected these level of performance with these speakers. I made these amps for my electrostatics.
Excatly!! Contrary to common belifies these amps are champs in the bass region. No feedback in mine either
 
One thing about 7241s (other than their high price and extreme rarity) is that they need a great deal of care and feeding. The preconditioning must be at least 5 days and nights. There must be sufficient cathode current limiting resistors for each cathode. I think running in excess of about 135volts on the plate to be foolhardy. But if you are patient with them, I have seen them give good service. A CF driver is recommended, with a separate coupling cap and CF driver (with attendant biasing networks) will be needed.
I am curious about this statement "the pre-conditioning must be...etc" as well as "there must be sufficient cathode current limiting resistors for each cathode". Could you explain these statements, please?

I have also attached a schematic for a 7241 as v2 where the author has put in resistors in the 3 filaments. Does it make sense to you?
 

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It does. The Wattage of the resistors is too low! Essentially we are talking about 10Watt 2.5 Ohm resistors required for each cathode. If they are no present a cathode can hog current, causing premature failure. That is why Tung Sol designed this tube with three cathode connections. If you look at the tube you'll see its actually three sections from the 6336 dual power triode.

'Preconditioning' is the act of lighting up the filament on a previously unused (new, or NOS) tube for a predetermined amount of time. This is known to improve the life of the tube (perhaps doubling it) and reduces arcing due to flaking of the cathode coating. This works on any power tube. When B+ is applied the preconditioning process is permanently ended.
 
One last question: what difference in the functioning of the tube would it make to use the values as originally designed? It seems to me that with 3 cathodes in the tube and 6 resistors spec'd (2 each of 51 ohms in parallel), there would be 25 ohms for each cathode. Or was it a typo since 25 looks a lot like 2.5 ohms? What difference would that difference make?
 
Thank you for your quick response. So you recommend using 10w 2.5 ohm resistors instead. Thanks. Very, very helpful
The original drawing says that too: two 5 Ohm resistors in parallel (hence 6 resistors instead of 3) is 2.5 Ohms.
But now that you point that out, I had assumed the '51 Ohms' was really '5.1 Ohms'.
But that is in the context of a Circlotron output. If its used in a different way, then 25 Ohms would be OK, but not if only 2 Watts! Is there more to the circuit than just the drawing you showed?
 
Yes, I saw that discrepancy and I wanted clarification. In fact, I verified it with the original tube data sheet and it too recommends that the cathode resistor should be around 25 ohms, so I figured that someone misread the schematic.
More to the point, you helped me identify the fact that there are 3 cathodes and that they should have a higher wattage of resistor on them. So thanks for that.
That being said, yes, there is more to the schematic but I have confidence in its accuracy. So again, thanks for your help so far.
 
'Preconditioning' is the act of lighting up the filament on a previously unused (new, or NOS) tube for a predetermined amount of time. This is known to improve the life of the tube (perhaps doubling it) and reduces arcing due to flaking of the cathode coating. This works on any power tube. When B+ is applied the preconditioning process is permanently ended.

What is a good amount of time? I just bought a few 5C8S rectifiers for a possible new build.
 
Merlin Blencowe posted a link to a VERY interesting 1986 patent here: #US4614914

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...ancellation-transformers.371254/#post-6627067
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4614914A/en?oq=us4614914
By eliminating (effectively, using positive current Fdbk) the primary resistance of an OT, the magnetizing current (and hysteresis component) are eliminated, as well as the primary resistance of the OT. So a conventional tube amplifier using an OT can perform identically to an OTL amplifier.

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/suggestions-for-new-build.381592/#post-6905264OTL sound -without- the heat or expense.
What about phase shifts, are they as per OPT or OTL ?
 
Phase shift is a function of bandwidth. Its filter theory. A 6dB rolloff will cause phase shift to 10th or 10x the cutoff frequency, inside the passband. higher folloffs, like 12dB or 18, will have less phase shift over such a wide range but will have more and even some peakiness just prior to the -3dB point.

If you are not running feedback keeping phase shift down is a good idea. But this requires bandwidth, which is a lot easier to obtain if there are no transformers present.
 
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