• 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.

OPT in or near loudspeaker?

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Until now the answer is no, so far we have not heard from people who have tried it.

I find that having HV DC in the cables makes things easier as you can have long cables without loss, I guess that the some times heated discussion about cables could disappear.

Safety should of course be taken care of but I do not find it more difficult than all the other HV cables in the house, it is mostly a question about choosing a reasonable plug standard.

I thought that in Europe the normal standard for PA was 600ohm symmetric.

My point is that if you are a DIY'er then you should take all the advantages of it and not try to make products which already exist on the commercial market.

I have some Tamura OPT's laying around and find that they are too good not to be used so I am thinking of some bizarre circuits in the 1-2 watt range which I have not seen before.

Søren
 
A slightly different variant that does get mentioned sometimes (Tubecad) is to keep the OT at the amplifier, and run the global feedback back from the speaker terminals, instead of from the OT secondary terminals. That will lower the damping factor right at the speaker, and put less (effective) capacitance into the feedback with a low Zo signal.
 
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Has any of you actually tried it?

Hello Søren

Back in the old days this was quiet normal. As an example please have a look at an radio from Telefunken, build in 1931.

Katzenkopf T 340 T340W RENS1204 Radio Telefunken Deutschland

You see, there is no speaker and no output-transformer.

One of the speakers for this radio is the Telefunken Arcodyn 505 with a field coil speaker and a build-in output transformer.

Arcodyn 505WT Speaker-P Telefunken Deutschland TFK, Gesellsc

The output transformer has taps for different tubes, from the tiny RE134, over RES164, RE304 up to the RE604, the predecessor of the AD1.

Best regards
Michael
 
Until now the answer is no, so far we have not heard from people who have tried it.

Søren,

Perhaps then a reason for not having tried it. In a sense, as in re-inventing the wheel. What advantage would one expect?

Perhaps I should first ask what length of cable you are looking at. One can use a fair length of not over-expensive loudspeaker cable before audible disadvantage would set in. Losses can be calculated; I see no disadvantage in lengths of loudspeaker cable applicable to domestic audio. (Not to open a can of worms, but the 'loss of damping factor' effect is overrated and mostly erroneously applied.)

On the other hand, yes, instability could set in with long feeds of anode circuit cable, apart from the dangers already mentioned. So in my view no advantage, but some disadvantages in using long anode coupling cables.
 
Johan,

as you may be remember, I was asking if some one had tried it, I did not ask for advices of which I got plenty, but nothing new to me.

Looking in another thread I found this:

"Second round started with the VV52. We focused on F-7003 and F-5002 only. The result still the same but the owner of F-7003 said "I feel the detail of F-7003 was hidden somewhere"
So, we moved both OPT to the Spk terminal to use #35 SWG 20cm long of Spk cable and used 5 meter for HV cable from VV52 to OPT. Believe it or not, both OPT gained in detail and F-5002 showed more volume and clearer bass than the F-7003, even better than F-2007, I think. I thought this contradicted the idea that F-5002 has weak bass."

I found it in this thread:

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/tubes-valves/109987-best-se-output-transformer-300b-shootout.html

It is from 2007.

So I still think I will try it although not in the very near future do to other projects.

Søren
 
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