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    Building, troubleshooting and testing of these amplifiers should only be
    performed by someone who is thoroughly familiar with
    the safety precautions around high voltages.

Suggestion for a tube buffer

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It is not only the harmonics what make the good tube sound. It is also the low slew rate of the tube circuit that egalises the stairform digitalartifacts of the highertones to more natural sinus waveforms.
I did research for myself and found that listening for several houres to very good digital source and amp was impossible for me. But adding one tube stage buffer with very low distorsion (<0.01%) in the setup made it possible for me to listen the hole day.
I did also looked at the signals with and without the tube buffer. There was a huge difference at hightones(>8khz) from digital sources. With tubebuffer the higher the freqency was the more fluid the waveform was.
This explains why i never had problems with listening to complete analoge soundpath.
Best experience with 6n6p and ecc99 buffers.
Further i saw on the scoop that digital sources combined with class d amps had a lot more of interference artifacts than from analoge source or with a tube buffer in between.
Everybody with a scoop and a test cd with hightones can test this for himself.
 
Sorry if maybe it's not much involved here, I heard many listeners from tube units affirming that silver silver/copper cables fit well with tubes because seem to "mix the things". Silver as you know has a higher conductivity than copper - that's physics - and for the ears this seems to lead to an increase to medium-high frequencies, so it's perceived as an overall drier, harsh sound. Pure copper is sweeter. I'm going at the opposite direction you say, yes...I want to say, everyone seek a compromise for what is better for his own taste: at the end too much tubey can be fatiguing also like listening too much SS/digital, it depends. I think everyone has a particular way to "mix the things".
 
A few percent. Completely irrelevant in any audio context. That's physics.


That's imagination.

It was just my opinion, I make various interconnect cables from three years and I noted myself those (though subtle) differences in the HIFI systems, and the people I deal with. Just to say that I see more and more people looking for silver cables to combine, especially with tubes....Mine was an attempt to explain
 
It was just my opinion, I make various interconnect cables from three years and I noted myself those (though subtle) differences in the HIFI systems, and the people I deal with. Just to say that I see more and more people looking for silver cables to combine, especially with tubes....Mine was an attempt to explain

Cable capacitances and the current to drive them are truly significant. Cuprous oxide particles create tiny diodes that degrade the signal. High purity, oxygen free, copper disposes of that issue.

Especially in the context of cables, the implications of the "Audiophilia Nervosa" and "Emperor's New Clothes" pseudo diseases must be taken into account.
 
The explanation lies in the areas of expectation effect and subconscious synesthesia. Copper sounds dull, silver sounds bright, and banana sounds fruity. (Yes, someone on here did some tests of a banana as an interconnect!)

Cable capacitances and the current to drive them are truly significant. Cuprous oxide particles create tiny diodes that degrade the signal. High purity, oxygen free, copper disposes of that issue.

Especially in the context of cables, the implications of the "Audiophilia Nervosa" and "Emperor's New Clothes" pseudo diseases must be taken into account.

The Placebo effect is alive and well in audio, unfortunately. The path to fine audio and relaxation oft travels parallel to a river of snake oil and tomfoolery. I get an especially hearty chuckle out of it at times, and manufacturers are all to happy to play into such silliness. $30 worth of precious metals in your 50cm interconnect may look and feel fancy, but unless you were using something vastly different in electrical characteristics before, it should have no significant measurable or verified difference. Things like capacitance and oxidisation are real, of course, but not often such that they give a hugely perceptible difference. People fail double blind A-B tests on these thing time and time again and still aren't convinced, unfortunately :(

Certain things are measurable and make perfect sense (harmonic distortion can and does affect how you interpret sound, of course, making it not entirely silly to desire a bit of it, as it does reduce listening fatigue at times, and feel "cozy") and others are just plain silly.


In such an esoteric and data-based hobby as DIY electronics it's sad to see such things as "magic" cables still being perpetuated and promoted.


This ends my regularly scheduled off-topic rant for the day :D
 
Most people couldn't tell the difference between golden interconnects and barbed wire.

Finally we have a WINNER for the best one-liner I've read in this new year. It was close. But I'm still laughing so the humor meter is pegged. Bravo. And you are right of course.

All I've found so far is that people who use delicately balanced equipment end up falling prey to parasitic effects that nominally shouldn't figure into the equation at all. Use of fantastically over-engineered triode 'line stages' and 'magnetic turntable pickup preamps', with such a striving toward eliminating all the snake-oil theories of “problem components” (capacitors, resistors, rectifiers, inductors…) that they end up having fairly high output impedances ("delicately balanced") and drive equally delicate next-stages.

As Eli sez… parasitic cable capacitance and run-length inductance become meaningful at higher impedances. Who knew! (We EE types did…)

GoatGuy
 
Most people couldn't tell the difference between golden interconnects and barbed wire.

That's funny! I'm from Italy and don't undestand well the nuances of english speaking, but I cannot disagree. I am the first to say that many people look for the "nice cable" and the market don't care what is the truth, until there is a dull who ever buy. Aesthetics comes before the substance...
 
Well, I made the buffer at the end...I used the circuit suggested by GoatGuy. It runs very well coupled with a Class A headphone amp. I built it with slight modification, C(out) and C(byp), and with higher voltage 240-250 V regulated. I tried before with a JJ E88CC and then with a tube made in England (probabily a BRIMAR BVA of the sixites). With the last one it sounds very musical and soundstage too is good.
 

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