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Re: I disagree.

Hi

The Circlotron has an advantage over the conventional center tap plate output in that the winding is one fourth the normal impedance of the same tubes plate loaded and can be an autoformer.
This makes it easier to extend the transformers high frequency cutoff.
It has the advantage over the Mcintosh double bridge in that the single winding has less parallel capacitance.
The down side of the Circlotron and the Mcintosh circuit is the very high drive voltage the output tube require. In the Mcintosh, this was accomplished by bootstrapping the supply’s off a transformer winding..

The weakness of both designs is that transformers generate harmonic distortion in the bottom third of the audible frequency range. This distortion is unlike that of an amplifier in that if one averages the magnitude and level of all the distortion components, one finds the shape of the distortion envelope is unchanged by the input frequency. This is not related to saturation distortion which happens at high level at low frequencies, this is present at any level.

And yes, at the limits of performance, ALL designs are a careful balance of trade off’s or they are not at the edge of “what can be done”.

Tom

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