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Tube DIY Asylum Do It Yourself (DIY) paradise for tube and SET project builders. |
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In Reply to: Re: Pinging Steve Eddy ... posted by Sasquatch on December 26, 2005 at 08:04:24:
Thanks for the link. I will contact them to check their prices. However, the power supply transformers are free and sound excellent, so I will probably just solder new leads on them and call it a day. There is a law of diminishing returns with a WMA player as a source.True enough. Though there's no reason why your use of transformers should be limited to a WMA player either. :)
Do you have a theory about why transformer coupling might improve the sound--ignoring the obvious advantage of saving an added gain stage? Last night the wife and I did A/B comparisons of the transformer or nothing at similar volume settings and still preferred the sound with the transformers in line. The sound was more relaxed and natural with a better front to back soundstage. For daytime listening I need gain and would gladly have taken a small sonic hit to have it. Improved sound was not something I expected. The amp is a 12SL7 RC coupled to 1626, single ended, both stages battery biased.Three guesses:
a) the transformers are introducing benign harmonic distortion
b) they are isolating the amp from hash generated by the player
c) they have a frequency response anomaly that sounds goodIn your particular instance it may well be all three. I don't really have any definitive answers. I just know that when I first gave transformers a try some 15-20 years ago I fell in love with them. And I'm one who tends to just enjoy results and not ask too many questions. :)
Of course, old school amp schematics all show transformer inputs and coupling between stages with batteries for bias. Maybe those guys new what they were doing.Oh certainly. But such practices are rather expensive so the tradition of using transformers largely only carries on in the professional audio market. And even there they're not all too common in more modern gear.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Pinging Steve Eddy ... - Steve Eddy 18:42:51 12/26/05 (0)
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