kevin gilmore

Did not see that. Which means it is completely useless unless you buy both pieces as there is no other way to get pure dsd into the dac. Makes it much less usefull. And sort of typical for them, as i was wondering how they accomplished all that with hdmi, and the answer is that they did not. People are not going to read the fine print and try and hook up a sony or oppo and find out that it does not work.

I think you need names for them. But a few of the names are missing. Nothing small enough to be called the "ray samuels" model. Nothing big enough to be called the "Tuberoller" (in his dreams) model. Nothing long enough to be called the "Mikhail"

But they advertise it as being the only component necessary between the source and the power amp. That makes it a preamp like thing. surround sound is clearly the future when it comes to integrated audio/video stuff. Like it or not, most people only have the room for one man cave, and everything has to go into that one room. They have done all the hard work (user interface et all) including the hdmi stuff, might as well finish the job.

They are missing the boat again. Needs hdmi passthru. Needs 5.1 surround decoding. Needs 5.1 channels of balanced output. Then double the price and they might have something to compete for the future.

A. NOPE. No sand except in the power supply. Power supply could in fact be all tubes. Will show a picture of the ultra isolated multi channel filament supply at some point. Its really cute. B. Its a real bear to build. I only know of 3 total working units. Voltage compliance at the front end is very tight, and you have to pick very well matched input tubes. STOP IT. I get enough spam as it is. People know how to find me.

bigir, i will get you for this. texas-de-brazil. yuum

while you have it open, write down the part number on the side of the led, because one segment is out, and you really should replace it. mikhail just glues in the glass with superglue. superglue, glass(plexi) and aluminum don't go together very well. We all remember trevornetworks attempts at same...

Bad day today. Saw a 14.4kv 1000amp commonwealth edison line short against another of same and blow a hole in the road about 20 feet wide. Sure wish i had my video camera for that. Whole building lost power for 55 minutes. As for 6s4's you can push them to about 750 volts. They are rated at either 500 or 550 volts depending on which data sheet you read.2000 volts peak, but that really does not count for class A. 5687's are rated at 300 volts. The 6s4's are single triodes with a 200 volt heater to cathode. So they are a whole bunch easier for many designs.

Ray may actually not know what the design is, as he had his engineer that also does all his circuit board layouts do the thing. So it could be srpp, or it could be constant current, both of which are otherwise identical except the output is taken from either the cathode of the top tube (srpp) or the plate of the bottom tube (ccs). Tests i did last weekend showed that 5687's start to arc and do all sorts of nasty things over 425 volts plate voltage. So the power available from this amplifer could be anywhere from a little bit low (425) or a lot low (300) Transformers would definitely help some as the output impedance of the srpp would see roughly a constant load impedance. In any case for an amplifier priced like the A10, there should be bigger output tubes that can handle at least 800 volts. Then again -=germainia=- really likes ray's hr2. So what the hell do i know

Certainly. But i'm not giving them to you..

AH HA... stink gas... sulfur hexafluoride I had a pair of those a long time back. motorola piezo tweeters inside the air bags. As i remember the gas gave about a 5db gain boost. mskennedy... you kidding right.... those are military boys. their prices are 3 times that of apex...

If you are going thru all the trouble to make an all dc coupled all tube amp, then you might as well scale up the output tubes to handle more voltage and power. Those 3583's went out of production 10 years ago.(probably more than 10 years) If you can find them dirt cheap, then give it a go. You will need sockets for those parts which may be hard to find. You might actually have better luck using DHT's for the outputs, as the gate voltage will be much less... Also remember that this lifts the output voltage to +300 dc. Which means the bias is is now +850 dc. Some people seem to get a bit nervous with that...

Price the pa42's lately??? Plus lots of power supplies. === bitch. Besides which using 6ca7's as the output tubes requires even more messing with the power supplies due to the cut off voltage increase.

The WES is ac coupled. A fully dc coupled all tube amplifier is a royal bitch. Only the srm-717,sr-007t, kgss, kgst, BH, BHSE are fully dc coupled input thru output. The WES is going to blow away the A10. The WES is going to sound similar to mikhail's disasters. Except it won't trash output tubes and otherwise go arcy sparky. The BHSE has a different presentation. All of you out there (with cash) should buy both a BHSE and a WES. YOU WILL BE HAPPY. TRUST ME.

Good circuit. Srx is a good circuit too till mikhail made total trash out of it.

NOPE. GES on steroids. No reason to ever build a srx circuit with beefed up tubes due to filament to cathode voltage concerns in the top of the first stage, and the output stage. Unless you really want 5 different filament supplies.

You want to move somewhere with a great opera company, wonderful symphony, and a thriving live jazz scene. And the best radio station in the world, and ravinia not to shabby either. But dental floss tychoon definitely works too...

replace with a pair of 1n4007 silicon diodes and be done with

And justin beats me to the answer again. Its the AC signal that is the problem especially since the 2 halves of the tubes are 180 out of phase. So one cathode goes up by 90 volts,and the other goes down by 90 volts. Any more output signal than that and you violate the tube ratings. (for 5687's) You could mix the tubes, using one section for L+ and R+, then as long as the music is mono... There absolutely is a way to do this, has to be single triodes. OR single DHT's. Maybe i should publish my all DHT amp schematic, but really don't want the competition (hack cough) to actually learn how to do it right. Sucks to have a day job, otherwise i could be like billy and be on head-case all day.

Nope try again... One triode of the two in the same tube is the high side, and the other is the low side. If the low side tube cathode is pretty close to ground, as one would expect with a srpp with gain, then the most the top cathode of the other triode in the same glass would be +90. Output voltage swing would be very minimal. Not rays "louder than loud" style. Would limit B+ to less than 200 volts... In fact on the cRaptor, the B+ is 250 volts, and the top cathode is at 150 volts, 60 volts over spec.

Lets everyone send justin various things to test and play with. Lets start with bench power supplys. I'm planning on an entire pallet piled high with supplies in a few weeks. Sure hope justin's apartment has a loading dock..

MAJOR FAIL. The top tube violates the filament to cathode spec. Nothing can be done about this either, as they are dual triode tubes.

Lets take a standard tube based differential amplifier with a gain of 10 or more. If you input a SE signal, and the other side is ground, the output is balanced. The exact level differences are probably no more than 1db. Do the same thing with a balanced input. The level differences are (or should be) very close to zero. So what you have is an unbalanced to balanced converter, and a balanced to balanced buffer all in one tube. Pretty sure this is what ray is doing. The fact that it took him years to really understand this is not a surprise as mikhail is yet to figure it out. John Curl is one of the very few that have been doing it correctly for 20 or more years. Transformers of course make it easy, but no one wants those. And i agree with justin that there are lots of products out there that take unbalanced inputs and output balanced. Or take a balanced input that is seriously unbalanced and turn it into a balanced output. Krell, levinson...Even cheap stuff like outlawaudio. People forget that the reason balanced exists in the first place is to get rid of the ground loops. Absolutely necessary for professional audio and cables 100's of feet long. I would think that most people with half a brain consider ALO a horrible joke, and its not worth the trouble to bash the hell out of them.

All electrostatic transducers (other than the beveridge) are balanced devices and must be driven with a balanced drive system. The A10 in balanced input mode must clearly be balanced thru the 4 channel pot to the output section. Now whether or not the 4 output sections are push pull (i.e. srpp) or single ended (tube with resistor plate load pictured a couple of pages back) is a different discussion. Likely the later and either dc coupled outputs (with dual power supply) or ac coupled outputs (single power supply) ES1 is fully balanced input thru output, capacitively coupled in the middle, dc coupled outputs KGSS, KGST, BH and BHSE are fully balanced input thru output completely dc coupled input to output srm-T1, 007t,srm-717 etc are all fully balanced input thru output completely dc coupled input to output

actually ray would be in a position to do a dual unit if he wanted to. chuck the preamp part, just have a unbalanced/balanced switch then 2 x 12ax7 for the balanced /unbalanced inputs, 4 x 5687 for balanced dynamic and 4 x 5687 for balanced electrostatic. You could even have both at the same time.