SET12

Thank You tube Lovers! For giving "Me Loves Khorns" a hand here! I might add that Remember to always have a speaker connected to the tube amp when it is on! As some amps are prone to having their output transformers damaged unless their is some form of protection. Not all SETs are equal Parrot just hasn't heard one in that range yet! As Far as the 833 yes the specs are lousy but its about the music. I suggest reading the rest of the review. If the editor thought that the reviewer was totally nuts it would of never gotten its Class A recomendation. The Manufacture went after power and when you do this with this tube it requires a very high primary load impedance for its output transformer the tube is easier to manage at lower output powers giving better specs. Their are a many DIYer people around the world working with it including myself. It has a 10 volt @ 10 amps filament A 300 Watt plate rating thats 300ma. @ 1000 volts A Mu of 35

NOT! There is good and bad in both! I suggest you give a good listen to the Cary single-ended 805 Mono Blocks equiped with the 211 Transmitting tube. No one that I have ever had in my home has ever prefered PP over the SET that I have and that includes Musicans, and Recording Engineers. SET12

Thanks Erick! I will try and remember that the topics vary here. Do you scratch build? in other words do you design your self? I'd be interested in taking a look at your schematic one of the best 6L6 amps I have seen is a Heath Kit W5M you can take a look at the owners manual at the Heath Kit site I have a friend who owns a pair and loves them some real engineering in them. SET12

Nice review and a good product I think it is important to have a schematic for it for the long haul. Take a look at this TAD amp the price is right! http://www.angelfire.com/biz/bizzyb/TAD-60.html SET12

Not that I know of unless you use a balance out then converted to single-ended and remember that it will take to 4 ohm taps to in series to make an 8 ohm connection Frank VanAlstine had a inverter for such use he may still sell it. SET12

This man has really just about said it all! Tubes are about harmonic magic, imaging, decays and even transit repsonse many will argue that single ended designs are mushy and flabby because of no damping factor but do they tell you that push pull cancels out the even order harmonics that are most pleasing to the human ear leaving the wicked odd order harmonics no! and some SET's are mushy and yet properly implimented designs can be very tight and fast. And I see Rigma has a Model 91 300B from Anglea Instruments you can even build one of these for your self and just remember the worlds most expensive amplifier is not push-pull it is a single ended 833 selling for 350,000$ of which is a Transmitting tube design like mine below which is the glow of an Svetlana 811-10 running in Class A2 this really puts mood into music as well as creating a huge sound stage often much larger than any AV solid-state gear while basking in a warm glow! May the Glow be with you! SET12

No disrespect for anyone here! but I thought this was a 2-Channel forum here? You can debut the Multi channel logic view all day! and the center as well with many merits to both sides. Some of us feel that to get the performance of two channel from multi channel is just cost prohibitive one could even argue that the performance of a multi-channel system for the same funds will still out perform 2-channel. Listening is an event for some and therefore we sit in a chair and listen My stage is at times so wide, that I have to turn my neck some 45 degrees in either direction and sometimes imformation is literally in back of me or passing thru my head I have no interest in listening to tiny point sources I am interested in image stability but as I have said electronics very widely as well as speaker systems many people prefer to pursue the two channel method and are interested in harmonics and decays and the recorded room ambiance this is why I am into tube gear and why I have no interest in solid state. I might add that some of friends that have multi-channel equipment are just dumping the stuff they are just tired of it and its expense because they take 2-channel more seriously in persuit of their bliss. I guess it may boil down to what is one man or womens loss is another ones gain for multi-channel! SET12

i would say it's all output impedance, which you have to figger a xfmr in that equation... supply layout ..?? please explain.... and, yes, i am not against SET, i run PP tubes for mids There are many things going on in an amplifier, Some are relevent when the x-thing is going on and some are not relevent when the y-thing is going on yes some tube amps can be dark, mushy, slow, lifeless this goes for solid-state as well. everything is relevent to an amp yet some things like a large quick supply can do wonders for overall performance. An example the Brass EL84 amp that I have posted pictures of was once a butt ugly chassis according to my friends wife. But the performance really excited my friend so we did a form of restoration to a new chassis and circuit layout with all new parts but the Iron, turned out to be not only a performer but a real looker as well. He called me one day and said he thought the power transformer went out, He ordered a new one and when it arrived I went to help him install it and found their was nothing wrong with the old one he was ready to send it back when I said lets give it a listen as it was very massive it was a one-electron power trany it did sound fuller, and then on a hunch I said lets pull a 100 ohm resistor out of the supply path to the 84 output tubes letting them run right off the cap that the rectifier fed, since this was push pull most of the noise would cancel anyway. The result listening was very amazing to the both of us! The resistor was never returned. Everything was improved as a result. If you have a choke in the supply path chances are it likely has a high DC resistance like 60 to 200 ohms and maybe 5-10 henrys you can try bypassing it all together or you may have a large 100 or so ohm resistor that you can bypass depending on the supply capacitance you may or may not have some noise when this is done but if you like the punch which will be better detected full range you can add more capacitance to your supply. You should only try this if you have some high voltage experiance or have a friend with experiance help you the voltage is lethal. If you don't want to do that another alternative is to use a large choke one that is lets say around 1 henry and 5 ohms DC resistance Hamond makes an enclosed one its weight is around 17lbs or one that fits with low values. caps maybe an easier alternative if you have to I am not alone in this kind of thinking Herb Riechart I'm not sure on the spelling sets his chokes up like this he is a major 300B amp man. He designed an amp called Flesh and Blood and based on my little experiment he is totally correct in the performance dynamics to be had from fast time constant supplies. I go even further than he does but I may have possible patent applications so I can't discuss what I do. but what I have said here will make an amplifier more dynamic and envolveing. SET12

Again I have to concur with edwinr here. Some electronics are certainly better at ambient, lateral, depth ,height, width, and projected imformation. I myself prefer what Dennis Had of Cary audio often refers to life size imaging which is very large, When you have a degree of this the entire listening room is totally imersed in the recordings ambient cues this is what I have heard with his 211 equiped single ended 805 amplifier. I have not experianced this effect amplifiers that do not image much beyond speakers width. My own electronics excell at this and it is enjoyed much jbsl, I think if what you have and you enjoy it, Thats all that counts! That goes for anyone and if others enjoy it thats great as well! SET12

Risingjay, Thanks for looking, Yes even more can be gotten from the amps and speakers, even though I have few watts doesn't me I have to give up much. As far as damping factor there is a yes and no to that issue supply layout has perhaps even more to do with that issue! SET12

Set 12, No disrespect but we established what you were thinking about bass slam with your first post. And what was that? No disrespect, but don't think for a minute that ten watts can't possibly compete with several hundred for slam and just take a look at the crossovers that I use and then take a good look at yours! and thats just the speaker for an amplifier power supplly for a solid state amp you would need a 2-300,000 uf supply to compete with my 10 watt amp supply and I doubt those amps are that big but its possible, the ten peak that I have exceeds 100db at my chair.

Good Luck, I for one have never been as concerned about 20-100 hz not that I don't enjoy good low end but I find that people are often miss informed on the actual power a speaker really uses especially a Klipsch and in reality it doesn't take all that high of continous power to damage them and you can damage them easly and not even know it. try putting a digtal multi-meter on AC voltage and look at some of the average AC readings. Voltage squared divided by the load impedance is the average power. 2.83 volts across an 8 ohm load is 1 watt for example. Again good luck! SET 12

Edwin, I would just like to second much of what you have said here I couldn't agree more. Set up is half of the systems performance and maybe more when room treatments factor in and maybe tone controls can help there but then you have to deal with the reduction of everything else even volume controls in the digital domain have been known to truncate the digital imformation down from 16 bit to as low as 12 bit and there are manufactures that claim they have fixed it but have they? SET12

You can go to ALK's web page, because the cost of copper is up I'm sure his prices are up I think you could order the parts and build them for 250-300$ if you buy from him you can expect to pay some 500$ these will just drop in, If your handy at all the DIY approach is the way to go he has the schematic available for you free to use just not to use commercially. It is a very shocking experiance to hear these when the mid's are brought down to where they should be. They also allow you to passively Bi-Amp one for the mid and treble and one for the bass, the amps of course still will run full range but a tube amp can be tweaked by running a cap at the input to roll the low end off for greater volume levels if one wants. SET12

Its high to begin with, From what may be considered flat speaker reponse, As a consumer I for one don't want to add eq to take care of a design issue and a serious one at that

Erik, Are those Jensens Copper Foil and Oils or just paper and oil? theres a huge differance here.

risingjay, It sounds like your a little confused on power and its relation to dynamics none of which are even remotely related to one another in my opinion, I learned this early on in my audio journey mid way I was able to purse it in greater depth and able to incorporate my experiance in some experiments of tube circuits to my current amplifiers. If your into solid-state gear with klipsch's I can steer you in a couple of directions to look at one amp with alot of punch and very large soundstage is a Forte model 4 that I owned it is just 50 watts/channel the amp had a clone of the same circuit only a higher voltage rail to produce some 200/watts channel known as the model 6 the 50 just smoked the 200 in every area so why did that happen? Well maybe because the Forte was biased into heavy Class A some 12 watts I believe when the 200 watter is likely to have just a couple! Higher bias currents allow greater sensitivity to incoming driver stages the Forte all so had 8 output devices/channel and very large power supply although these points are indicative of performance in my book they aren't necessarly written in stone either but if you look at the best amps you will see these things usually you do not see this in AV stuff typically another great performer was a Harmon Kardon PA2200 I think rated at 100/channel this amp is a real sleeper very musical warm for solid state dynamic as heck I owned this as well and my best friend is now using it as a referance amp to design speakers with. He tried a vintage Crown amp that was more powerful in numbers but it was no match for the HK the Crown has been in the closet for some time! For myself I am into tube gear. I can hardly listen to Klipsch with solid state as well as a couple other friends of mine I feel the best of Klipsch comes out with tube gear from a full range point of view, and I'm sure many think that there is noway any tube gear could produce the punch of solid state, Well I can tell you that not only that it can it can even exceed solid state in dynamic punch maybe not pitch defination something that I have never heard a Klipsch do well ( pitch ) in my opinion and I have not heard any Subs that have had great pitch defination either their may be a few today. My own SET amps are very capable of punch in you chest and feeling it in your chair as Paul Klipsch would say all you need with his speakers is a good 5 watt amp and that's just what I'm using a 5.5 watt RMS that is. A few seasoned audiophiles from my club hear in Wisconsin have had the pleasure to witness punch from a SET and were a little taken by surprise rest asured their opinion of flea power dynamics has changed and since the topic of tone control use has come up on the forum I might add that I use none and I use no preamp either which has been found to be a source limitation in dynamics as well this allows me to put more funds towards more higher performance CD playback I am into LP's as well if you look through some of my posts you will see it is a very serious piece of gear with a power supply that is bigger than many power amps. As far as power supplies are concerned with tube gear I find most classic designed supplies the chief limiting factor often with small, high henry values and and high DC resistance the other way around works better. or even none at all this can be done if their is sufficent supply cap's I prefer pure pentode mode over Ultra Linear mode for dynamic punch in push-pull tube amps and easy thing to convert to. After one mod to my SET amps for just 50 cents worth of parts I was enjoying some rather nice double bass from a jazz recording and I got a phone call from my neighbor, she asked if I was playing music in my garge, I said no! Why! well she said the pictures on her walls were moving, I said your kidding me! No she said! I said I'll move my gear to my basement listening room then, She said oh no you don't have to do that I just though you wanted to know! I said thanks and my brother looked at me shaking his head saying no way over and over again finally he looked at the wall then the cieling and then at me and proclaimed he knew how it was being done as her living room and mine were seperated buy two garges between us! Acoustic energy was travelling up the wall studs then into the roof trusts down the roof line and back into a trust down into her wall that was just incrediable to me at the time all from a simple mod to a filament supply. If you would like to hear a powerful SET I would recommend a Cary single-ended mono blocks equiped with the 211 output tube and not the 845 the 211 has the guts over the 845 not that there aren't any out there but all SET's are not created equall one of my next projects will envolve an 833 tube a substanially more dynamic tube than either the 211 or my own 572 amps. SET12

jbsl, I have no experiance with any recent models. If the crossovers are made anything like the past, like electrolytics, just film caps and no film and foil that can carry higher currents, no litz air core inductors or low frequency Iron core inductors instead of air core low frequency inductors. If this is the case the stock units would be gone in a heart beat if I owned them. Especially if I saw an L-Pad in place of the Auto-Former also I would do an outboard version as a replacement a friend of mine did a copy of ALK's on plexiglass it looks really Retro Cool. The real problem in the older LaScala's as ALK pointed out among other things is the mid-range is to high in its spl level ALK allows the user to dial it in you can't simply change the tap on the autoformer because you'll change the turnover point. This is a very nice feature that works like a charm on the ALK's not to mention his very high quality parts though I am learie of the Hovaland caps that take so long to break in I have read on the madisound forum people not likeing them much you maybe looking at a couple-hundred hours to break in and bloom and get sweet they will in time but I wouldn't recommend them, this is my experiance with the Hovlands they are well made though with my own out board crossovers I intend to try few other brands SET12

DRBILL, Thank you!!! for your post on this topic! Yes their are some truly great preamps out their but the ones of most interest are usually very costly! I to have had no regretts putting my line stage on the shelf and have had no inclination at all to put it back for the last five years I believe one can easyly do with out and gain that much more but of course that can be system dependent. I have found that not all circumstances allow great performance with out a line stage. You need and amp with a lot of gain to use typical CD players direct or a CD player that can deliever greater output voltages than 2 volts, high sensitivity loudspeakers such as Klipsch designs help out alot the advantage of this is that you can afford to put more funds into your front end CD player or any other source componet taking your sytem to much greater heights. As far as the stock LaScalas I stand firm on my opinion and if it weren't for ALK's work I would not likely be on the Klipsch forum and I might add ALK's work did truly transform the LaScala into a fierce performer one that finally yielded some very nice bass performance as well with doing great justice with the mid-range and top end and if you haven't heard it and heard it set up correctly you are really missing a real outstanding performance of what the LaScala is capable of! There just isn't any comparison and I for one would never own them in the stock form. I could live with the stock Forte's though my Modified ones are in a differant league. SET12

Cal, Thank you for the welcome, I can take what I dish out tung in cheek also, We all have our philosophical feelings as to what audio is to us and its meaning whether it is real or not real, or just a created illussion. Some treat the listening experiance like listening to elavator music yet others get very envoled in the illussion by adding room treatments and various tweaks and those who enjoy a DIY designing as I do. I and many others of my local audio club enjoy large sound stages with as much space as we can get along with many other qualities that a High-End sound system can give although for some this is a lower priority certainly. Takeing one piece of gear and substituteing another on my system can reveal the differance in the apparent width and depth as well as the verticle height of the recording as revealed by what I refer to as room ambient cues whether it is real or created makes no differance to me I just enjoy what I'm hearing and I love the sense of space. In a listening session with a Jollita 100 watt hybrid that a friend of mine bought it could only reproduce a sound stage between the loudspeakers and very rarely much laterally its ambient imformation was rather low although the amp was very musical it just didn't produce enough imformation, I find this rather common with mid fi componets, The Jollita is well made the surprizeing thing about it was their was poor extension at the frequency extreams as well my buddy can't seem to even listen to it he tells me it just isn't the performer that my SET is at 10 watts. What he discovered is that power has nothing to do with dynamics, space, harmonic imformation and overall envolement other than loudness. Ten years ago I certainly couldn't even fathom myself ever owning a pair of Klipschs it wasn't untill I built these SET amps that I needed something efficent and discovered the capabilities of these Forte's with tube gear and then hearing a friends self built ALK crossover version transform a poor sounding LaScala into some real magic that made me mod my Forte's in extream and I might add it was worth every penny of the 800$ I spent. I think that almost all the Klipsch networks could benefit from improved parts, I think even the Deans crossovers are likely to be a substanial improvement. We have something in common in that we both own Grace tone arms I have a Grace 714 unipivot made of Teak wood mounted to a Sonagraph turntable with a Benz Micro MO .9 mv moving coil cartridge I use this with my 50lb two box DIY designed phono stage you have likely seen. I am certainly not done with the amplifiers as their is still more to be gotten from them the nice thing is it doesn't cost you much DIYing things and it is a heck of alot of fun. SET12 .

Have you ever considered tube gear? Tubes can be very rewarding I have just 10 watts peak 5.5 watts RMS a single-ended amp fed source direct and can obtain sound levels in excess of 100db at my chair I have alot of head room think about quality vs quanity! tubes have much more overload capacity than solid state. SET12

Edwinr, I went through the same thing in the early ninties, One day I had a good audio buddy over, I was complaining of the sound! He walked over and looked at all the wireing and said my god man what do you expect! Look at all this wire and power cords he said, I said what can I do? He said remove the multichannel stuff! And we did! His arms were full with wire, we sat down and listened to real 2 channel and I said I'll be ----- From then on I have never mixed two channel with Video gear yes I watch movies using the 2 channel amps but I have to plug my DVD direct and I use the variable out direct feeding the amplifiers this way the grounds are seperated. Mark Levinson is one company that switchs grounds as well as hots. I am not against muti channel its just I can't afford the same quality as I do for 2-channel. Simplicity goes along way! There is alot of good points made on this topic, But the point of it all is "do what ever makes you happy " SET12

My first experiance with huge a soundstage was some 15 yrs ago at a Chicago Audio Society meeting in a room that was 20ftx40ft Dennis Had of Cary Audio gave a Demonstration of his Single-Ended 211 tube monoblocks know as the 805 just 25 watts/channel the presentation extended thru the side walls of the 20ft length wall it also demonstrated to me that this particular amp was one of the most powerfull in the world tube or solid-state. Not all amplifiers are the same some do not reproduce much stage width or depth kind of like watching a home movie! others are extordinary at soundstaging the Cary is a prime example. The Cary uses a transmitting Triode which is part of the story, There are other non transmitting tube amps that do as well to, as well as some solid state amps. Not all recordings have the same width either some more some less the degree that one can hear it is dependent on how much ambient imformation ones system can reproduce and other qualities of the amplifier and loudspeaker capabilities placement of a system is also very important. There are bad tube amps single-end and push-pull and bad solid state as well as good in each area. Most people have ever rarely heard a 10 watt peak SET amp ever produce much in the way of punch in fact many are as you describe, are mushy mainly do to their supply implimation and a perhaps a few other things. My own amp is hardly a classical design Many things in audio are heard and not yet measured and yet many are heard and then measured such as crossover distortion in a Class B amplifier. No sound stage! Tell that to Dennis Had! Cause I'm not going to! SET12

Shawn, Did you ever think about what you might be missing? This is from the first post on this topic. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> These are just opinions and you are certainly entitled to yours and everybody else theirs and that is ok. But some members here may benefit from my 35 yrs of experience. And may find this experience interesting. I have been through many different types of speakers and amplifiers. And only in the last few years have I found some bliss to this hobby after spending many tens of thousands of dollars for all sorts of gadgets including equalizers, DBXs, and other sound enhancements. Through the yrs my power requirements fell like a rock I started with some 400 watts RMS/channel down to just 5.5 watts RMS/channel today! I have given nothing up, and have gained in all areas. For instance the soundstage presentation from my modified Fortes is just gargantuan with lateral imaging usually 5-10 to the left and right of the loudspeaker positions imaging is literally through the side walls of my living room the speakers are spaced 9ft apart I sit about 11 ft away from center, the depth goes back and easy 80ft at times from my perception and maybe more. As some of this is responsiable from my DIY designed mono blocks. I have no need of surround sound because 2 channel just envelops the listening room and the system can project an image just about anywhere including behind me. Plus it allows me to put the funds to better use pushing 2-channel performance even further. When I started in this hobby my soundstage was usually between the loudspeakers and not a lot of depth and layering. There is a lot more to describe here but this description of soundstage performance from the Fortes is nothing but shocking to a lot of my local club forum members as I am the only Klipsch owner especially when they hear the size of it coming from a pair of horn loudspeakers of Klipsch design. I use no preamp; I use to be a real proponent of active line stages until I decided to give no preamp a try. Do to the high efficiency of the Forte I was a little shocked at how much better it was with out the line stage I never looked back the gains were huge in the areas of dynamics, transparency and just about everything else and thats ok by me because the funds now go to my front end the CD player. I might add that most people do not realize how little in the way of signal is actually fed to their preamp with an audio tappered volume control it is just 15% at the 12 o'clock position vs. the 60% that I use from my CD player. Since my power amp has just two gain stages the signal path is very short, Just inchs with no switchs in the signal path think of all the switching in receivers especially the AV variety. So if tone controls work for you thats great! Then use them but for some of use they get in the way of music. SET12

Tube rolling is different ,it alone does not alter the response, materials and construction are different they influence harmonics not boosting or cutting the response Some electronics are so bad that one has to use tone controls, If your electronics are truly great then one doesn't have to use such controls and often great electronics with out tone controls will still out perform electronics that are using them. SET12