SET12

Thank you Scott0527, This project was the accumulation of a couple of other phono stages and a few thousand hrs of thought, Yes it does look a little suicidal, but its intent is to do the extorindinary! Buy first looks most designers might think that the supply would sound very ugly but I assure you it is very transparent and very fast, very low noise, 66db of gain. One might have to pay 10,000$ for a product like this something I could never afford so I designed and built this one for a 1000$. When I was building it I watched the movie Tora Tora Tora, In Harm's Way, and the Bismark over and over the famous words from Admiral Yamomato always come to mind when listening and looking at this project. " I fear the only thing we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terriable will of resolve". I am not alone here with a 900 joule power supply there is another commerically available giant but with out the transparentness of this project. SET12

Funny You should ask that cause thats just what this moving coil phono stage does in contrast to most phono stages. Power Supply

Your absolutely right! I think the root of it is in the equipment, Most AV Recievers and even most past recievers just don't have the involvement to allow me to really enjoy the music or even video sound prompting me to use their controls. An example is my cheap 34$ DVD player which is just terriable when listened to flat as I listen to 2 channel video sound from it I don't care to spend anymore money than what is neccessary for video satisfaction ( I do own a 42 in. Plasma) so I bought a cheap EQ from Radio Shack for 100$ very well made and recommended for cheap enhancement of cheap DVD players unless the player has EQ built into it. So I think if your gear is not very exoctic like my setup heck by all means use the controls most of the mid-fi gear is kinda lean sounding like my DVD player in contrast to my 5 watter which is all about quality not quanity. Take my friends little Jollita hybrid tube front end solid state output stage 100 watts/channel a 750$ amplifier, a nice amp but! with nowhere near the imformation, Sound stage width which was literally half the width and depth of my 5 watter not to mention the 5 watts having a greater slam factor something that most people have a hard time believeing unless they hear it for themselves. Hope this helps! SET12

This is my very powerful 5.5 watts RMS mono block amp just two gain stages with tone controls you can add a couple alone, If your using solid state better add another 5-8 and also I use no preamp just CD direct I agree source material is my limitation SET12

Speedball, What I was getting at is I trust nothing that is free! Virtally every site I ever visted had some form of worm infestation on my machine or a file that watched where I went! You can try the free Yahoo! But the Spy Detector may really suprize you! As I said you can download a trial and just delete it afterward it will show you just what it finds, it was shocking! for me. Try the yahoo than Spy Detector, Spying is rampent and gets through many firewalls and virus protection and is not really a virus but it does bog down a machine making you think that DSL or Cable is an answer when it just speeds up the spying infestation! and does not take care of the issues in the first place! SET12

Speedball, I am relatively new to the Net but I will tell you it is vital in my experiance. My new software Spy Detector has which has a free download to try out but won't let you delete what it finds unless you buy it, found some 1000 worms and their Register Cleaner found some 400 high risk files, made a beiever out of me! The Msn Spy Sweeper caught only 100 that was free! Spy Detector and their Register Cleaner is highly recommended The cost was 40$ for both and worth every penny! SET12

I was reverse engineering a Phono stage and noticed some diodes they were barrier diodes that produced .410 volts forward biased with 1 ma. of current flow LEDS are better but use small sizes for small currents their voltage variation is less as well. When I saw the diodes I took them out and replaced them with resistors with bypass caps, The sound differance was amazing! As fast as I took them out as fast as I put them back and I have never used anything but diode biasing that experiance! You can use a small bypass cap to help with its high frequency AC impedance it depends on the tube used most of the time none is really needed. And of course you can't use it in a feed back loop. I use diodes with directly heated Triodes as well and "WOW" SET12

Hi Erik, Thanks for the kind compliments! How do you like your tube gear! Especialy your 300B's? Have you ever tried LED biasing? I have in several projects and likely will never go back to resistors the differance is very audiable akin to battery bias. I'm from Appleton, Wisconsin some 25 mi from Greenbay WI I saw a thread on some guys from Milwaukee getting together I haven't tried to contact any of them yet I belong to a club here called NEWAS and we hold meetings at each others homes as well it would be cool to hook up with some of these guys from Milwaukee as I am the only NEWAS member with Klipsch's. Here's a link to the NEWAS site if you'd like to take a look I have a thread called 833 amp with alot of interesting links to tube gear as well as transmitting triode amps like an 833 I am known as just SET on the NEWAS forum site. http://newaudiosociety.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=amp;action=display;num=1137773606 Again thanks for the comments SET12

Hey People! I don't mind at all getting this back on the amp track for Speakerfritz! how about two of these! Wavac 833 In the night! Here I am with an 833 in hand fed from my car battery and a .25 ohm in series for a 10 amp flow for the filament! If anyone would like to see more! come vist my thread on NEWAS forum at http://newaudiosociety.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=amp;action=display;num=1137773606

Speakerfritz, I have read both of this guys books and I like most of his work with OTL's plus he is concerned about what can be done when fault issues arise, a big issue with OTL's is the bass in my opinion and Bruce Rozenblits as well, he discovered why OTL's have issues with bass and addressed the issue recieving a patent for it! he fixed the issue rather easyly I might add but never the less you might consider his products! Kits to! http://www.transcendentsound.com/ SET12

Hi Charlie, I'm new to the Klipsch forum, It appears that we have a few things in common like tubes and I see you have Chorus's, I am a DIYer this is my SET amp a 10 watter that I built that can use a 811 or a 572. I have written alot under the Modification thread under capacitor experiances you will see my modified Forte's and a very large powerfull phono stage.

You put a nice smile on my face speakerfritz! Thanks and I will always welcome your thoughs! and no it is not a first order it actually is an 11 section pie filter with each of the last 3 sections feeding a prop cap an Aeon to be exact. I can not go into alot of details about what is going on because this technique that I use may have a chance at a Patent. When I concieved this supply circuit I thought I might be a little nuts! But I ran into a guy at a consumer electronics show in Chicago he was just 25 I think at the time. That man was Jim White whose company is Asthestix I don't think I'm spelling it right but his phono stage inspired mine and from the pictures of his I was able to reverse engineer a bit of his supply and found that his is as large as mine. I read a review of his and of course it put a smile on my face because his phono as dynamic as it is has a dark character to it and I knew at once why! Where as my phono is lit and holographicly vivid. I once cut out half of my supply to hear its effect and I could hardly believe it but it was audiable in the sense of wieght though most people logically look at this thing as real overkill! But as I said the time constants are lightningly fast and yet this is not a regulated supply you need bulk if you are going to have low noise and speed at the same time and remember there is some 90db of gain minus the RIAA network so you have size to have speed. Chokes are good and bad! the bad is the DCR and when the supply is being modulated the ACR. Hears an example the brass amp, The circuit once had a 100 ohm resistor between the rectifier cap and the plate supply cap. My friend and I were listening to his ProAc Reponse 2's a hungry speaker with a 20 watt amp! Anyway I decided that since the amp was push-pull and we up'd they supply capacitance by a factor of 6-7 times I bypassed the 100 ohm resistor and we gave it a listen! He looked at me and I looked at him and he told me if it got any better he was going to cream his pants! And we never looked back! Now take a dyna 70 it has a 1 henery choke with a 60 ohm DCR, Do you get the picture? If the supply is 5 or 600 uf for the plate supply it may be enough for a 70 to try this. Also I'm no Ultralinear fan try listening to a dyna in Pentode mode the dynamics are greater! I will be designing an 833 amp in the future and it will Idle at some 300ma so I might have to use a choke but if I do it will be minimal like 1 henery with a DCR of just 5 ohms and the one I will use goes some 17lbs the key here is most people design with to big of values henery's, the Dcr is more important for speed. My moto's with this Phono Stage are two with all the other big dollar phono stages looking at mine and saying " I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terriable will of resolve" another to describe the transit response is "if a fly lands on the input the Earth will move" SET12

Thanks for the tip thats an excellant idea! I look so forward to the day that I can share a building experiance with her if she wants to I don't want to push her of course but she does love music at least! I have a bit of experiance with the 70's there isn't alot of room with them but the 70 is certainly one of the most moded amps around. I really like my friends Heath kit W5 mono's alot! some of which were came with Peerless Outputs check it out I think even in its stock form it is extreamly good and they will run circle around a stock 70 big time! and it is a Williamson circuit if you go to the Heath kit site you can even look at the construction manual and it has alot of great imformation on its design and why plus the chassis is as big as a 70 and it is all point to point wiring my buddy uses these with his LaScala's and just loves the bass produced from the W5. Scratch building does take more time but I think it can be more rewarding! Most of the time is devoted to layout and metal work, I made drawings and then templates for drilling so I could easyly reproduce the project. Since were talking about caps I like to show you my Moving-Coil Phono Preamp it is two box's one is the supply and the other is some more supply and the circuit module tha is easyly removable to work on it has 3 gain stages and a split RIAA network with super overload capacity and most people know that electrolytic caps in volume as great as this usaully sound really bad but I discovered a way part by acident and part by design on how to get strikeingly transparent sound from something as large as this when I say transparent I mean like a high quality polyprop supply plus its speed I have 66db of gain with it from 6922 tubes and it is nearly dead quite. I was told by a local 35 yr High-End specialist that it couldn't be made quite.

Thanks the great link! Its nice to see these kits being offered I got a real kick out of the ST35 my daughter and I could put that one together she is 10 yrs old but very smart maybe in 1 or 2 yrs I could teach her to solder! Since you have worked and repair tube gear. Can you design as well? These are my amps, the output trannys in the pics are just 6lb and are not the current 28lb ones I use now. Also the tube you see lit is a 811-10 which is interchangeable with a 572-10 which has a graphite plate for even better sound in my opinion.

SpeakerFritz, Thats alot of Spec's! And a very big chassis, I don't know anything about your age and experiance in audio! But I will tell you a little more of my experiance I have been an Audio Buff for some 35 yrs I guess you can call me old school as in those days we only had 2-channel audio. My first amp was a phase linear 400 that might have been capable of 400 watts/channel, I then went to a Dynaco kit 400 I had lots of toys to go with it eq,noise reduction, blah blah. Then I started thinking about true quality I steped into a Yamaha B2 and C2 and a Yamaha CT7000 the tuner alone in 1977 dollars was 1250$ it is the only piece I still have from that Era built like a Rolls Royce about 35lbs. The Yamaha B2 was about 135 watts/channel in 1977 I had a yrs wages tied up in my system. Then I got into tubes in the early 90's via a friend, I was designing a solid-state buffered preamp and he asked me WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I took a book he had and designed a Vacuum tube buffered preamp. The fact that it worked! Drove me to go to a bar and by myself a drink! For me it was a milestone going back to the days of going to the local drug store to test tubes for my tv and old console reciever I had sitting on a piece of wood bare! at the time when the preamp was built I owned a Forte modle 4 power amp that had 50 watts/channel biased to 12 watts in Class A this was a 1800$ power amp. Which ended up going to the closet till I sold it after building this amp a friend brought over an old Pilot Integreated amp 20 watts /channel using a EL84 power tube he bought it for 200$. A vintage dealer told him it was fixed up to sound real good but when he got it home it sounded just terriable and he asked me if I could do anything with it I had a schematic for it and I saw a nice 2 gain stage amp that was just simplicty, So I bypassed the front end (preamp) as all the controls were diseased and made a power amp out of it he used it till one day his wife said it was BUTT ugly we had the back side facing front so you could see the warm glow! any way we restore the power amp using all the original Iron just spraying the Iron piano gloss black I designed a new layout on a piece of brass he made a walnut base for the brass plate we did it for 500$ DIYing it the result was a very entertaining amp that is still being used with Dunlevy 4's a 8000$ loudspeaker rated at 91 db efficiency we also later installed silver foil and oil coupling capacitors once in I was told I couldn't have them back! or my arm might be broken! My buddy is as big as a gorrilla! The point I want to make is power corrupts and if the first watt doesn't floor you than the other 149 likely won't either. Stereophile Magazine a few yrs ago conducted a lab test and proved that tubes have an overload charteristics that are much greater than solid state! for a push pull tube amp that is some 2 1/2 times greater than its continious power rating and for a single-ended amp it can be 5 times greater so my 10 watt peak (thats 5.5 watts RMS) its actually the peak watts of tube gear that have been compared to the RMS of solid state so my ten watts play like 50 solid state in loudness. Most serious 2 channel friends of mine do not mix their 2 channel with home theater gear and some use their two channel gear with video but only in 2 channel mode many of my friends including myself just prefer the 2 channel after all most of my friends 2 channel systems far out weigh the quality of multi channel I use a seperate DVD player audio direct to my amp my sound stage is seriously huge! I find no need for a sub as my amps transit reponse can move the pictures on my neighbors walls and we are seperated by two garges I guess we found out that acoustic energy was traveling up my wall into the roof truss and back down into her living room. when I got her call I was playing some Jazz! this was after a 50 cent modification to my amps that made them ballistic! Anyway I got to get some sleep I work nights I'm going to put a picture of the Brass Amp in here in a moment! See you L8ter! SET12

I'll address the both of you here. Thanks, For the build compliments, It took more time planning and buying than anything else. My brother is a Master Cabinet builder he made the plat forms to match the Forte's which were refinished as well to match one another. Did you try the silver foil and oil mundorf or the gold and silver or just the film? I really like the Inductance cancellation of the Mundorf's The V-Cap construction looks excellant but did I gather it is just a Polyproplene film and oil? I am strictly a foil person due to the current delivery of foil I liked the Teflon V-Cap construction and they are foil. Very good looking caps and have you tried any of these as well? I usually get very bored with solid state electronics as I love harmonics and tubes just deliever the goods and great SET amps even more. But still a bad tube amp is no substitute for a good solid state. But I have a hard time listening to a horn speaker with any solid state to speak of. As far as Active Crossovers I prefer to do it in my amps and stay away from extra gain stages in the signal path this is a lesson well learned by me as I use no preamp! Not every one can do it but under the right conditions it is absolutely awesomeI My preamp has been on the self collecting dust for yrs now its an expensive FET preamp and it is amazing how the sound can be choked by extra gain stages. My system uses just two gainstages and if your using a solid-state amp you could have 5 or six easy! Although I may give tri-amp a shot I have so much head room with my 5.5 watt RMS amps and have such outstanding performance easly obtaining 100db levels I don't see the need for the tri-amp right now I have a strong interest in an 833 amp and want to get involed in building and designing to sell. One more point I don't think three very good amps are a substitute for one extrodinary amp the mono blocks that I have have some 400 joules of energy and output transformers that wieght 28lbs each that would be rather pricy to have 3 amps of the same quality. If your using a typical reciever, it might take 7-8 of them to equal the energy reserves of my mono's. And the mono's are nothing next to my 50lb. phonostage thats some 900 joules and I'm not the only one with a phonostage this crazy! Again thanks for your input I look forward to conversing with you's more! SET12

I went to Madisounds forum and checked out some opinions of the Hovaland caps, It was not good, there were complaints of of brightness, boxyness, splashyness I have to agree at least untill they break in and bloom and just sweeten up it took alot of hours, they are ok now but as I said I will not purchase them again. I am going to purchase the Mundorf caps.

Hi people, I'm a new kid on the block I'm more of an amplifier builder than a speaker builder but I own a pair of Forte's, And I have built, an external crossover for them you can see the begining construction of them on this thread. Forte 1 and inductor resistance by reiver62 I have enjoyed them very much for the last 3 yrs they are a vast improvement over the tinker toy stock crossovers giving me a huge transparent soundstage with solid-state like bass from my 5.5 watt RMS transmitting tube amp a 572-10 output tube running in Class A2 source direct that is no preamp needed from a Sony ES X77 CD player. I have the capability to change caps out in just minutes or even Inductors. This is what I started with, I am using North Creek Inductors his 8 ga. and Hovland caps with Polysterene bypasses, Solen with a North Creek bypass. I had a real hard time with the Hovlands they took forever to bloom and sweeten up they are very good now and very well made, But I will not purchase them again there are alot of very good caps out there. I like film and foil types, I do like kimber but they don't do alot for me I like silver foil and oil I have used MIT alot and like them very much, I'm not fancy to the motor caps like GE or ASC they don't have the transparency for me. I understand that Thiel loudspeakers use Polysterene's something I would like to try as I have heard huge dynamics from amplifiers using them they are really smooth maybe to smooth still I'd like to try some MIT's also the Mun-something ones that are very expensive there is alot to try and I feel its all very interesting, but one has to look at their needs and their electronics and decide what works for them I feel theres no one answer. I started my project because I heard a friends ALK DIY version it was such an improvement I had to do mine only I had to do mine so that I could try many different flavors as I call them. As for the Inductors from North Creek, Yes I have to agree with Al for the money they are wound a bit sloppy and I even had to trim excess glue from them and clean their appearance up a bit but I do like what they do for the Forte's bass just awesome as for the smaller inductor I will likely give a Litz a try although I am very happy with the performance of the North Creek. The Forte's have never ceased to amaze me my living room is 14 ft x 18 ft I have them on the long wall 8ft apart about 18 in from the back wall toed in slightly my sound stage extends outside my side walls by many feet offten and very deep when a recording calls for depth layering is just outstanding as well some of this stuff is certainly due to my extrodinary amplifiers as I recently had a Jollita 100 watt/channel hybrid whose soundstage width was vertiually half of my tube amps and did not even come close in the presentation of imformation the bass was the shocker as the tube amp was far more extended. All this for a 1200$ total investment 3 yrs ago! I had a hard time listening to CD's before I put this system together now I am having a blast! SET12

I agree with you the Forte's are very underrated I discovered their capabilities by accident when I needed an efficient speaker for a single-ended 572-10 10 watt tube amp that I designed I decided to mod the crossover after hearing AL K's crossover built by a friend of mine for his La Scala's which blew me away this friend of mine made his out board on plexiglass and they are great looking as well as fantastic sounding, I decided to build mine outboard as well only all parts can be changed within a few minutes allowing me to audition all kinds of inductors and caps, If I want I can even Tri-amp the project took awhile but has proven very worth while. Depending on your needs and mine are always high as my amplifiers have very high resolving power and very high dynamics much more so than most flea power amps and I use no preamp as well, parts quality as Al has said are very audiable I would say that my improvement is equal to a loudspeaker in the 5000$ plus range and I'm looking forward to further mods. Here is a picture of them as I was starting construction the parts layout actually are a little different in the final layout SET12