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Amp and Sound SE84, My Impressions


joessportster

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Took this pic last night in the dark tubes a glowing nice and purty
Nothing nicer on a cold night than the warm glow of a tube amp with great music. It's also literally nice to have the heat. On the extreme end, I avoid using my Scott 222c, with its very hot rectifier, when its warm outside as it tends to trigger the AC more often. In the winter it helps keep the furnace from cycling on as often.

Has anyone used cooling for tube amps?

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At one time I owned Joule Electra Marquis OTL mono amps, and they would literally peel skin, I had them in a 12 X 16 room, and they would raise the temp in that room by close to 20 degrees. Every time I sat down to listen I would start sweating, They sounded good but I could not take the heat

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Headphone amplifier output impedance is certainly an important consideration. Some design for very low output impedances, though 32 ohms would not be unreasonable. One industry standard with which I'm familiar suggests 120 ohms, which I have also used when adopting an integrated amplifier for headphone use, but preferred by a significant margin (particulalrly in cases where max output power was in the range of just a couple of watts) using output transformer taps between 8 and 16 ohms -- with both my Grado and Sennheiser phones.

Everyone is different though -- use and do what sounds best to you regardless of what anyone says to the contrary.

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Took this pic last night in the dark tubes a glowing nice and purty
Nothing nicer on a cold night than the warm glow of a tube amp with great music. It's also literally nice to have the heat. On the extreme end, I avoid using my Scott 222c, with its very hot rectifier, when its warm outside as it tends to trigger the AC more often. In the winter it helps keep the furnace from cycling on as often.

Has anyone used cooling for tube amps?

I have a ceiling fan in my room that reduces the amps temp by 10 degrees on it's slowest setting...

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Took this pic last night in the dark tubes a glowing nice and purty
Nothing nicer on a cold night than the warm glow of a tube amp with great music. It's also literally nice to have the heat. On the extreme end, I avoid using my Scott 222c, with its very hot rectifier, when its warm outside as it tends to trigger the AC more often. In the winter it helps keep the furnace from cycling on as often.

Has anyone used cooling for tube amps?

I have a ceiling fan in my room that reduces the amps temp by 10 degrees on it's slowest setting...

:D

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Justin: May I ask how you are calculating for those impedances? A number of valve amp designers install headphone jacks on their amplifiers which are connected to the existing output transformer's secondary taps - most commonly 4,8, or 16 ohms. Using those impedances, output voltage specs will often be provided for driving phones of different impedances, including those with impedances of a few to several hundred ohms.

The headphone jack, where a common ground is used for the output transformer secondary ground connection, is often connected to the speaker out taps via a series resistor. The same thing can be done, by the way, to power a subwoofer off the same amp. One derives the subwoofer output off the output transformer secondaries, dropping it to a line level signal by way of a simple voltage divider. In other words, I would like to submit that you can build an extremely high quality, dedicated headphone amp using the same output transformers you would use for 4,8, or 16 ohm loudspeaker voice coils. Matching headphone impedance and amplifier output impedances is not exactly the same as what is common practice for loudspeakers.

You can very easily use a good quality DPDT switch to toggle back and forth between the amp's speaker and head phone outputs in order to have a very capable amp for both purposes. Best of luck with your project! Great to see people building stuff!

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You can very easily use a good quality DPDT switch to toggle back and forth between the amp's speaker and head phone outputs in order to have a very capable amp for both purposes. Best of luck with your project! Great to see people building stuff!

Erik, Just curious why would you even need the switch,, unless it's simply to Mute one or the other if you had both speakers and headphones connected ??

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I will not be using a voltage dividing network on this next amp. I wanted as simple a solution as possible… It might not work… but I’m hopeful it will. I didn’t want to take an output tap intended for a speaker and drive it down to be used for phones. The SE-84 takes that approach… I was tying a diffident method. I’ve seen this approach used… as I’m not a phones user I did not evaluate, but when this project is done and scoped… I’ll buy some to listen. The Darling circuit with 8ohm tap outputs ~.750mv… I will see when the transforms get here and are build what it will output given the new output impedances… the napkin math looks very promising but bench testing will tell. The hope is DHT, no feedback and no resistive network… strap the phones to the ¼” socket and call it good.

I based my impedances on looking what several headphone manufactures spec for driving sig vs the phone freq response. Who knows… cant what makes it fun.

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