Peach "V1" (I think) recommendations

[Coytee]

Was listening to some flute last night and frankly, it sounded a bit rough. I don't know any technical terms, so forgive me on that, but on a long, extended note, it sounded like either the recording was oversaturated (it wasn't) or something in my food chain was overloaded.

Signal was from CD player straight to Peach, straight to McIntosh 2102 amp. I was hearing some distortion as though the gain on the Peach was set to 10 and the max of the McIntosh could accept without distorting was 2. I turned the Peach gains WAY down, to about 8:00 or so, just barely above off...and it still broke the sound up.

I switched out the Peach and put in it's place the dbx CX1 and all the rough sound went away. All of it, even at loud volume. I swapped back to Peach and it was back. I finally concluded that perhaps my V1 tube was on the decline.

First question: Might I presume I can take one of the tubes from the other slots and put it in here? (I don't use the HI Z mode, but I could swap them just to keep slot occupied) I think they're all 3 the same.

Second: (Mark are you listening?) I presume there is specific tube A and B that might be felt to do the following:

A: More punchy & stronger bass

B: More open, spatial, depth & imaging

Perhaps there is a tube that will do both.

I'm interested in hearing about tube "B" (and if it does "A" then that's gravey)

Since I'm a vacume regarding tubes (heh heh heh), rather than being told I should look at a "pinched waist", or "Purple banded" or something like that , which tells me nothing, how about:

Brand & model & general price ranges. This way I can go to a tube place and give them a specific item I'm looking for (even though they may understand which one the pinched waist is)

Thanks for any thoughts

[tigerwoodKhorns]

Was listening to some flute last night and frankly, it sounded a bit rough. I don't know any technical terms, so forgive me on that, but on a long, extended note, it sounded like either the recording was oversaturated (it wasn't) or something in my food chain was overloaded.

Signal was from CD player straight to Peach, straight to McIntosh 2102 amp. I was hearing some distortion as though the gain on the Peach was set to 10 and the max of the McIntosh could accept without distorting was 2. I turned the Peach gains WAY down, to about 8:00 or so, just barely above off...and it still broke the sound up.

I switched out the Peach and put in it's place the dbx CX1 and all the rough sound went away. All of it, even at loud volume. I swapped back to Peach and it was back. I finally concluded that perhaps my V1 tube was on the decline.

First question: Might I presume I can take one of the tubes from the other slots and put it in here? (I don't use the HI Z mode, but I could swap them just to keep slot occupied) I think they're all 3 the same.

Second: (Mark are you listening?) I presume there is specific tube A and B that might be felt to do the following:

A: More punchy & stronger bass

B: More open, spatial, depth & imaging

Perhaps there is a tube that will do both.

I'm interested in hearing about tube "B" (and if it does "A" then that's gravey)

Since I'm a vacume regarding tubes (heh heh heh), rather than being told I should look at a "pinched waist", or "Purple banded" or something like that , which tells me nothing, how about:

Brand & model & general price ranges. This way I can go to a tube place and give them a specific item I'm looking for (even though they may understand which one the pinched waist is)

Thanks for any thoughts

All three tubes are teh same Yugoslavian tubes. You can swap and se eif th eproblem goes away.

I tried vintage tubes and gave up. Two bad pinched waist tubes in a row. They are expensive too. I got my money back from both sellers but don't want to press my luck.

A great tube for th emoney is a sovtek "rocket" tube. It has a logo of a rocket on it and runs about $15. It has great bass and I love it.

Chris

[Coytee]

hmmm...

rocket? , pinched waist? , purple banded? lol (these things have numbers for a reasonnnnnnnnnnnn)

Any idea what the model number of the Rocket is? I just talked to Tube Depot and he was scratching his head too.

[Coytee]

Spoke with Mark & he gave me the name of Amperex BugleBoy 6922.

I just hung up with BrentJessee and ordered one. Guess we'll see what happens.

Thanks!

[Mike Lindsey]

Spoke with Mark & he gave me the name of Amperex BugleBoy 6922.

I just hung up with BrentJessee and ordered one. Guess we'll see what happens.

Thanks!

Well... the one I got from Upscale Audio had so much noise that I had to send it back.Good luck with the one you get.

Mike

[cjgeraci]

1) Good luck with the Amperex Bugle Boy 6922. It is a reasonably-priced NOS tube that won't break the bank and has some nice sonic advantages over some of the new brands. As pointed out, however, the noise level (or lack of one) of Amperex tubes vary all over the place. So....you may get a great one or not so great.......at least you will not have paid an arm and a leg for it.

2) Try not to be discouraged if your initial experience with a NOS tube is not all you expected. Chris had two bad experiences with pinched-waist Amperex, but this was compounded by the fact that he went for a Ferrari twice ("price-wise") and was burnt. There are affordable NOS preamp tube options out there, and at least to my ears, I still prefer certain NOS tubes.

3) I like a number of Amperex tubes - nicer bass than most, but some can be a little harsher on the top end. Favorite moderately-priced Amperex for me is the 6922 white lettering Holland version - in my Blueberry stage now. I also like certain Telefunken and Siemens tubes. The gold pin, non-CCA Siemens are also a great value and nice sounding. Little bit less bass response than comparable Amperex and a little drier though. Most Telefunken are smooth and a little rolled off on the top end. I run two CCA Siemens in my SuperLoz mode. I would not suggest those to start off with because that is one of those "Porsche" tubes (as an analogy). Was it worth it to me?? Yes. But, start walking before you start running - so you have some basis to compare.

Here's a pretty decent guide to 6DJ8/6922 tubes that is pretty famous by now. I have found that many of this guy's listening impressions are pretty on......

http://www.audioasylum.com/scripts/d.pl?audio/faq/joes-tubes.html#6DJ8

Good luck

Carl.

[DRBILL]

This might be a case for "Occam's Razor."

A while back I heard something really bad coming from my left Klipschorn. I took everything apart and strewed it across the floor in three rooms. It took half the night at the tube tester. Then it was the bench with the frequency generator and the oscilloscope. In desperation I put everything back together and listened to the same CD and it was as bad as ever.

Almost as a whim, I took the CD to the bedroom where the TV and the five speakers preside. I dropped the CD in and started it up. You guessed it. It sounded like sin warmed over.

It was a good label. DDD. It sounded like mud.

Too often we assume that "it has to be my stuff if it sounds bad."

Which reminds me of a story. I friend of mine was on at the ground floor in the development of the RCA system of color TV. At midnight each night the engineers pointed a color camera at a bowl of fruit on a table and left everything on like a test pattern until the first program the next day. This allowed the other engineers to adjust the color TV sets they were developing. My friend slipped in one night and replaced the banana with another banana that he had painted red. You can finish the story. It took three days to put everything back together!

No fooling. did you listen to the flute CD on another system?[6]

DRBILL

[Coytee]

Update: Dr. Bill, I tried several cd's and all had this same distortion

Update part II: After talking to Mark today, he asked me to describe in detail what was connected to what. I told him about everything, however, seems I missed something that in a way, he did not miss (for the second time I might add)

I have the "Y" splitters coming out of my cd player and that puts the split signal into the Peach AND the CX1 preamps. Even though the CX1 was turned off, he said he wasn't sure he liked the idea of "dragging it around" (or something like that).

So, last night I put Dire Straits in and had same distortion going on. While playing I went to disconnect the other pre off the splitter.

Low & behold, the instant it was taken out of the loop, the sound IMMEDIATELY cleaned up!!!

Alas though, I said above I missed something... As it turned out, (might be good to know that I've been swapping amps around too) I ALSO had a Y splitter on the output that goes to my McIntosh amp. The other end of THIS splitter goes to the dbx BX1 amp. So I've had splitters on the input side of the Peach and on the output side.

Seems I forgot about this situation and as I was "removing the other preamp from the loop" what I was REALLY doing was removing the other POWER amp from the loop. I had forgotten about splitting the outputs to the power amps.

What I find kind of interesting is, I'm currently flipping between the McIntosh 2102 and the dbx BX1 power amps (and evidently have caused this noise). When I was flipping between the 2102 and the MC-30's, I didn't notice this issue. Might be a bug in the dbx, might be structural differences for all I know (or care). I just thought it was interesting that this amp caused that.

Mark ALSO happened to nail my last issue (again with a Y splitter) when I had the OTL's in the system and was turning them off. Seems when turning off, they emitted a touch of dc current out of their input which in general is benign. Since I had a splitter going to the input, when this dc burp came out, it went straight INTO the amp I was using (the other dbx amp, BX3) and causing it to weird out too.

I guess the moral of the story is...when am i going to learn to simply STOP using these splitters which have caused me some strange issues.

Thanks to all for your thoughts and specifically, thanks again to Mark for helping peg an issue that is/was totally unrelated to your product.

I guess I now have a fancy tube on way to me and my existing tubes are fine. I've been debating the idea of rolling my V1 so this is just icing on the cake. (that my stock tubes are fine)

[SilverSport]

...and you have taught the rest of us a lesson...or at least the ones like me that didn't already know this...

Bill

[cjgeraci]

Geez, why did I not think of the solution earlier? Yes, I also had a problem with my Peach when I split a source to both the Peach and another pre - using a "Y" splitter.

That being said, however, I have never had any problems running splitters to multiple amps - coming out of the Peach outputs - as Mark stated.

Additionally - to any Jolida JD100 CDP owners, I have never experienced any problems with my Peach when running the JD100 to two separate preamps (the Jolida has two separate sets of outputs).

Glad it worked out for you.

Carl.

[Coytee]

Geez, why did I not think of the solution earlier? Yes, I also had a problem with my Peach when I split a source to both the Peach and another pre - using a "Y" splitter.

Frankly, I think I did a pi** poor job of describing the situation ACCURATELY. From my perspective, when I "switched" the amps out, I was using the HT bypass on the Peach. I was turning the other amp off.

So, when I make comment about what was in the circuit, it consisted of items who's power was turned ON. I didn't think/feel that the other items would be seen in the food chain. Clearly, I was wrong.

To compound that inaccuracy, it wasn't the splitting of the pre's (evidently) that was doing it as much as splitting the amps. (not saying splitting pre's won't cause issues, just that mine cleared up when I disconnected the BX1 power amp, erroneously THINKING I was disconnectiong the preamp)

As Mark said...at least I'm going to get a tube out of this to play with.

[cjgeraci]

"To compound that inaccuracy, it wasn't the splitting of the pre's (evidently) that was doing it as much as splitting the amps. (not saying splitting pre's won't cause issues, just that mine cleared up when I disconnected the BX1 power amp, erroneously THINKING I was disconnectiong the preamp)"

Hmmm.....interesting. My guess is that the BX1 was really causing havoc with the Peach. Not sure how, however. As stated earlier, I run the following off of my Peach outputs with nary the problem: a Marantz 8B tube amp, two QSC PLX 1202 ss amps and one SVS sub.

Carl.

[DoubleJ]

"To compound that inaccuracy, it wasn't the splitting of the pre's (evidently) that was doing it as much as splitting the amps. (not saying splitting pre's won't cause issues, just that mine cleared up when I disconnected the BX1 power amp, erroneously THINKING I was disconnectiong the preamp)"

Hmmm.....interesting. My guess is that the BX1 was really causing havoc with the Peach. Not sure how, however. As stated earlier, I run the following off of my Peach outputs with nary the problem: a Marantz 8B tube amp, two QSC PLX 1202 ss amps and one SVS sub.

Carl.

Carl:

How are you running your SVS sub through the Peach?

I've been racking my pea brain trying to figure out this vary thing.

Thanks

JJ

[cjgeraci]

Just take a "y" splitter and split one of the outputs coming from the Peach - and send of those full signals to the sub (and the other to your amp). Then, use the sub's crossover to cut down the signal (my SVS is set at about 70 hz).

I've tried the tape out from the Peach, and various other ways of sending my sub a signal to augment two-channel. I keep coming back to splitting one of the outputs coming from the Peach - because the sub sounds the best doing it that way (lowest distortion - tightest sound).

Carl.