LampizatOr Baltic 3
- Thread starter VoicesInMyHead
- Start date
Hi, I tried to PM but there seems to be a restriction. Anywho, I just hooked up my B3 today and am interested in Roll'n some tubes
Please PM me with asking prices and how they differ from the stock tubes that Lampi ships with the unit. In the meantime, I'll scour the 1st - 30 pages in this thread!
TIA
Nice! What other tubes are you using with the ecc32’s?Listening to B3 with Mullard ecc32- beautiful combo (would rate it higher then with Melz)
Taking a poll . . .
I left my Amber 3 on 24/7 for 2 years . . Anyone see a problem with me doing that with B3/B4 ?
I left my Amber 3 on 24/7 for 2 years . . Anyone see a problem with me doing that with B3/B4 ?
I think that's what most people do, I usually only turn it off if I'm going away for a few days or more. This is from the B3 manual:
Power on-off cycle
The tube lifetime, almost like the life of a car engine in cold climate – is determined largely by the on-off cycle. The heat expansion coefficient of the glass is so much different than that of the metal, that the air-tight seal of the metal pins can leak oxygen inside the tube and eventually kill it. Even if it is just one molecule per day. So in other words it is better to keep the DAC always on, than to switch it on and off more than necessary.
The lampizator DAC with tube rectifier has a slow start feature which brings the high voltage supply gradually up, at the rate of two- to five volts per second. The PSU reaches 250 V DC after 90 seconds. This helps to extend tube life. The DAC is also equipped with voltage down feature (bleeders) which reduce the power voltage upon switch-off at roughly the same rate.
On top of that – the tubes are operated always around 25% of full nominal power, which greatly increases their life expectancy. Combining all the factors together, the tube lifetime should be anywhere between 10 and 20 years, assuming the player is switched off only once per day, for the night.
btw, if you have Engine 11 and the new volume control I think it's fair to say that you have B4. you're of course welcome in the B3 thread as it's basically still the same DAC, it's unfortunate that the threads are diverging as I don't really see a B4 or B3 only discussion taking place, and even if so it wouldn't be much of a problem.
I know of something better
we're all hoping for a killer result here, but afaik this is still untested in Baltic and yet to be seen... maybe we all will just end up sitting here with more tubes and adapters on the shelf...
although I'm of course holding my breath for the next new thing! I think we've had some nice discoveries with rectis here lately, taking steps from "previous old time favourites" and also good examples of price not always being equal to sound quality.
I’ll do a ‘proof of concept’ this week with some cheap and easily available examples of this tube type to confirm satisfactory operation.
This is exactly the case . . . data plate & face plate says B3 with all the B4 Vol Control / E11 features.
Thanks for the inclusion and THANKS for all your informative posts in this thread
fwiw, I just placed an order for 2 NOS 5U4G rectis with very different construction. One tall skinny bottle GE 5u4g A with very few holes in the plates and "D" getter
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one Sylvania JAN-CHS-5U4GB TALL FAT BOTTLE with many punched out rectangular holes in the plates with halo getter
SYLVANIA JAN-CHS-5U4GB TALL FAT BOTTLE RECTIFIER TUBE TESTS NOS on AT1000 | eBay
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I realize one is military issue and the other is not . . . Is that the difference between the A and B designation?
I don't think the A/B has anything to do with being military or not, the "JAN CHS" specification is what says it's military, I think JAN is short for Joint Army-Navy and CHS could perhaps be Common Hardware Software?
Please report your findings with these tubes. You probably want to give them a few days to settle.
Several people in this thread has recently found Brimar CV1863 to be quite pricy worthy, and almost something of a giant killer coming out on the top in comparisons. Always keep an open mind...
@Sablon Audio tested quite a few rectifiers in post #475. More extensive descriptions of some of the rectis was posted some pages earlier.
I think the "blue balls" Psvanes that most of us got with our Baltics (and Horizons) sometimes is getting bashed a bit too much, I think it's not such a bad new production tube coming as standard with the DAC's, but yes, eventually you want to have it changed to something more "exotic". A lot of people are favoring Melz 1578, I'm currently in the 6F8G camp myself (adapter required), and it's going to be interesting to see what some experiments with a specific 6n7 tube are going in the next coming weeks.
My cheapest to deliver donor tubes ordered yesterday just arrived. I haven’t a clue who the manufacturer is however the ‘concept‘ works and fwiw Adele sounds surprisingly good from cold, even through adaptors.
nice! interesting to see how these cheap ones will deliver against the Melz with some play time... but it seems that you're already intrigued enough to climb the ladder for something more exciting.
the famous "Adele scale" is a classic for 6F8G testing...
After several days on repeat, I think the adapters should be reasonably well burnt in. The results of this experiment have been interesting, with a big jump in macro dynamics partly offset by a small diminution in subtlety. The former shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has researched this tube type and I suspect there will be gains in texture and tonality with a better quality valve. As far as I can tell, these Haltron appear to be relabelled later production Sylvania and I have a couple of pairs of European 1950s models on their way to compare.
One of the aforementioned 50’s options has just arrived, 1953 Visseaux. Straight from the box, after a 70 year slumber, it is sounding more soulful and nuanced than the Haltron Sylvania but less upfront punchy.
I am curious what kind of data stream others are feeding to their B3. I use Roon with USB out from my endpoint into my B3. Previously I had been playing the native sample rate of the file but yesterday I changed to have Roon DSP upsample to DSD128. I was surprised to find that for me it seemed clearer, had more depth and a more realistic soundstage. Actually it had more of an effect than any tube rolling I had done.
Any thoughts?
Any thoughts?
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