There’s more to the sound of rectifiers than voltage drop. As I have stated elsewhere, some of my equipment has a tube rectifier in a regulated supply. I hear the same differences between different rectifiers when used in a regulated supply as I hear in equipment without a regulator. The voltage drop differences are of no consequence in the regulated supplies.
SET amp owners thread
- Thread starter bonzo75
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There are other factors as to whether a tube rectifier feels comfortable.
resistance transformer, the sizes of the fliter choke or cap. These ensure either longevity and stability or a quick death. I think regulations are only useful for small currents without a large dynamic load, e.g. preamp, driver stage. I think the differences are based on manufacturing tolerances.
I recently compared, 5U4G (4 types), 5AR4(3 types), 5R4GY (RCA Black Plates) and 5U4GB (Sylvania NOS), in two different amps (Horning SATI 520b and Silvercore 2A3).
In the Silvercore I found that the 3 best sounding were: 1955 Valvo GZ34(5AR4), Marconi 5U4G and RCA JAN (1940s) 5R4GY. The Valvo was the most direct and least romantic but had great life and resolution. The other two sounded more similar and were a bit more spacious and tonally rich. Dynamics were probably best with 5AR4.
On Horning the GZ34s don’t work and the best overall are the very robust 5U4GB but 5R4GYs were nicer tonally but had less guts.
in my Ayon Crossfire 3 I like the Marconi but have tried non-5U4Gs yet…
Many factors affect the sound of tubes in general and rectifiers in particular. The geometry of the metal parts, the materials from which they are made, even the type of vacuum pump with which the vacuum in the tube is obtained. Mercury pumps gave the best sound, oil pumps gave worse results.
Imagine how it could sound with proper 2a3 tubes instead of the crappy ones you have now
Yup, some potential there to still exploitImagine how it could sound with proper 2a3 tubes instead of the crappy ones you have now
my tip
El mago 300b
Or old audio innovations 200 series el84 amp company renamed later in audionote.uk
Such a special sound both amps i swear you never forget
Posted this in repsonse to a question from Moricab back in Jan and Bonzo just asked me to post it here, so here it is.
I've been living with, and loving, a pair of Silvercore 833MKII monoblocs for the last three years.
Compared to other low powered SET designs, the Silvercores have a lot of 'meat on the bone' and offer quite a saturated sound. They still absolutely have that transparent, soulful and sweet SET virtue but there is more robustness to here. The bass is full and rich and with a decent amount of punch but again, it is SET bass, not SS. Still, I've never felt they were light in the pants; just lots of lovely tuneful if slightly rounded bass Finally, they have a silver wound transformer in them so as you would expect, they are quite bright in the mid range but never brittle or harsh. I've lived with them playing into a pair of hORNS FP10S and have just moved up the speakers significantly to the much larger FP15 big brothers. Both speakers are 96db rated so the 20 watts the Silvercores generate are more than enough. The FP10s are quite dark sounding speakers though, whereas the FP15s are much more neutral and so the ever so slightly bright mid range became more apparent. This was easily fixed by some tube rolling in the pre-amp.
I love them and since I've owned them I have had a few radically different alternatives in for comparisson. The best amps I have had, and which got closest to being good enough to warrant seriously considering a swap, were Concert Fidelity ZX120s (I have the CF 080LSX pre amp that matches them). These were a MOSFET design with 120 watts available but with the first 30 watts biased to pure Class A. They were so very different with that characteristic bass slam and more punchy leading edge dynamic, but they lost overall choherence and musicality. If I only ever listened to hardcore industrial, electro, techno, dance music, then it would be an easy decision to swap to the SS designed amps, but i don't and in the end the trade off was more than I would have been prepared to give up. That said, the test revealled two things to me.
First is that for SS designs they were quite fabulous. The second is that for the money, the Silvercore 833MKIIs are a complete bargain. The new price of the 833s is £12k in the UK (Inc. VAT), whereas the Concert Fidelitys cost £18k; the Silvercores are punching way above their weight in terms of price.
I've also heard them compared against the £40k Audio Music 833s, the big ones with the separate power supply chassis and between the two I would still choose the Silvercores although the Audio Musics were also very good. But then they cost 3.2 times more!
I've been living with, and loving, a pair of Silvercore 833MKII monoblocs for the last three years.
Compared to other low powered SET designs, the Silvercores have a lot of 'meat on the bone' and offer quite a saturated sound. They still absolutely have that transparent, soulful and sweet SET virtue but there is more robustness to here. The bass is full and rich and with a decent amount of punch but again, it is SET bass, not SS. Still, I've never felt they were light in the pants; just lots of lovely tuneful if slightly rounded bass Finally, they have a silver wound transformer in them so as you would expect, they are quite bright in the mid range but never brittle or harsh. I've lived with them playing into a pair of hORNS FP10S and have just moved up the speakers significantly to the much larger FP15 big brothers. Both speakers are 96db rated so the 20 watts the Silvercores generate are more than enough. The FP10s are quite dark sounding speakers though, whereas the FP15s are much more neutral and so the ever so slightly bright mid range became more apparent. This was easily fixed by some tube rolling in the pre-amp.
I love them and since I've owned them I have had a few radically different alternatives in for comparisson. The best amps I have had, and which got closest to being good enough to warrant seriously considering a swap, were Concert Fidelity ZX120s (I have the CF 080LSX pre amp that matches them). These were a MOSFET design with 120 watts available but with the first 30 watts biased to pure Class A. They were so very different with that characteristic bass slam and more punchy leading edge dynamic, but they lost overall choherence and musicality. If I only ever listened to hardcore industrial, electro, techno, dance music, then it would be an easy decision to swap to the SS designed amps, but i don't and in the end the trade off was more than I would have been prepared to give up. That said, the test revealled two things to me.
First is that for SS designs they were quite fabulous. The second is that for the money, the Silvercore 833MKIIs are a complete bargain. The new price of the 833s is £12k in the UK (Inc. VAT), whereas the Concert Fidelitys cost £18k; the Silvercores are punching way above their weight in terms of price.
I've also heard them compared against the £40k Audio Music 833s, the big ones with the separate power supply chassis and between the two I would still choose the Silvercores although the Audio Musics were also very good. But then they cost 3.2 times more!
If you want to hear the sound of a SET amplifier with bass without any "but", try https://sound-design-atelier.com/amplifier-2 The rest of the sound range will not cause you any complaints either. As well as the price of devices.
The same 20 W, but a completely different concept of building amplifiers.
There will always be a 'but' - no design can do everything to please everyone. But I'd be interested in hearing any amplifier that can reproduce SS bass tautness and SET transparency and sweetness. A good friend of mine (HeiHei) used to have a set of David Berning Quadrature Z that I suspect did this, but I never got to hear them. He now has a system that gets close to doing everything I would want stylistically but sadly the price of that is well out of my reach.
You are right, we are all different and our preferences are not the same.
I haven't heard Quadrature Z, unfortunately, but after getting acquainted with its technical review, I can say with high probability that there is nothing to regret. Instead of a low-frequency output transformer, they use a high-frequency transformer with a bunch of signal transformations for this. It does not help the sound.
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