What’s the world’s best 2 watt amplifier?

charles1dad

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@Germanboxers
Congratulations!!
I’ve no doubt that your amplifiers sound magnificent. What speakers are they driving? Continue to enjoy and appreciate the music.
Charles
 

charles1dad

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Never mind, I see your system description. Avant-garde Dual Mezzo, This initially wasn’t seen on my phone screen.
 

Germanboxers

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Dec 14, 2015
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Hi!

I was caught by surprise myself about the break in time these transformers need. I used different silver transformers before and switched to bees wax impregnated transformers. For some reason these need a long time to settle in.

You might consider to try the TM801A in the driver position as well. They are currently sold out but I will get more made in February.

Best regards

Thomas
Hello Thomas. I have been following your efforts with the TM series and was excited to see you had a TM801A. I intend to order some. Will get in touch with you after the holidays.
 

Germanboxers

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Dec 14, 2015
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Never mind, I see your system description. Avant-garde Dual Mezzo, This initially wasn’t seen on my phone screen.
Hey Charles,

Good to see you’re still enjoying music and your Coincident based system.
 
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cjfrbw

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Apr 20, 2010
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I think the alleged and storied ‘dynamic peak’ is responsible for more audiophile nervosa guilt trip thrashing than most topics.

If you make the ‘dynamic peak’ your main quarry, you wind up ignoring many other mysteries and qualities of a good listening experience for one theoretical bogeyman.

The only real way to slay the ‘dynamic peak’ dragon is bigger chassis, huger speakers, horns, more amplification devices, etc. etc. I would rather hear 97 percent of the signal well, rather than 99 percent poorly.

The noodling over ‘absolute sound’, an inherent self contradictory construct to begin with, is also pretty pointless. It might be fine to define the limitations of home listening compared to concert venues, but after that, mostly nada, It’s an arbitrary standard to make audio critics sound smarter than they are and is a bit glib and mostly irrelevant.

My stereo system is a player piano playing lab scrolls from mastering studios, the vast majority manipulated and compressed. I want something that will nurture the signal best in my room and for my particular listening tendencies. The quality of the listening experience has some limited relation to reproduction of ‘dynamic peaks’ and so called absolute sound. They are nice when they happen, if they happen, but I’m not going to strangle the system for rigid hypotheses.

There are lots of ways to prioritize different aspects of sound with particular speakers and setups. Go for it, but it is unlikely that any of it will sound like what your hear at live performances except by happenstance.
 
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cal3713

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I recently upgraded my crossover with Duelund CAST caps. Prior to this I used “military grade” metal foil and poly caps. Huge difference! Soundstage size, localization, timbre, tone, dynamics… as if I upgraded every component in my system.
Probably the best value upgrade one can make is a crossover upgrade.
Couldn't agree more. I also use a Duelund CAST cap in my speaker crossover (thanks to the suggestion of @charles1dad ) and it was a huge improvement. Exactly the same experience as you.
 

Germanboxers

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Dec 14, 2015
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I’m impressed by how much these weigh, by the way. 45 amps produce like 1.5-2 watts. My Triode Labs 45s weigh about 10 pounds each, perhaps. These look like they weigh 100 pounds each!
Good guess. They weigh 80lbs a piece. Lots of iron in these amps with 3 power transformers and 8 chokes per monoblock. Thomas puts a great deal of focus on the power supplies and filtering in his designs.

Amps4.jpg P9.JPG Filament PS.jpg
 

Fred Crane

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Apr 23, 2020
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I would include the Destination Audio 45 and 50 tube based amplifiers which I believe are 1.8 and 3.4 watts per channel respectively and simply divine sounding!
View attachment 100809
Great thread. The above Destination Audio 45 Monos are a staple of my SET diet. The way they are 'voiced' kills me. Of course, I'm typically using them with Destination Audio Vista Horns, Destination Audio's 76 Preamp and Destination's Dac and Phonostage. I think that is the one unspoken aspect of any thread of this nature. No amp is an island. Finding the best at a given power rating is situational. One amp will sound better with Preamp A while another will sound better with preamp B, but you have to make certain to pair the first with speaker D, while the other sounds better with Speaker C. Of course, this only makes sense if you're using cable that has the same composition as the hook up and transformer wire for each iteration etc : ) All of this is outside of the thought that certain 'sounds' will appeal to listener A that may well be unlistenable to Listener B.**

You can look at a vast array of speakers that have the 100db+ sensitivity rating to work with these type of amplifiers. Their sounds are entirely different from each other. Take a trip to listen to them back to back and you might come away thinking that 'a sensitive approach' was the only thing they had in common. Also, given the recent dissolution of the measurement police you may also find the sensitivity ratings are not as exacting as you had hoped. As such, to imagine that there is one amp that sounds best with all of them may be wishful thinking. Still and all this is a useful exercise as it does shine a light on a number of great amps by great makers that one can put on an audition list. Though I would be mindful of the idea that unless you're hearing the whole strain of amplification...you haven't heard it. The other simplifying choice would be to find a sound from an engineer or company that you love and begin to compile a complete system from that maker. Just my 2 cents...

(**As an example, I was called to listen to a system by a well heeled audiophile turned maker, who was going into the business. He had found an engineer whose white papers were very exciting to him. He had a friend's exquisite tubes and horns prior to putting together this new venture. A good deal of his musical diet was comprised of recordings that were recorded 'in the box'...for the most part, electronica. Whereas he loved his new horns and the chip amp that drove them, I couldn't bear to hear them. I posit that his hearing had been guided from his youth onward, by headphone listening to electronic music while mine was initially almost all live acoustic fair. After going back and forth with him, I came to believe that dynamics and frequency response were the North Stars of his hearing. He didn't hear the harshness nor the lack of cohesion from the mid bass to the low bass which was to me obvious and intrusive.)
 
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Salectric

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cal3713

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Dante Choi

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I read with big interest this thread. I have 2 high efficient speakers systems, first one is Tannoy Autograph with Silver Monitors and the second is Vitavox CN-191. I had the interest to use Vitatox with low-powered amplifiers. I have used Air Tight ATM-211, Nagra VPA, Allnic A-8000 (T-1610 SE with 50W x Ch), Audio Note UK Kegon Balance with original WE-300A Single Parallel, and finally Audio Note UK Paladin Silver stereo power amp with 45 SE. In my opinion, Paladin SIlver with a little 1.8W x Ch has the finest tone, but sometimes I feel that the sound is anemic, with a lack of body. For my taste, the best match for Vitavox is 211SE with 15-18W x Ch. In the case of Tannoy, I´m using Audio Note UK M9 Phono and Ongaku Shinguru. In the case of Vitavox, I´m driving them with Audio Note UK M6 Phono. Very interesting to see Thomas Mayer 45 Amps and Destination Audio 45 mono.
 

bonzo75

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Feb 26, 2014
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I read with big interest this thread. I have 2 high efficient speakers systems, first one is Tannoy Autograph with Silver Monitors and the second is Vitavox CN-191. I had the interest to use Vitatox with low-powered amplifiers. I have used Air Tight ATM-211, Nagra VPA, Allnic A-8000 (T-1610 SE with 50W x Ch), Audio Note UK Kegon Balance with original WE-300A Single Parallel, and finally Audio Note UK Paladin Silver stereo power amp with 45 SE. In my opinion, Paladin SIlver with a little 1.8W x Ch has the finest tone, but sometimes I feel that the sound is anemic, with a lack of body. For my taste, the best match for Vitavox is 211SE with 15-18W x Ch. In the case of Tannoy, I´m using Audio Note UK M9 Phono and Ongaku Shinguru. In the case of Vitavox, I´m driving them with Audio Note UK M6 Phono. Very interesting to see Thomas Mayer 45 Amps and Destination Audio 45 mono.

hi, what happened to the 50 watts Allnic 242?
 

Dante Choi

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Feb 26, 2016
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Buenos Aires,, Argentina
As I wrote: In a well designed amplifier the rectifier makes very little difference. So if a customer wants these to be used I use them. Since i always use them in a bridge together with TV dampers I still have the slow ramp up of voltage. The higher voltage drop can be compensated by higher voltage from the power transformer

Thomas
This is shocking for me. In ALL amplifiers, I experienced improved performance changing rectifiers. During my life, I spend time and money to find WE-274B, Mullard GZ-34 metal base, GEC 5U4, good 5R4, etc...
 

Salectric

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Rectifier tubes have always made a big difference in sound quality in all of my gear. It doesn’t matter whether the circuit is lightly filtered or heavily filtered, regulated or not regulated.
 
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charles1dad

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Hey Charles,

Good to see you’re still enjoying music and your Coincident based system.
Yes I am still very much enjoying them and my admiration of them has only deepened.
Your Thomas Mayer amplifiers look marvelous to me and I have no doubt that your audio system is utterly sublime sounding.
Charles
 

Atmasphere

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May 4, 2010
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I've been dabbling in low powered amplifiers for some time. My first foray was a type 45 based amp (allegedly built by Burgess). I played it on a set of Coral 8" full range drivers mounted in a cabinet using a passive 8" radiator made by Coral. It worked Ok but I felt I could do better.

I have a theory that most people running lower powered amps have not compared them directly to other amps on a level playing field. What I mean by this is that if you have an SET, where is the push-pull version of it that uses the same power tubes and similar construction? Or, where is the push-pull amp that makes the same power? Most of the comparisons I've seen are against amps of quite a lot more power! So I figured to eliminate that as a variable, as well as the type of tube, since most SETs use DHTs while the PP amp it gets compared to is often an indirectly heated pentode based design, probably using feedback and operating class AB. Apples and oranges.

So I ran a variety of experiments. The first was to create a type 45 based amp that was push pull instead of SET. The power went from 0.75 Watts to about 5 Watts, using a very conventional 1950s phase splitter. The result was instantly more transparent and smoother, easier to listen to at any power level.

(I also tried out a solid state amp that was single-ended right to the output stage. Because of its topology, it made a prodigious 2nd harmonic just like SETs do, and not surprisingly, was very smooth- until you pushed it harder at which point it got brighter. FWIW this is an amp I used to service back when I was putting myself though engineering school; I worked at the local Allied Radio Shack service center, which serviced the 5-state area of the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The amp is the SA-175 and makes about 3 Watts at full power. For this test I refurbished it since no amp from that period will be working right if not serviced out.)

Finally I designed a tube amp that makes 5 Watts, based on the EL95. This is a 7-pin miniature pentode that caught my fancy when I serviced out an old Grundig console for a friend (BTW, consoles are back! see https://wrensilva.com/collections/stereo-consoles sort of a hipster thing...) who lives in a condo. A pair of them makes 5 Watts in class A.

The EL95, like its bigger brother the 6AQ5, is meant to be very easy to drive. I found that Edcor had a high end output transformer that had exactly the right plate load impedance I was looking for, in a 10Watt embodiment, which meant at full power the transformers would always be loafing. They had ultralinear taps too! What all this means is this allowed me to use a 12AT7 wired as a differential amplifier to drive the power tubes directly. No 'phase splitter' and the only gain driving the power tubes in the input circuit. Since the 12AT7 is quite linear, it also allowed me to run feedback. Normally I'm not a fan of feedback in tube amps since its often misapplied. But since this amplifier circuit was entirely musical and listenable without any feedback, I knew that the linearity of the feedback node was not going to mess with the feedback signal too much. I also needed it because the amp had too much gain! So one grid of the 12AT7 was the input and the opposing grid was for the feedback, in a way that you often see in solid state amps.

I wanted this amp to be small, taking up no more room than the SA175 it was replacing. It has a volume control and 2 inputs so its really an integrated amp. Regardless compared to the type 45 it was really no contest- it was lower noise, audibly and measurably wider bandwidth (in both directions; full power to 100KHz), smoother and more transparent. Its footprint is the same as the SA175 so it can sit on a bit of notebook paper with room to spare. I am probably more enamored of this amp than i should be; it was insanely easy to design and worked perfectly as soon as it was powered up. I made it of decent parts but its nothing special in that regard. Its simply works because it has the right distortion profile.

SETs have what is called a 'quadratic non-linearity' that results in a prodigious 2nd harmonic. The 3rd is fairly prominent too by not nearly that of the 2nd. Together they imbue the amp with 'warmth' and mask the higher ordered harmonics which would otherwise cause harshness. So they come off nice and smooth. But since they lack feedback, by about 20% of full power the higher ordered harmonics come out to play, particularly on transients, which, since the ear also uses them to sense sound pressure, causes the amp to sound 'dynamic'. This is caused entirely by distortion and how it interacts with the ear.

When the circuit is fully differential you have a 'cubic non-linearity'. This is because even ordered harmonics are cancelled from one stage to the next. This cancellation means that distortion is not compounded as much as the signal moves through the amp. The result is a 3rd harmonic (at a slightly lower level than seen in an SET) with succeeding harmonics falling off on an exponential curve but at a faster rate than quadratic, resulting in less overall distortion and also masked higher orders. So it too is musical, but is more transparent owing to less overall distortion. There is a greater amount of usable power also owing to the lower distortion (the difference at full power is about 10:1 between the typical SET and typical fully differential amp).

So its not really a surprise that the little EL95 amp did so well. Math after all governs how all amplifiers work. Its nice though when you have the result verify what the math is saying. GemAmp.jpg
 

Fred Crane

Industry Expert
Apr 23, 2020
271
442
135
I read with big interest this thread. I have 2 high efficient speakers systems, first one is Tannoy Autograph with Silver Monitors and the second is Vitavox CN-191. I had the interest to use Vitatox with low-powered amplifiers. I have used Air Tight ATM-211, Nagra VPA, Allnic A-8000 (T-1610 SE with 50W x Ch), Audio Note UK Kegon Balance with original WE-300A Single Parallel, and finally Audio Note UK Paladin Silver stereo power amp with 45 SE. In my opinion, Paladin SIlver with a little 1.8W x Ch has the finest tone, but sometimes I feel that the sound is anemic, with a lack of body. For my taste, the best match for Vitavox is 211SE with 15-18W x Ch. In the case of Tannoy, I´m using Audio Note UK M9 Phono and Ongaku Shinguru. In the case of Vitavox, I´m driving them with Audio Note UK M6 Phono. Very interesting to see Thomas Mayer 45 Amps and Destination Audio 45 mono.
 

Fred Crane

Industry Expert
Apr 23, 2020
271
442
135
I read with big interest this thread. I have 2 high efficient speakers systems, first one is Tannoy Autograph with Silver Monitors and the second is Vitavox CN-191. I had the interest to use Vitatox with low-powered amplifiers. I have used Air Tight ATM-211, Nagra VPA, Allnic A-8000 (T-1610 SE with 50W x Ch), Audio Note UK Kegon Balance with original WE-300A Single Parallel, and finally Audio Note UK Paladin Silver stereo power amp with 45 SE. In my opinion, Paladin SIlver with a little 1.8W x Ch has the finest tone, but sometimes I feel that the sound is anemic, with a lack of body. For my taste, the best match for Vitavox is 211SE with 15-18W x Ch. In the case of Tannoy, I´m using Audio Note UK M9 Phono and Ongaku Shinguru. In the case of Vitavox, I´m driving them with Audio Note UK M6 Phono. Very interesting to see Thomas Mayer 45 Amps and Destination Audio 45 mono.

we-have-moved.png

I wonder how you would feel about the Destination Audio GM70 on your Vitavox. It has some of the same 45 gestalt while applying 1300v on the rails...a better 211 in my humble opinion. InShot_20220211_135658170.jpg
241662178_571683893978255_8635585553224874329_n (1).jpg
 
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