MEGA-LAMPIZATOR


This lampizator was made in april 07 during one fine weekend I spent together with Ewgenniy Kreminski, the master himself.
We sat together and lied a plan for the ultimate lampizator, regardless of cost, heat, and size. I mean - I lied the pen, paper and wino. Ewgennyi drew the ideas for the monster. That is called collaborative genius at work.
It is a breathtaking machine and it WORKS folks !


Ewgennyi sipping Cabernet after the monster MEGA LAMPIZATOR played the first tunes.


The tubes: double triodes 6H13C (in latin 6N13S) are meant primarily for power tubes for amps. They are huge. I can't imagine anybody who is normal to use these power triodes as small signal amplifiers. It seems like totally crazy idea. (wait a minute, didn't Manley (the old man) use 300 B as small signal tube for his preamp ??? But again, he is not "normal")

In the simple resistor-loaded anode follower, they have very small amplification factor of 2, (normal tubes have 30 in average !!!) very low output impedance (300 Ohm) and the sound has unlimited space, depth, clarity and detail. The sound is very mature, big, effortless, with true timbre and great macro and micro dynamics. In my book this becomes a reference for super high quality lampization.
Of course it makes also a great preamp.
In fact, this is an OTL class A amplifier.

Let's put things into perspective - the 6H13 is a LARGE tube   ;-)




On the photos  below you see it inside my passive preamplifier, but the relay boards are not connected (the red thingies)
The grey cubes are paper in oil capacitors in anode supply smoothing circuit. Ewgenniy likes to put a 20 uF PIO straight after his bridge rectifiers.
After that to the right comes a 380 Ohm resistor, then 330uF lytics capacitor, then split two parallel 380 Ohm resistors, split into two phases of balanced circuit (or into L-R channels of SE circuits).
I used two power toroids (seen on the extreme left) because of heater demands - 3A per tube (6,3 V DC) !!!
The tubes sit in standard octal bases.  I positioned them horizontally to save space.

Lampizator layout of the octal base:


OCTAL BASE:
7 and 8 are heaters, 1 is grid, 2 = anode, 3=cathode - and second triode - 4 is grid2,    5 = anode2,     6 is cathode2.
We used typical anode follower SE triode in pure class A and zero feedback. We had low current but seriously I would aim at 40 mA to let the tube sing.
 

Hooked to my Grundig 9009 with softers straight from DACs and balanced secondaries - this makes  - what seemed to me that evening as the best CD in the world period. That's ihow good it was.


Proposed power transformer:

For SE operation:
core: 35 VA (minimum ) toroid
1 secondary 6,3 V AC / 4 A heaters winding
1 secondary 120 V AC / 0,1 A for anodes
1 screen winding.
This is good for one tube - which contains internally two triodes - good enough for stereo.
For balanced - use a 50 VA core and two heater windings. And of course - two tubes















click on image to see a large schematics.

After some time I changed the R2 - anode resistor - to be 1,5 K not 7. Otherwise there is not enough anode voltage.
The cathode biasing resistor should also be smaller than 300 Ohms, maybe 100 is good.
The tube can handle 120 mA per half so if we arrive at 30, 40 or 50 does not matter. Only the supply caps must increase with higher current.

Here is a story of a smaller scale job - internal megalampizator in my  Yamaha CDX480 player.
This is the schematics of the other job


After two years I still think that the experiment was a lot of fun and worth trying, but seriously - the other lampizators beat the megalampizator in too many areas. Especially the 6N2P tube in SRPP beats the mega seriosly.
What the mega has is certain sound maturity, size, dimension, effortless dynamics - which no other tube has. But the amount of detail is not enough for me.
Try it yourself and see how you like it.

WARNING !

This solution is ONLY for the V out dacs. Not for I out dacs !!!


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