Is this it?

That's a shame. It's a beast!!!

That skull knob is just too cool!  Never saw one like that before...

That's just a plasma globe setting behind it...

Isn't that a line from "Young Frankenstein?"

Well, my thoughts behind creating this thread were to give you a real time glimpse into the design process of a new amplifier.  At this stage, I have the design and how it should sound in my head and am trying to make it happen on the bench.

So step one, yes it's alive!  Sadly it sounds like crap... so let the hunt begin!  How many things did I wire wrong?



another mystery...

I love it when you take us behind the curtain and let us see what all goes into the creation of a world-class tube amp. This thing is going to be awesome!  I better start saving my money....

After two unexpected / additional sessions with it, I was able to capture the actual moment in time of it's first true playback where I actually listened to it to see where we are... what is the starting point going to be...  thought you would enjoy the pic... in fact, here... I'll let you have the full resolution version here: https://www.decware.com/newsite/images/DSC_0052l.JPG

I believe this picture is worth a thousand words... so I'll keep it short.   What am I hearing... amazing balls, incredibly smooth, perhaps too smooth, incredible potential... the voicing will no doubt be quite a ride - I'm sure.  Can't start the voicing with something that sounds this good out the gate until it has actually broken in....  these giant caps can take some real time.

3 hours into it, the detail is increasing... it's SO the opposite of solid state... interesting.  When any other amp is having a bad hair day... meaning lots of hash in the power grid causing excessive grain and dryness...  I can already see that with this amplifier that is never going to happen...  It's smooth beyond the ability to screw it up.  Put you power plants in the ground and the decomposing steel will enrich the iron content of the soil which will in turn improve the conductivity of your ground rod that your neutral is tied to... this in turn will create blacker backgrounds and better definition than when you had it in your system.   Just a tip.  I have to say what I'm hearing right now is like battery power.  The speed of the entire amplifier is really going to be effected by the main caps...  I'm going to wait to see where it lands wondering if I'll be bypassing the electrolytic with film caps.  I also have a few other experiments going on, or planned lets say, but tonight marks the starting point, and it doesn't suck.

Fun fun fun....  wait to you hear what it took to get to this point...  I'll save that for my next post.

4 hours into it and the power transformers are barely warm.... Impressive.  Starting to really open up too.  Rock and Roll lovers.... this may be your amp.

Will this new family member end up between the Torii and the Mono's?

Hi Steve,

How much power did you measure with this amp so far?

Time for another update...

I have never had so much trouble getting bias meters to work properly!  I've had one meter give me fits since the beginning.  In fact the very first thing I did when I first fired this amp with output tubes installed, is peg one of the meters so hard I had to replace it.  

Please take a look here at how much fun it is to replace a meter in this amp!



Each meter has two green oval stickers on it (to help you locate them)  

Wouldn't have been a problem except I had the idea to make the meters even cooler than they are.  To that effect I spent a night drilling holes in the casing after taking the meters completely apart and installing just the exact right LEDs.  That's all find and dandy until you blow a meter...  

Since all ideas actually come from our higher consciousness, and or other entities in that same dimension, it's not hard to figure out that this particular idea was not from the group of dead audio gurus from ancient times that sit around their mirror pool and watch me work...no this idea was from father murphy.  Notice I won't capitalize his name out of disrespect.   In any case, the idea is.

Time out.... before I continue, can anyone guess why I spent literally 10 hours or more trying to get the action of one of the meters balanced with the rest... not to mention the value it read.   The answer is in the last photograph I posted.  If you look at the original size high res version of the photo, it is unmistakable...

OK... Where were we... ohh yea, the meters...  First of all setting up the bias windows is a real bitch, but then that 's because I have a particular way I want the biasing of the tubes to take place and it simply takes a lot of work to get it to happen.

Most fixed bias amplifiers have a bias pot for each tube, or at least each pair.  Well if it has one pot for a pair of tubes, it's completely useless... don't buy it.  The commonly seen approach is a separate adjustment pot for each output tube.  You would think this is an ideal solution, making it easy to adjust the bias for each tube perfectly.  Sadly it's almost always done from the same bias supply, so when you adjust the bias for one tube, the bias on the other tube chances slightly from where it was.  So, you adjust that tube, and now the one you previously set exactly where you wanted it, moves.   So, you adjust that one again, and the one you just finished has now moved again.  Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, this can go back and forth about 6 times, before getting a perfect match between the tubes.

A perfect match between the tubes is the goal.  How many mills each tube is adjusted to is also a factor, but that's the kind of thing that once you decide the value and set it, you shouldn't have to ever worry about it again unless you install different tubes.  Sadly with a bias pot for each tube this is not possible.  Even with independent bias supplies and pots for each tube, you still find yourself grouping together the bias in milliamps with the balance between each tube.   It's just ridiculous.

So what I do, is have an independent bias supply for each tube and a ganged pot to control the bias in mills for the pair.  If you want 70 mills, you turn the knob and both tubes change at the same time.  THEN we add a second ganged pot mirror wired between the top and bottom sections to create a balance control.  This balances the mills between the two tubes.   Remember as tubes and the amp warm up, bias changes.  This is why the tedious ritual I described earlier using a separate bias pot for each tube has to be repeated after an hour or so of listening, because when the output tubes are perfectly matched, something audibly exotic happens to the music.  You can be certain that if an amplifier doesn't have meters, this audibly exotic set of balances will never occur.  That's again, because the bias of the tubes change with warm up.  You need a way to adjust quickly look at the amp and see if the two tubes are drawing the exact same number of mills.  If they are not, you need a simply frikin knob to turn to make them that way... all while listening to music, uninterrupted.

This is why you buy Decware.   (whoops that one slipped, sorry)

Obviously you don't want to change the mills that the pair of tubes is set at, you just want them to match.  Perfectly matched tubes are never perfectly matched except at a particular current and temperature which only happens for a short moment during the warmup cycle of the amplifier. Basically if the place you purchased your tubes matched them at the same exact current your amplifier draws, and waiting 30 minutes before testing them, your amp will have matched tubes at the 30 minute mark.  An hour later, they will be off again.  And since most places that test tubes, do them almost cold (5 minute warm up) your amp only has matched tubes for about two minutes just after the five minute mark.

So you see, the only way to achieve zen is to be able to visually see the current draw as tubes warm up, and have a simple way to adjust the balance.   You might do it two or three times in the first 2 hours.  After that you can leave it alone and it will always arrive at the same place after the same amount of time.  However, neurotic audiophiles will always opt to match the tubes at the 10 minute mark when they start listening, at the 40 minute mark when the amp is starting to get warm, and at the 2 hour mark when the amp is totally at peace.

So now you know why father murphy had the idea to put lights in the meters, because meters are important to me in these types of amplifiers.

Anyway, anyone figured out how father murphy messes with Stevieboy?

I thought I would share one simple thing that happens during the design and development process, the meter deal... but that's really only one.  I gave serious consideration of making this a real time accurate design log with every detail logged.  It would be great.  But it's too much information.  I'm just not comfortable with giving that much away.  So I'm going to be leaving most if not all of the voicing details out of this thread.  It probably won't seem that way, but yea... it will be.  The underlying point to all of this is that from pain comes gain.  There are no short cuts.  If it goes well, burry it in the back yard because it's a fluke.  You have to feel some real pain, real stress, and real anxiety to release an amplifier that's as good as everything else you've done because each of those things were the same deal.

This is where I part ways with so many "math guys" as I like to call them.  Impressive as they like to pretend they are, all of them voice an amplifier with a scope.  That's like trying to tune a piano with a toilet plunger...  

Ouch! Wrong meter???

Whoops. When I clicked the email for this thread it to me to post 74...did not see the rest and reponded with what turned out to post 80!

I finished your nights writing....thanks for keeping us in the loop. Congratulations! Tube synergy settling into the rest of the long setup so far...what new doors will this open??? Can't wait to hear!

Beautiful ride Steve.

Jd

Careful! Jason of Schiit just threatened to add $50 to the price every time someone asks about their forthcoming amp

I hope to read more soon too.  -S

Very exciting that you are satisfied with the Mystery Amp at this point, and that it performs so well with less efficient speakers! I look forward to more impressions as you play the amp more. Or could it by chance be complete?!?!?

Great news! Looking forward to more impressions.

Transformers have the biggest effect on a tube amplifier's sound in my world, so it came as no surprise that this latest intrusion into the amplifiers voicing would be big. (No that's not true... it came as a big surprise!)  And now having just witnesses how different transformers effect the sound again, I still can't help but be amazed at just how much things can change!

After several evenings discussing the output winding topologies we recently tested some classic secondary arrangements with the typical taps against some dual secondary arrangements where windings of different lengths are combined on the same bobbin.  The differences ranged from something that sounded typically real good, to something that sounded magical.  Some interesting stuff since the only main difference is in the pattern of core saturation.  I expected to have to strain to hear the difference, but instead I had to check and see if we were still listening to the same amplifier.

With this rather pleasant discovery I now know this amp is going to be hugely successful.  Optimized for (but not limited to) KT66 output tubes, I'm currently witnessing it sound better than both the Zen Mono's and the TORII MK III.  That doesn't mean it is, because it's still to new and there is some infatuation that will need to wear off before I can actually hear it objectively.

I'll keep you posted as I put the fine polish on it and continue to wrap my head around it.  Right now my comment about the sound would be this:  Generally liquidity and honesty are rarely found in the same amplifier, but this seems to be a reference for both.  Almost too good to be true.  


Steve

Sounds amazing Steve! Thanks for the ongoing story and impressions! If it sounds better than MY Torii is sounding these days, it is truly magical

I hope I can hear it one day!!!