Does anyone care to ask an amplifier designer a technical question? My door is open.


I closed the cable and fuse thread because the trolls were making a mess of things. I hope they dont find me here.

I design Tube and Solid State power amps and preamps for Music Reference. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, have trained my ears keenly to hear frequency response differences, distortion and pretty good at guessing SPL. Ive spent 40 years doing that as a tech, store owner, and designer.
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Perhaps someone would like to ask a question about how one designs a successfull amplifier? What determines damping factor and what damping factor does besides damping the woofer. There is an entirely different, I feel better way to look at damping and call it Regulation , which is 1/damping.

I like to tell true stories of my experience with others in this industry.

I have started a school which you can visit at http://berkeleyhifischool.com/ There you can see some of my presentations.

On YouTube go to the Music Reference channel to see how to design and build your own tube linestage. The series has over 200,000 views. You have to hit the video tab to see all.

I am not here to advertise for MR. Soon I will be making and posting more videos on YouTube. I don’t make any money off the videos, I just want to share knowledge and I hope others will share knowledge. Asking a good question is actually a display of your knowledge because you know enough to formulate a decent question.

Starting in January I plan to make these videos and post them on the HiFi school site and hosted on a new YouTube channel belonging to the school.


128x128ramtubes
But other than possible tube noise floor raising...is the actual sound likely to alter in any way as tubes age?
Yes. If their transconductance falls below the minimum values, the performance will suffer and can affect things like bandwidth, distortion and dynamic qualities. In a nutshell, can sound 'sleepy'.
Much better than a 33 band EQ in my opinion, and in some cases even a parametric EQ.
@4krow
Its **very** tricky to build a 33 band EQ that doesn't mess up the sound! Even a 10-band is challenging. Parametrics have a lot in common with the filters used in analog synthesizers- they are pretty complex circuit-wise and so they are going to have a sonic footprint even when set to flat. 

Thanks atmosphere!!
I'm being a bit lazy in getting around to changing the tubes in my CJ pre, but I'll see if I can note any difference other than (hopefully) lowering of noise floor.
 For the price, I wouldn't hesitate to go with Yamaha again after all those years ago. When I was struggling, I owned an inexpensive Yamaha integrated that really surprised me to be as good as it was and flexible as well. Like I have stated before, 'some' tone controls are flexible enough to be practical, at times anyway. The bulk of them just don't do it for me.
yes, I would be happy to pay for coursework on the subject. What do you offer?
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