Interstage vs Choke styple Tube Amplifiers


Hi, I am getting into the work of high sensitivity horn system and considering SET tube mono amps for my 110db TAD compression driver/horn. Don't need lots of power. 45, 2A3 or 300B set amps will be good. The amps seems to fall into two camps - interstage type (Audio Note, Shindo, Promitheus, etc.) and chock style (Cary, Art, Welborne, etc.). Assuming known high end components are used with high quality transformers for the tube amps, what is the inherent advantage/disadvantege of these design implementations and how would such design work with horns sensitive to noise?
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Showing 1 response by atmasphere

Are you referring to impedance coupling between stages? If so then there are 3 camps, as many SETs also use RC coupling.

Interstage transformer coupling is usually done to create circuit simplicity, but does so at the price of the effects of the interstage coupling transformer. This often results in a more lush sound, accompanied by a 'dynamic' quality. IMO the term 'dynamic' as I used in the last sentence is really more accuratly portrayed by the word 'distorted'. Not distorted in the sense of outright clipping, but adding unclipped distortion that ear reacts to as perceiving as loudness cues.

The effect is artificial, and once aware of it, I found it hard to listen to any but the very best SETs, none of which I found to have interstage transformers.