Are all amps being built wrong?

This is an interesting article on the subject, © 2019, Rod Elliott (ESP)
https://sound-au.com/articles/current-drive.htm#s1

One of the conclusions (scroll to the bottom of the long article):
"There have been many claims over the years that current drive is the best, and some may claim it's the only) way to drive loudspeakers, as it reduces distortion and allows the speaker to work the "way it was intended". While there is some discussion of this on the Net (see [ 2 ] as an example), there is little real evidence that the benefits are anywhere near as great as claimed. Tests I've run have shown little improvement, and this is expected given that loudspeaker systems and the drivers used therein are designed specifically with the understanding that they will be driven with a voltage amplifier. By definition, that means the output impedance is low, always below 0.2Ω, and often much less."

Is a phono cartridge a current device or a voltage device?And what about a DAC?

This is an interesting statement: " Tests I’ve run have shown little improvement, and this is expected given that loudspeaker systems and the drivers used therein are designed specifically with the understanding that they will be driven with a voltage amplifier."

However small, apparently there is an inprovement with current drive. Which could grow larger when speakers would be specifically designed for current drive. One can wonder why it is not used more often ... any improvement is good, even more so knowing people are willing to spend thousands on their (power, speaker, interconnect) cables alone to gain just a very minute improvement.

This statement is false. No Futterman amp ever had anything like 60dB of feedback!! The most any had was more like 20dB, and because the amp had very wide bandwidth, oscillation (caused by its phase margin being exceeded by the feedback) was sometimes an issue. So to your closing comment here- they are well-known to **not** be stable into complex loads.

@atmasphere Roger Modjeski based his OTLs (he built several, mostly as custom projects, I have two of them) on the Futterman circuit and in his last design prior to his death he was specifically referencing the H3 circuit. In an effort to solve the oscillation issue in his first prototype and which you noted, one thing Roger found is Futterman himself omitted some things from the H3 schematic, specifically the lack of notation for the ferrite beads which Roger eventually discovered because he had me source an H3 for him to study (the NYAL versions of this circuit certainly had their issues, perhaps due to the schematic omissions as well). One look underneath and there they all were. Now when Roger completed his design I asked him how much feedback he was using. The response was 60 dB which in addition to adding the beads to the circuit (although far fewer than Futterman used) solved the oscillation issue in the second prototype of his design.

Now I don't remember why he came up with 60 dB, but since jasonbourne52 also mentioned it, I'm inclined to think it was what Futterman used. Of course this could all be a coincidence and Roger could have come up with that amount of feedback on his own through testing.

In an effort to solve the oscillation issue in his first prototype and which you noted, one thing Roger found is Futterman himself omitted some things from the H3 schematic, specifically the lack of notation for the ferrite beads

@clio09 

IMO this was intentional. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence from customers that say that the Futterman amps held together while amps made by others using the Futterman circuit didn't. However Harry Pearson recounted an incident where Futterman brought one of his amps to Sea Cliff for audition but before it could be entirely set up, one of the amps went into oscillation and failed (this was in response to a letter to the editor from Harvey Rosenburg in the late 1990s). But all you have to do is leave out one bead by accident and you're sunk. Futterman made most of his amps himself to my understanding.


60dB of feedback in a tube amplifier is an impressive feat! Normally you have such prodigious issues with not exceeding the phase margin of the amp (OTL or not) that most would not attempt such a thing. If 60dB is correct I'm quite impressed (and stand corrected)! The ones I've seen did not have any such value- I doubt that they even had 60dB of loop gain (that's the gain of the amp plus the amount of feedback).  But some of the Futterman amps have impressively low output impedance figures, such that they would have easily behaved as a voltage source, even though they made more power into higher impedances.


Kron-Hite made laboratory amplifiers in the 1960s. In their manual for the amp (which used KT88s) they claimed 80dB(!) of feedback. Its hard to imagine how they pulled that off- that amp was quite stable. I had a pair of them for a while in the late 1970s and they compared very favorably to an ARC D-75 that a friend of mine had.