nutube – wauwatosa tube factory

June 21, 2019

Nelson Pass has a tube design available

It’s no secret that I admire Nelson Pass both for his design skills and for what he gives to the DIY audio hobby. Unfortunately, us vacuum tube enthusiasts are mostly left out in the cold when Pass flexes his design muscles. That is until Burning Amp 2017 when he presented a pre-amp using the Korg NuTube.

Ok, so it isn’t the first “tube” that comes to mind when we think thermionic emission, but hey, it’s got a vacuum at least!

The Korg NuTube is a twin “triode” made by adapting vacuum florescent display technology to audio applications. Just like a DHT, it has an anode, a grid, and a directly heated cathode. The principals of operation (i.e. emission from cathode to anode modulated by a grid voltage within a vacuum envelope) are essentially identical to the little glass bottles we all know and love.

However, the low-voltage miniaturized technology requires certain compromises. With a max dissipation of only 1.7mW, the NuTube is limited in the maximum anode voltage and this forces positive grid operation, requiring a buffer to drive the inevitable low impedance. Like wise, the high plate impedance also necessitates a buffer on the output for most applications.

This is exactly what we see in Pass’s design, using his signature CCS-loaded JFET follower style buffer stage at the input and output. The result is a very compact and relatively low-voltage tube preamp with around 16dB of gain (as designed). Best of all, you can pick up a board and parts at the DIY Audio Store here!

I had the opportunity to hear this preamp not long ago in a nice system (Magnepan speakers, tube and solid state amplifiers) and compared it with an Alex Cavalli designed tube buffer and a MOSFET-based preamp. The Pass preamp sounded fantastic in this good company.

November 7, 2018November 6, 2018

There is now a NuTube portable amp kit

Some recent digging around Pete Millett’s nutube.us website turned up this interesting page. What we see is a pocket size amplifier powered by AA batteries.

At first glance, it looks similar to a project you can find on this archive of Audio Mania magazine (Japan). Here’s the schematic showing the DC booster power supply:

nutube

The Nu:Tekt kit appears to use an opamp driver on the output rather than the FET combo shown above. With the exception of the small daughter board which appears to come assembled (I assume this is the booster), the kit looks to be completely through hole.

Little is revealed on Millett’s site, but I’ll be following this kit with interest!

May 16, 2018May 15, 2018

The Nuvistor and Bob Katz’s Audio Blender (via Inner Fidelity)

Bob Katz has been writing a series of articles over at InnerFidelity for several years and they’ve recently taken a turn down a more experimental path. His most recent article details a device that mixes a transparent solid state signal and a Nuvistor signal biased to provide a distortion spectrum with just a small percentage of second harmonic. Check out his write up here!

nuvistor

A Nuvistor is a small metal and ceramic tube released by RCA just as transistors began supplanting vacuum tube technology in most electronics. They are a true vacuum tube with familiar triode operation and characteristics and an indirectly heated cathode. The most common Nuvistor in consumer electronics was the 6CW4 (high Mu) though there are several triode flavors and even a couple of tetrodes.

nuvistor cutaway.png

Because they were originally intended for radio and TV usage, Nuvistors enjoy very good bandwidth, low noise, and high gain (high Mu variants). The metal envelope is integrated with the basing and the tube plugs into what RCA dubbed the Twelvar base. You can probably guess how many pins that had. With the Nuvistor, RCA also introduced the RCA Dark Heater, a lower temperature filament that guaranteed higher stability and less AC leakage. Despite this innovation, most Nuvistor heaters require around 1W to light (e.g. 150mA @ 6.3V).

The 8056 used in Bob Katz’s project has the following characteristics:

8056 characteristics.png

And the following very respectable plate curves:

8056 plate curves.png

With a modest Mu, low plate resistance, and very low B+, it’s no wonder Bob decided to marry this interesting tube to a solid state partner for his Blender. The 8056 heater requires 6.3V at 135mA. At this voltage and heater requirement, it’s close to being practical for modern portable devices. In their heyday Nuvistors were used in battery-powered and efficiency-critical applications like the US Space Program and military radios and communications equipment.

Would I ever build something with Nuvistors? It’s tough to say. I’ve been on a casual hunt for tubes that might be suitable in a portable battery-powered application. Other candidates are the Korg Nutube or the sub-mini 6088. Like all things in this hobby, there are trade-offs. The Nuvistor 8056 heaters are hungry relative to these other options, but the other characteristics are very attractive. In all likelihood, I’ll try them all eventually. This is why I DIY.