Hoffman’s Iron Law impacts all systems, regardless of the type of amplifier. It states that speaker designers may only optimize for two of three performance goals: efficiency, size, and frequency extension. Modern speaker design goals trend towards slim and minimally-intrusive boxes. Because few are willing to give up low frequency ability, this aesthetic trend has resulted in lower-efficiency speakers, requiring ever more powerful amplifiers.
When you have a set of bookshelf speakers or less-efficient towers, a single-ended triode amplifier may not cut it for power. Larger push pull (and parallel push pull) amplifiers are capable of using lower turns ratio output transformers and delivering more power to a load. That could be the difference between realistic dynamics and a more compressed musical presentation. Of course, there are some things to overcome when you upsize your tube amplifier.
- The power supply – If building an amplifier with (parallel) push pull power tubes, you’re going to need a lot of heater current. You’ll also need a lot of high voltage current. This means solid state rectification is the way to go. Using a bridge rectifier (four diodes) rather than a full-wave (two diodes) also saves some efficiency in the transformer.
- Size and weight – More current demands from the transformer(s) directly translates to a larger size and weight. Again, bridge rectifiers will help reduce the power transformer size slightly. A switching buck converter for heaters is also something worth looking into for efficiency’s sake. Building as monoblocks is a good solution, but you’ll probably spend twice as much on chassis, power supplies, etc.
- Current sharing – To keep standing DC currents from saturating the output transformer core, we want all our output tubes to share current equally (or at least balance per phase in each channel). Bias servos, Blumlein garter bias, individual fixed bias, and individual cathode resistors all have their advantages and disadvantages. Careful consideration here is key.
- Driving Miller capacitance – With a bunch of parallel output tubes, the input and driver stages will need some grunt to keep Miller Effect from rolling off high frequencies. This is especially true if you’re driving triodes in the output stage. A follower of some type may be needed to ensure a low enough source impedance.
If you haven’t already gathered, I’m a bit preoccupied with how I’ll utilize the big old chassis I picked up recently. Clearly something large is in store. The present question is octals or DHTs and two or four output tubes per side. The chassis originally held some monstrous iron, so there’s space for just about anything.
wauwatosa tube factory 