It would be great and very interesting if you could share your measurements, findings with your 5AR4.
(Again I really do not understand why they sell the R300 with 274Bs and EH5U4GBs when the 5AR4 are the better, safest option!?)
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Willsenton R300B SE Integrated Amp
- Thread starter CohibaJoe
- Start date
It would be great and very interesting if you could share your measurements, findings with your 5AR4.
(Again I really do not understand why they sell the R300 with 274Bs and EH5U4GBs when the 5AR4 are the better, safest option!?)
Looks over function. The first Mustang was a fancy Falcon. Guess which sold better.
Right, I blame some of these type design choices on consumers. Years ago I realized people buy things based on the appearance much more so than their function and I myself am a victim of this mindset at times. I can be influenced by "Wow that looks awesome!"
At the end of the day, they have to put up for sale what consumers demand and when things like magical $1000 a pop 274B rectifier tubes exist and influencers are telling people how wide the sound stage is when using these in a power supply, well at some point all this gets out of hand. Who wants a boring 5AR5 that simply rectifies DC when you can have a tube that creates "better in the bass quality and detail, and also on the airy and descriptive/expressive top end" before the electricity is anywhere near another tube or even a signal...
Note these same folks not only will tell you how great some $250 fuse on the AC inlet sounds, they proclaim they can hear a difference when they flip it over.
I hope that Stephe is not gonna find any currently unknown issues using different kind of rectifier tubes….
I suspect they are not great, esp the 300B ones. But I wanted to do an "out of the box" review, like many people will use the amp. Generally, it sounded better than I expected.
because of the BS power supply, maybe change the rectifier tubes and do a subjective test again.
would be interesting
Stephe, what do you think?
Gigantic
A big, big love
@StepheK as an aside, I love the content you put out and I'm particularly grateful for the analysis you've done on this amp, as I'd been taken in by all the glowing reviews of it from the likes of A British Audiophile, Jay's Iyagi, & Audiophiliac. That said, averaging 20 minutes or more, I frequently find your videos to be somewhat impenetrable- perhaps it's my ADHD, but it's difficult for me to watch videos that are that long. One thing that may help your watch and play-through rates would be to break ups your videos and insert cues like many other audio reviewers do, to denote that you're changing topics, e.g. "Intro"-'What I Don't Like" - "What I Like" - "Summary" etc. Doing this would really help make your videos more watchable and will probably help with YouTube revenue, too.
It's difficult to balance video length vs going into enough detail. I try to edit them down to around 20 min, I will look at the subject cue thing, thanks for the feedback.
maybe better not to plug the 5AR4s in …. because of different specs they maybe harm the 300Bs?
and better wait for Stephe next findings..
???
maybe Stephe can help
This earlier version has no 10 ohm resistors and it looks like they combine the output of the two rectifier tubes and then run it through a single diode. I am curious where the choke leads are attached as well as where that huge 330uf cap lead is tied into the circuit on yours.
Here are some hand drawn up PS diagrams I reverse engineered from the amp I have as wired, along with what I plan to change the design to. I'm also considering replacing that huge 330uf cap with something smaller, not sure on that yet.
Here are some hand drawn up PS diagrams I reverse engineered from the amp I have as wired, along with what I plan to change the design to. I'm also considering replacing that huge 330uf cap with something smaller, not sure on that yet.
But the "yellow sheet mods" are on the AC side and I believe only are in use if there is a failure/high stress. These seem like redundant diodes in series with the rectifier tube on the DC side. Why even bother with a tube rectifier (the expense, heat, load on the power transformer etc) if you are just gonna run the DC through a SS diode?
This is an actual question, not questioning what you said. I don't understand, especially if they aren't using an indirectly heated tube to gain the slow startup.
I'm guessing that the tube rectifiers are there to aid with sales, and the diode is to ease the load on the rectifiers to allow for larger caps.
If you get a plate to cathode short you will have AC on the cathode side so the diode will still prevent damage to the caps.
How common is that using decent quality tubes? It just seems kinda pointless to use a tube rectifier this way. And I'm of the opinion "sag" is not something a HiFi amp should have in the power supply. I get it can do some cool sounding things in a high distortion, overdriven guitar amp. But I don't see voltage sag in a HiFi amp as being something to strive for.