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Nice Tour of VTL Amplifier Company

amirm

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OK, so I am biased here as I know Luke and Bea as professional colleagues. But this is how you do small scale but high quality production of tube amplifiers. It is a good learning video from stereophile with another professional colleague, Jason doing the interviewing.


It is a good learning video on production issues and why this equipment does cost a lot more to build than mass market. Through-hole components. Testing components pre-assembly. Lots of hand wiring. Voltage testing, etc.

Also love the investment they have made in "jigs" to test subsystems.

Lots of small companies skip these steps which is bad form.

Highly recommend watching.
 
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Blumlein 88

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Thanks for this. At one time I had a VTL 75/75 made shortly after David Manley and Luke opened the factory in California. It was #008. They had wonderful transformers, better than any tube unit I knew of at the time. Hefty power supplies and a simple classic circuit. Everything was laid out component to component with only about 3 inches of wire from the input jack. Alas it had issues. Lifetime warranty in those days and they covered it even paying shipping both ways. It had other issues the 2nd time. So finally they got it fixed without issues. That unit had different brand resistors from one channel to another, and sometimes you had one in a place and the opposite channel used a higher pair in parallel for the same value. Yet it appeared each part was carefully matched channel to channel.

The one thing I hated was the touchy bias pots right beside the power tubes. Biasing was a pain though needed only rarely. Eventually I changed it moving to 10 turn pots with two on each side of the chassis. This was so nice as it was easy to precisely adjust the bias and you were away from the power tubes. A friend came up with the idea. I wrote them trying to suggest they do this on all their gear. Unfortunately they didn't.

I had #058. It also got the 10 turn bias pots. All MIT coupling caps, all Vishay S102 resistors and the short piece of wire was a braided strand of teflon insulated silver. I suppose it is out there somewhere. It would look like this only I seem to recall mine had the larger gray Mallory PS caps at the back. I think this one pictured is #115.
649190807_large_cf6fdc85e1aee0899f9eae81b4cf80e7.jpg


Here is one like the #008. It had a bunch of paralleled photoflash caps in the shiny black boxes at the rear for the PS. #008 also got the MIT, Vishay and silver treatment eventually.

vtl-vacuum-tube-logic-stereo-75-75-deluxe-ultra-linear-power-amplifier-196222_302059334027.jpg


I think Eve Anna eventually retained Manley Labs. Which still has products in mostly the pro market.

These little amps were terrific on Quad ESL63s, which I think I remember Luke having in those days.
 

tomelex

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Their early stuff was ultra simple indeed. Right out of 1950's text books with a modern integrated circuit voltage regulator and solid state rectifiers designed in. Good price, reasonable chassis, and at a time when many were again gaining interest in tube gear, and other than high priced stuff or old stuff, nothing new and affordable. They filled that gap then.
 
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