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Are there any good cheap tube amps?

tired_guru

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Joined
Feb 8, 2019
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I guess I'm in the exploration phase right now because I honestly don't know. I've only experienced solid state amps and never experienced the differences with a tube amp. What I do know I like is my massdrop th-x00 are really fun, but feel closed in. My HD600 feels boring and sterile(?), but I really like the clarity. A lot of internet chatter says a tube amp pairs well with the HD600? I also ordered the lcd2c and aeon flow open to try some other stuff headphone wise too.
Your HD600 can bring a lot of joy once paired well with some specific components like wooaudio 6 amp or questyle cma400i. Long time ago, when these were my first audiophile headphones, I spent little fortune to drive them to their limits checking a lot of stuff. These days cma400i from SE output reminds me one of the best audio rigs with them. Will suck you deeply into music for many hours. From any other amps/dacs these headphones can sound completely not interesting / boring. The transformation is quite unbelievable.

Using fostex with cma400i will be another big surprise ...
 

bravomail

Addicted to Fun and Learning
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Oct 19, 2018
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I grew up when many electronics around me was lamp. Lamps will often go bad, they are easy to replace, but not very cheap to buy. Lamps are susceptible to mechanical vibrations. Lamps and devices containing them will get hot. The sound produced by lamp devices was OK, warm, but nothing special. And then recently I learned about other things. Lamps need high voltage, so the electrical safety is higher concern, PSUs are more complex as well. Lamp amps have high impedance output, unless you put an additional transformer after last stage. Lamps are not linear, so you either get a lot of harmonics, or if you use proper Class-A on a short linear piece of the diagram, you will get a highly inefficient amp.
Are there any good sounding competent lamp amps? Yes. This guy in below video got a very good DIY lamp speaker amp, which was a good match for his speakers (he has some vintage S30 from Russia).
His cat seems to agree.
 
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