Dynaco PAS..Comments please...

[DHT 845]

Some products measure well, sound bad. I just returned the highly regarded Topping DX7 Pro as it sounded terribly brittle with my VTA ST120 ( that I built) and Magnapan MMGs. My $109 DOUK P1 sounded much better as did the Schiit Saga.....to my ears, After near 50 years of selling and installing this stuff, tubes just "sound" better. Maybe not to everyone, but to my ears, no competition.

You know, it's like coocking, sometimes sth spoils the "taste". I know that tube amp for maggies has this "magic". I used to build huge ribbon speakers and drived them with tubes. But tube preamp is not a "must". It changes the source sound in its own way. But if you like tube preamps there are many options. My suggestion is try JP200 clone. Others may say go for Audio Research Reference 10 or NAT Audio Magnetostat. "Slight" price difference...

 

[DHT 845]

As far as Topping DX7 concerned... I have not heard it, but maybe it just revealed the problems from the blusound 2i ... ?
I hardly believe that topping made "brittle" gear.

 

[RoyB]

I hardly believe that topping made "brittle" gear.

But the Bluesound sounds fantastic with a DOUK P1, Schiit Saga and Yamaha CX800.........And either with onboard DAC or through Schiit Modi

I also have a Topping MX3 in another room with ELAC 2.0/6.2 that sounds much better than the D70x...... Go figure

 

[SIY]

RoyB wants a tube pre for TUBE amp, whats your problem guys? You try to discourage man to tube gear. Tube designes are old and almost everything today made is "stolen" from the past. $500 for tube pre is not pile of money. Everyone knows that tube gear measures like shit and it does not even touch modern op-amps levels of distortion.

RoyB As far as todays designs L2 from Audio Note kits is very nice sounding but it is $1750. You can have easily 2 Kondo KSL-M7 clones for that (with quality parts and tubes) and such clone sounds fantastic in tube terms. JP200 is fatter, bigger sounding, M7 is more delicate sounding,

If you want something truly terrible and unreliable, buy cheap tube stuff.

That's the problem- decent tube stuff is very expensive. Cheap tube stuff is like buying the fake Rolexes, but even more so. And buying it on the basis of "tube sound" fantasy is the height of foolishness.

 

[SIY]

pile of shit:

https://pl.aliexpress.com/af/JP200....a2g0o.productlist.0.0.5c822af3Sbv0vz&catId=44

FIFY.

 

[raindance]

A used Cayin, probably not cheap but extremely well built or Antique Sound Labs, like the AQ2004DT - very simple or a Conrad Johnson PV10 or 11 or a Meixing Ming Da (quite well made stuff) or an AES AE3 (I don't recommend anything more expensive from Cary Audio) or an AMC CVT1030 - I have a hugely modified one if you're interested.

I recommend Bob Latino kits. Also Elekit make excellent kits.

These will all be as tubey sounding as a preamp gets and are relatively modern and reliable.

Most of the tube flavor comes from the power amp, these will all loosen up the bass a bit more, roll off the treble a bit and put a spotlight on the mids. Plus add tube rush, hiss, hum, etc - all of which is attenuated by the Maggie's being not very efficient, so should be ok.

Always make sure you warm up the preamp before turning on the power amp. They all push out massive turn on spikes unless there's a turn on delay circuit, which most don't have.

Out of all of these suggestions, only the AMC has tone controls and I think one of the Bob Latino kits does. These will do more for you than "tube rolling" which is a subtle change at best.

 

[DHT 845]

If you want something truly terrible and unreliable, buy cheap tube stuff.
That's the problem- decent tube stuff is very expensive.

Absolutely not true. I had a mingda $1000 integrated amp and it was very well made and reliabe. That sth. costs $10.000 does not mean it is well designed. I had also $4500 tube DAC that was piece of shit garage made stuff I can say from the perspective. I would never buy it again.
I know various myths about tube gear, one of those is that it need very expensive transformer (TAMURA, TANGO, Lundahl etc.).
I think than american and EU companies inflated tube gear prices to such extend, that it needs some "justification" and myths are born.

 

[SIY]

Absolutely not true. I had a mingda $1000 integrated amp and it was very well made and reliabe. That sth. costs $10.000 does not mean it is well designed.

I'll certainly agree with the second sentence.

 

[JeffS7444]

Always make sure you warm up the preamp before turning on the power amp. They all push out massive turn on spikes unless there's a turn on delay circuit, which most don't have.

Kind of a disgrace for gear with high-end pretensions, no?

 

[JeffS7444]

Some products measure well, sound bad. I just returned the highly regarded Topping DX7 Pro as it sounded terribly brittle with my VTA ST120 ( that I built) and Magnapan MMGs. My $109 DOUK P1 sounded much better as did the Schiit Saga.....to my ears, After near 50 years of selling and installing this stuff, tubes just "sound" better. Maybe not to everyone, but to my ears, no competition.

That's nice, but are you sure you didn't mean to post this on another site? Because this is Audio Science Review.

 

[Jim Matthews]

Absolutely not true. I had a mingda $1000 integrated amp and it was very well made and reliabe.

The quality of Chinese audio products is positively surprising.

Given that most of the gear discussed here in ASR is made in China, it seems a blindspot among our gentle readers.

 

[SIY]

The quality of Chinese audio products is positively surprising.

There are some very good products from there. There are some excellent products from there. There are some horrible products from there. The cheap tube stuff falls into the last category.

 

[raindance]

I'll add that Jolida gear isn't bad either. They use circuit boards whereas Ming Da / Meixing and Cayin are strictly point to point - and I'd say about the best point to point wiring I've ever seen was in a Cayin amp. It was wired like the inside of a military airplane.

But I definitely have trouble with a particular phrase: "full function preamp". If it doesn't have tone controls, I'm sorry, it isn't full function.

Also, I have trouble with "full class A" - all tube preamps are class A. There's no need to ever implement class AB in a preamp.

Just my 2c.

There are a ton of really bad products from China, but equally a ton of really good ones - you just can't generalize. I've repaired a lot of 'em.

 

[gene_stl]

What means "brittle sound"??? I think we have some folks here that are on the wrong site.

 

[raindance]

Maybe it makes bits of your ears break off

 

[BluesDaddy]

There are some very good products from there. There are some excellent products from there. There are some horrible products from there. The cheap tube stuff falls into the last category.

From "eavesdropping" on discussions by folks who have stuff made in China, it all depends on how tightly quality if specified and monitored (the higher and more does make it more expensive). Cheap Chinese stuff that is churned out by Chinese companies has generally been crap in my experience. Other items made IN China for companies with high quality standards and who monitor factory operations generally seems pretty good.

 

[Trif]

Some products measure well, sound bad. I just returned the highly regarded Topping DX7 Pro as it sounded terribly brittle with my VTA ST120 ( that I built) and Magnapan MMGs. My $109 DOUK P1 sounded much better as did the Schiit Saga.....to my ears, After near 50 years of selling and installing this stuff, tubes just "sound" better. Maybe not to everyone, but to my ears, no competition.

When I was a child, I would stare at the grooves in the black plastic, trying to imagine how so much information was stored in there. It wasn't hard to imagine my father's 12" woofers sounding like drums and the tweeters were horns.... violins were a mystery, though. Somehow, the needle was flicked by a bit of plastic and that made the amplifier respond with a signal that made the speaker sound like a band playing "The Bourbon Street Blues". Since no one had told me that "amplifiers have no sound of their own", I assumed it was the amp that made the musical sounds when triggered by the record and needle.

We can now make perfect digital copies, but any recording of an acoustic event will still be somewhat lossy. Tube amplifiers offer an opportunity to replace the missing information. A good tube amp.... well, that's what started this hobby in the first place.

To be honest, my time with my PAS 3 was cut short by an article in Audio about stepped attenuators. After that, I didn't use tone controls, either. I suppose the PAS was my introduction to the idea that the simpler the better. By the '80s, I was playing with SETs driving full range open baffles.

anyway.... Regarding your question, I say American steel from the '60s is what'll make the difference. It's in the transformers.

Pity the Want Ad wasn't still around. I'd suggest trying to find a pair of Mark IIIs and loading them with JJ KT66s.

 

[SIY]

We can now make perfect digital copies, but any recording of an acoustic event will still be somewhat lossy. Tube amplifiers offer an opportunity to replace the missing information.

That’s physically impossible.

Speaking of transformers, that’s a common failure point for PAS-3 preamps and their ancestors. Dynaco went as cheap as they could for that, and burned out transformers are very common.

 

[Trif]

That’s physically impossible.

I might argue it's physically impossible for a tube amp not to do that. In fact, if you wanted a certain quantity of information on the output of a tube amp, it would be necessary to reduce the information going in.

But yes, what you're thinking of is impossible. However, consider the little daydream I started with. A tube amp can put the reverb back on the drum skin. A sound that was lost in the recording because they had to pad the kit's mics down so much to deal with the impact of the stick. Rosin on the bow? Can you actually hear that? You can with a tube amp.

Yes, I'm a recovering addict.

 

[SIY]

I might argue it's physically impossible for a tube amp not to do that. In fact, if you wanted a certain quantity of information on the output of a tube amp, it would be necessary to reduce the information going in.

But yes, what you're thinking of is impossible. However, consider the little daydream I started with. A tube amp can put the reverb back on the drum skin. A sound that was lost in the recording because they had to pad the kit's mics down so much to deal with the impact of the stick. Rosin on the bow? Can you actually hear that? You can with a tube amp.

Yes, I'm a recovering addict.

There’s much wrong here. First, tubes can’t violate the Second Law. Second, with even inexpensive digital interfaces, you won’t hear the difference between the direct mike feed and the interface output unless you badly misadjust the level. The notion that you’re somehow “losing reverb” or “rosin on the bow” and those can somehow be captured by tube equipment is ludicrous.