dsavitsk

The Torpedo and Crack will teach you wildly different soldering skills. If you see yourself building one-off tube amps using point to point techniques, the Bottlehead is a good starting point. If you want to do primarily PCB based projects, the Torpedo is better. It is probably a good idea to get one project under your belt before jumping into future ones. Different people learn differently -if you are a book learner, Art of Electronics is excellent. If you are a hands on learner, start soldering working on other people's projects, and trying to trace what's going on. It is how a lot of us got into this stuff.

Seemingly interesting but actually poor analysis. It is possible for headphone A to barely pass all categories and be rated A+, while headphone B passes 5 out of 9 with flying colors, barely misses on the other 4, and is rated an F. The cutoffs for each category are arbitrary, with no correlation to how sound is perceived, making this an example of why purely "objective" reviews are 1) subjective and 2) generally useless.

After trying Samsung and Sharp LEDs, we bought the 50" ST60 a couple of months ago. It is really nice. Definitely worth the ~$200 price premium.

Since other tubes work in the amp, build a test rig. You need a high voltage, a heater supply, and a couple of resistors to see if the tubes behave as expected elsewhere.

I assumed it was Iowa and Michigan or something -- the guy coming in from the right has different socks and a different helmet.

Happy Birthday!

And stop in Hartford to pick me up on the way?

Sorry to hear, Larry.

Indeed, we have made a half dozen or so changes that make the amp much quieter.

Happy Birthdays!

Indeed, sometimes a rat's nest amp will work better. Too neat often induces cross-talk from wires running in parallel while proper star grounding can look like a mess. PTP is great for one-offs and simple designs, but there are definitely places where a well designed PCB is superior.

I had one of those once -- Actually, I had an initial root canal where the resin did not fill the cavity completely and I got an infection in the end of it a year later. So they had to do another root canal through the first one. Required 3 3-hour sessions spread over 6 weeks to allow for swelling to recede. To make it worse, the initial root canal was through a crown, which had been put in place when a deep filling cracked. In the initial root canal, the dentist had to do that. At one point the numbness had completely worn off, and he accidentally touched something with the tip of the needle -- I think I jumped 3 feet out of the chair -- hands down the worst thing I have ever felt.

Sounds like a job for VMWare ...

I used an L-2 on the high Z setting with a 600R resistor in parallel to the output. Similar arrangements on a number of other amps did not fair as well.

Only bizarre in that the audiophile world won't buy anything that isn't a 6SN7. It's a nice tube for the rest of us.

The T1's actually sounded great with just the right amplification, but "just the right amplification" required a lot of tweaking. With any other amp, they were pretty blah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/arts/music/lou-reed-dies-at-71.html

Or the input jacks.

\x160\xc5\x86\xfb\x1b\x1f\xc8\xfa\x9d\xcf2s\x01\x8eH

There are tube shields, but I can't say that I've ever seen them for octals. However, you can make a shield out of aluminum foil -- just wrap the tube, ground the foil, and make sure that the foil does not touch the pins. Does it change in different rooms?

Happy continuing birthday!

It can drive it, and it will probably work fine. But since when is fine good enough? I'd actually be inclined to use it in pentode mode ...

FTFY

300B is hard to drive well. How about putting a follower between the driver and the 300B. Jack has done such things. I think you can do a better circuit than the opamp as driver, but it is a quick and easy solution. The biggest hurdle is the step up transformer as it will need a sizable core (or a ton of windings) to deal with the voltage swing. Something like a Lundahl LL1689 would work. The 119DA might. If Hammond's rating is to be believed it should swing 80V or so. The voltage gain is low, so maybe pair it with a 1:4 step up before the driver circuit.