DHT preamp “The Mule”

The birth of the Mule

The name I guess says it all. This is yet another DHT preamp with the gyrator PCB. So what’s different? Simply, a breadboard DHT preamp module ready to be abused. I’m planning to mod this to death and try a long list of other DHTs with the gyrator load.

I will only need to change the valve sockets (or build an adaptor) as well as the filament resistors and Rod Coleman filament regulators. Simple changes which can be done fast, will open the door to quick tests on my system.

In order to make this simple and a rapid build, I opted to use an IKEA chopping board. These are made of a laminated hardwood and are dirt cheap. A couple of hours are required to drill all the board like this:

Job done. You only need to do this once. Here is another look at the half-build Mule:

The initial sockets are NOS short pin UX-4/UV-4. I will play around with the 01a before I move to other DHTs. I still need to add the tag strips for filament resistors, output capacitors and the filament regulators.

Wiring will take a couple of hours and we should have another DHT amp to play with 🙂

4P1L: pump up the current!

Background

I’m a firm believer than sharing knowledge and experience is the best way forward to continue learning yourself. It always pay pack at some point. This time Paul Prinz, a fellow implementer of the 3B7 DHT Preamp using the gyrator PCB, came back with a great suggestion. He found a MOSFET which could do high drain currents, it has high transconductance and most importantly the parasitic capacitances were low even close to the BF862. Hooray, I thought. We may have a great solution here to use the gyrator load for currents above 25mA and with similar performance to the great BF862. There are some other depletion MOSFETs that can do high currents, however they all have relatively high capacitances and low transconductances when VDS is low, like in the cascoded gyrator circuit.

The BSH111BK is an enhancement MOSFET, so doesn’t have a “depletion” behaviour like the jFETs. This isn’t a problem as the bias voltage can be set by the reference CCS.

For comparison, here is a brief summary of the key characteristics of these three devices:

	BF862	BSH111BK	MMBFJ310L
Ptot (W)	0.3	0.3	0.225
VDSmax (V)	20	55	25
VGS off (V)	-1.2		-4
IDSS (mA)	25	210	60
Gfs (mS)	45	640	18
Ciss (pF)	10	19.1	5
Crss (pF)	1.9	1.5	2.5
Coss (pF)		2.7

Continue reading “4P1L: pump up the current!”

01a Gen2 Preamp Build from Barry French

Barry French has recently build his version of the 01a Preamp Gen2. Here are a couple of pictures:

And Barry’s impressions:

“The 01a Amplifier is a stunner, personally I feel it leaves the 26 out in the cold, better top & bottom by a Country Mile, this was built using the Russian FT-3 Caps on the Output, Russian PIO Caps on the Boards with Jupiter 0.1 μf Wax/Oil Caps from B+ to Ground, the Power Supplies for both Filaments & B+ are from my original 26.”

01a Preamp (Gen2) Universal HT Supply

Introduction

I received many requests throughout this year of folks building the 01a preamp (Gen2) asking for advice on the HT supply design. Well, I have my own incarnation which serves multiple purposes as is a shared supply, therefore isn’t useful to anyone.

My friend Andy Evans came up with a supply using available components. This is exactly what you are looking for the HT supply. I made some tweaks to Andy’s design, so all credit should go to him.

Design

The HT supply design is very simple. It’s mainly a choke-input valve rectifier supply. It has an additional LC smoothing stage. Here is the high-level circuit, see some notes

The transformer is a 250-0-250V / 50VA with an output current of 60mA. It has two windings for 6.3V AC heaters, but you only need one. Here is a great choice from a recommended seller.

The valve rectifier is a double-diode damper. Of course you can use some other options, but I like the sound of them. Here are some you might want to consider in your build:

6BY5G: a nice double-diode damper with lower filament requirements than the commonly used. This is my first choice
EZ-80: the famous rectifier. This is what Andy used.
EY-91: you will need 2 valves as there is one diode per bottle.
6C4P-EV: a nice Russian small double kenotron rectifier. Very cheap alternative for European builders
AZ1 / AZ11 mesh valves. Their sound is unique, however they are very expensive these days. You will have to add a pair of voltage dropping resistors to accommodate the lower filament voltage requirement.

For the indirectly heated diodes, it will be better to connect one end of the filaments to the cathode.

The chokes are commonly available. These are from Hammond (155J) and have 15H @ 30mA. The downside is the high resistance, over 1kΩ. This isn’t an issue here as the current consumption is low so the voltage drop is minimal. With a choke input supply you need a minimum current to operate. In this case is about 15-16mA so a bleeder resistor is needed (29kΩ 5W wire wound) .

C1 serves to equalise the output voltage. It pushes the supply to operate a bit more like cap-input (hybrid) by increasing the output voltage. I use it to tune the output voltage to 200V.

C2 and C3 are classic motor run capacitors. I personally use ASC Oil ones 450VAC rated. You can choose what you can get hold. You can use any good quality film capacitors. I like the WIMA DC-LINK ones, they are great.

The output ripple is about 7mV. This isn’t a problem as the gyrator load has a very high supply rejection (PSRR) so no need to go crazy on this. If you

The design is so simple that anyone should be able to build this easily.

Hope it works for you.

Merry Christmas!

SiC MOSFET Follower Driver

How many more times

Led Zeppelin wrote a fantastic song on their first album: how many more times. You may not be a rock fan, but hey: what a great song. How many more times do I want to get back to this “slew rate” theme? I don’t know, as much as I have to. Plenty of comments out there of bad designs with wimpy drivers attempting to take the 300B/2A3 or even 45 valves to full tilt with disappointing results. Either way, they always blame the valves.

I came back to revisit the driving of capacitive loads effectively as I’m working on a new 4P1L PSE amplifier. Slowly, but getting there. Previously I looked at adding a buffer to the 01a preamp as a result of slew rate limitations found in Tony’s implementation of this preamp.

The circuit design

Continue reading “SiC MOSFET Follower Driver”

Building gyrator boards

I’ve been on some business travel so haven’t had much time to work on stuff, however I did get a set of gyrator boards for a friend and a customer:

BF862 configured for 4P1L preamp
2SK170 configured for 01a preamp

4P1L preamp with BF862 gyrator

Many have asked me about this preamp with gyrator load. Here is the latest implementation which I preferred most in terms of sound. The mu resistor is 470Ω which is a nice compromise between BF862 transconductance and distortion. I adjusted it on test. I use a 100nF for C1 so R6 is 10MΩ. R4 can be either 300KΩ, 330KΩ or even 390KΩ. Difference would be only on the voltage range for the CCS. I found running it at 25mA to be perfectly fine, some BF862 can even do J310. I prefer this SMD compared to the J310. It performs much better even at high frequency:

Tony’s 01a Preamp

I went to see my friend Tony today and helped him to fix his 01a preamp implementation. Time ago Tony used a prototype version of my gyrator PCB to build the Gen2 preamp with the addition of an output follower to address the slew rate limitations he had on his system due to the larger capacitive load.

Luckily we found the fault easily and it was a bad solder in one of the smoothing HT chokes. Once fault was rectified, we proceeded to take some measurements of this preamp.

Continue reading “Tony’s 01a Preamp”

27/56 Preamp from Jose Martins

Jose Martins sent me an email with his recent built on the 27/56 preamplifier using the gyrator load and these PCBs. I recently posted an idea using the lovely 27 IHT valve here.

Here is a picture of the finished preamplifier:

Continue reading “27/56 Preamp from Jose Martins”

Gyrator load – test mule

I’ve done several tests using a simple gyrator PCB test mule. It was time to build a proper and flexible test mule for extreme abuse:

2 Boards for current flexibility
Board 1: BF862
Board 2: J310
Top FET is IXTP08N100D2 for 1000V operation
ZIF socket pins for CCS reference resistor and RMu. This will give the necessary flexibility to try any combination in the gyrator depending on the triode and or the power supply
External pots for ease regulation of anode voltage

The top MOSFETs are bolted on the aluminium case which will act as heatsink. For tests this should be sufficient.

The top plate of the case looks like this:

There are 4mm posts are for HT supply, GND, mu-output, Anode. There are also a pair of 2mm posts for current sensing per board.

Some further soldering to do and job done!

Gyrator Test Mule: 4P1L Preamp

It’s always great to come back and revisit a great design. The 4P1L preamp performs flawlessly so I tweaked the gyrator board to see how it worked with the BF862 FET. The result is great, it sounds as good as it measures:

The 4P1L is biased to 150V/25mA which is the maximum current that the BF862 can do (IDSS max). You can see that the frequency response is flat up to 1.5MHz. The LF response of my test mule is affected by the AC coupling of the measuring gear. However it should be around 5-10Hz.

The distortion of low-level signals is really good:

Predominantly H2, it’s very nice to see THD<0.015% for a 4Vrms output. The load is 100KΩ which is the typical input impedance of an amplifier (with exception of solid state gear)

This low distortion manifests across the entire audio band (ignore the THD below 20Hz which is a byproduct of my testing gear):

The nice thing to see also, it’s how well the 4P1L can drive larger voltage swings:

We can see H4 popping up, however odd harmonics are lower (H5 in fact is higher than H3). THD at 10Vrms is still below 0.03%!