Tag: 45 SE Class A2

45 SE Amplifier – revisited

A unique sound

If you have a small room and high-efficiency speakers, then keep reading. If not, you can still enjoy reading about probably the best sounding output valve in my view. The 45. I wrote about it few times and have to say, it’s still one of the best. Better than a 300B but unfortunately can do only 2W. You can use it in Push-Pull and is superb. Have a look at this.

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Driving the 45 DHT in A2

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Having had a great exchange of comments with “45” in a previous post, I thought it was easier to post this after doing some simulations with the 45 DHT in A2 operation.

I’m a great fan of the 45 valve. I think is probably the best sounding DHT out there. I listened to 300B, 2A3 and even 4P1L as an output valve, but nothing compares to me to the warm sound of this valve.

Later specifications of the 45 show that you can push it to 10W of anode dissipation. I’m currently using it at Ia=34mA, Vak=300V with an 2.5KΩ OT. You could get 2W out, but at the moment I’m squeezing 1.5W at maximum drive. There is a way of getting more out of the valve which is obviously by driving it in A2 (i.e. positive grid current). My current project (4-65A SE in class A2) uses a gyrator-loaded driver and stacked supplies which work brilliantly in A2. The driver provides sufficient grid current at low impedance even when the input impedance of the output valve drastically changes when grid current kicks in closer to 0V.

I have a pair of LL1623/60mA which I’m planning to use in the future to try 4P1L PSE or 6C4C output stages. This OT can be configured for 5.6KΩ, 3KΩ and 1.6KΩ anode loads.

Here is a first simulation of the 45 operating in class A2. The bias point was changed now down to 210V/47mA as the OT is configured for 3KΩ load:

45 loadline in A2 version 2The anode AC power is then:

P{}_{a}=\frac{1}{2}\cdot i{}_{ap}^2\cdot Z{}_{a}

So roughly for Iap=46.5mA and Za=3KΩ, then Pa=3.2W. This is about 32% efficiency. More than double of the current juice I’m getting out of this valve, but at the expense of pushing the grid to +32V and anode peak current of 93-94mA. Grid current should be around 3-5mA from what the AB2 data looks like.

Question is here, is it worth trying this? Complexity of the amp is on the stacked power supplies. The driver will need to swing easily 120Vpp, so a well designed 4P1L in filament bias can do this with minimum distortion.

Thoughts?