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Marketing, plain and simple

I run the most successful OTL company in history, but I can also tell you that I am no marketeer! That is easily the single biggest problem: how to get the message out. Driving speakers, heat, quantity of tubes and output impedance are really not the issue.

You can make OTLs run so cool you can put your hand to the envelope and not get burned. That is a matter of the class of operation! You can easily run an OTL class AB2 or class B, it will run cool and get very long tube life in such conditions. We get long tube life even though we run class A operation (specifically, class A2).

The heat comes more from the class of operation than anything else. If you run one of our amps in Standby all day at the end of the day the heat is negligible- you can put your hand on the tube and hold it there.

Incidentally, OTLs do not suffer crossover distortion problems like other amplifier designs. So operating them with reduced bias is quite practical.

Depending on the tube choice, the number of tubes can be an issue. I like the 6AS7G as it is cheap, linear and readily available in large production quantities. But its only good for about 10 watts so you need a few of them. Our 60-watt amp has 8 per channel and our 220 watt amp has 20. Once you get into that range of power, the number of tubes is not an issue :)

Regardless of the power tube you can get the output impedance down to a fraction of an ohm with 20db of feedback or less. I prefer zero feedback- the output impedance is higher, but I have found that if the speaker needs a lower output impedance (needs the feedback) the chances that it will ever sound like real music is nil, since feedback violates one of the fundamental rules of human hearing/perception: how we detect the sound pressure of a sound.

You might want to take a look at the link for more about this- its not just an OTL thing!

The main thing that I have ever found is that people don't realize that an OTL is something that will work for them! That is the single biggest problem, followed by the fact that there were some OTL manufacturers that made unreliable product, and convinced many (including some on this thread) that OTLs are inherently unreliable. They are quite reliable. It has everything to do with design and execution, like any technology.



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