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In Reply to: Re: plate load-"brilliant" question posted by dave slagle on October 29, 2001 at 19:12:25:
Sorry, too many variables without drawing up a schematic.Yes-1 5Y3 but with the plates tied together. Plates to the CT of the common 5v AC filament tranny for both 2A3s. I tried AC to heat the 5y3 but it was a 60Hz hum machine! I thought...try a DC supply to heat the 5Y3, you have a big ol' Lambda taking up space that puts out tons of current. Voila! No cap bypassing the 5Y3 at that point. Lacking bass but otherwise a great improvement over a cathode resistor. I even switched back to hear if I was just thinking the rectified cathode was really better....yep, it was...errr...is, at least to my ears.
I have been playing with different caps bypassing the 5Y3 to bring up the low end. Maybe this "shouldn't" be done, but I'm just in a mood to try anything that sounds feasable. There really isn't anything expensive in this amp if it goes up in flames...except the OPTs. But they are really in little danger here...the main rectifier(an old EZ80) will fail before I get anywhere close to the current rating of the OPTs. This has been an interesting experiment...and it's sounding better!
Any thoughts or advice? I'm all ears tonight.
Tom
Follow Ups:
not too many variables... i just wanted to be clear...since the plates are tued together, i would think you would be getting the equivalent of 30ma of current per 1/2 since they
are in parallel, you could try just using 1 plate and your bias should go up because you will be drawing double the current...
its worth a try.i never thought about the 60hz hum when using an DHR... so thanks for that pointer... maybe thats the problem with the 83
too???how about tryong a hum-balance on the rectifer??? i think its probably step in the wrong direction, but it would be
interesting to try i would use gordons trick of a 100 ohm pot bypassed with 10 ohm resistors and maybe bypass them with
caps???you could also try bypassing just the filament with caps... again wrong direction i suspect but something may be found
out...i don't much care for the filament supply for the rectifier... so maybe the search must start for that elusive inefficient
IDR.... damn.... i opened up the book and out jumped the 6853... looks like an IDR same specs as the 5y3 but it shows a cathode (filament is connected to the cathode) ...probably as easy to
find as the 8212 and the 8213...dave
also the 6106 looks like a possibility, but they are listed (by AES) as a 5Y3-wgt... so you would have to be sure you got the right one... but they may be easier to find...dave
Thanks Dave,I was talking to one of our older engineers (who probably thinks I'm nuts..."just use a resistor") and he suggested a hum pot also. He thinks that with a good quality CT 5v tranny, there might not even be need for it. The tranny I was using had no CT and that's why I simply grounded on side and had all that hum.
Gotta run again,
Tom
ahhh that changes things a bit :-)
another thing to try is a pair of say 5 ohm WW resistors in series across the winding and ground the "virtual" CT... you could even size theseresistors to load down the trannie a bit and drop your filament voltage below 5V and get a larger bias???lots of things to explore here.. have fun!
dave
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