Ella Amplifier - Is this the best deal on tubes or what? - hi-fi_guru

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Ella Amplifier - Is this the best deal on tubes or what?

I just completed building three of the Ella kits from DIY. All I can say is marvelously musical piece of equipment - almost like listening to no amp at all. Outside of a couple of missing LED's there were no problems with the kits. Brian quickly sent the LED's and provided quick responses to all questions. The amps look beautiful and sound better than many 1000.00+ amps I have auditioned. I am using all Svetlana tubes with matched quads of 6550's. I tried KT88's and EL34's and the 6550's seem to give the punch of the 88's with the liquidity of the 34's. I am biasing them at 55ma which seems to sound more transparent than the recommended 45. This really becomes apparent after about 20 hours of burn in - I had the opportunity to run two side by side to notice the difference simply by switching inputs. I did swap the linelevel cable for Tributary Silver cable. I also did all wiring with 16 guage multistranded pure oxygen free continuous drawn silver plated coper wire. Quality of the kits and materials is second to none. One thing I noticed a big difference on were the caps. I tried the oil in paper and several other flavors but settled on Solen FastCaps. I listen to a lot of jazz and the Solens sounded more natural with faster attack. The oils seem to give it a more tube like sound - but I did not want to hear the amp. I am very pleased with the results. I noticed another big improvement by reducing the NFB to half. Diodes were replaced with UltraFast replacements and all electrolytics and power switch were bypassed with Solen .1uf 600+volts. I also opted for the $19.00 choke upgrade in each amp. This is the best $19.00 you will spend. The soundstage got bigger and the imaging was pinpoint - female vocalists took on a 3D depth and were "in the room" with you. It felt like you could reach out and touch them. I am using the three amps on the front three channels of my stereo / surround system which I run mostly in pure two channel or sometimes three chanel mode. My front stage consists of 6 Paradigm Studio 40 monitors. One stacked inverted on top of the other to give me essentially 3 mini towers each consisting of two speakers. Each of the Studio 40's has bi-amp connections which have been slightly modified to allow one Ella on each speaker tower. The Ella runs the tweet and midrange in each tower / a Technics 110watt x2 Pure Sound Group power amp runs the woofers in each tower. This gives a completely vertically biamped set up for all three channels. If you want to rock to AC/DC - these amps will do it. If you want to swooned by Sarah mcGlaughlin - swoon away. Just for kicks (I'm not much of a soundtrack fanatic) I put on the dts recording of the Titanic Soundtrack. Even my wife was blown away. It was almost "spooky" how the sound enveloped you - again from just the two channels. All I can say - even though the shipping charges are a drag - I had mine in three days from time of order - Brian Cherry gives excellent service and the there is no way you can not be satisfied with these amps. Highly recommended. I have about 60 hours on these babies now - and they just keep getting sweeter and sweeter. I took them into my work where we auditioned them next to some of the big bad boys of surround sound (100w plus per channel) as well as some other high end brands. The persistant comment - "No way that only cost that" "No way that's only 50 watts." All I can say - just buy it! It's a diamond in the rough. Now if you will excuse me, I'm about to enjoy a nice candlelit dinner - no candles - tubes will be fine, thank you.

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Topic - Ella Amplifier - Is this the best deal on tubes or what? - hi-fi_guru 12:50:57 07/26/02 (1)

Re: Ella Amplifier - Is this the best deal on tubes or what? - tubeboy 18:28:01 07/27/02 (0)

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