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In Reply to: RE: SET Amp Sweet Spot posted by dsockel on May 03, 2023 at 04:46:58
There's no sweet spot in a Class A SET in terms of signal amplitude. Distortion simply increases as the volume is turned up.
Follow Ups:
I've been exploring in the last several years the thought that there is indeed a sweet spot in the distortion signature; that is, a little bit of second harmonic improves the listening experience but too much covers up the details.
Whether it's masking of some distortion products, or emulation of the natural acoustic nonlinearities in the ear canal, or something completely different, ... or just another mass hallucination ... remains to be determined.
If true, the effect seems to be highly sensitive to the specific source music - spectrally dense material such as symphonic music wants much less than small-scale chamber music for example. It seems to be highly sensitive to the particular listener as well.
Or maybe it's all bogus after all.
According to Cheever, it would also be SPL dependent. So, a higher sensitivity speaker with the distortion in the right pattern at a level that optimizes masking at the right SPL for that speaker/amp combination could provide an optimal experience.
Hey Paul, any idea if you are feeding the 300B into a higher impedance load (I am running my 15 ohm Lowthers with permalloy parafeed transformers operating on the 8 ohm tap) if that affects the amount of odd vs even order distortion, or does all the distortion decrease the same due to the higher load?
Retsel
The sound of an amp is greatly based upon the preamp/driver tubes and coupling capacitors. The Decware likely has superior components.
This post has been sitting in SET for over two months with nothing new!
of a splinter hobby with a receding fanbase.
KP
The problem with SET's is that they don't play loud enough for most people unless with the right speakers and even then, most want louder.
Your post made me think of a couple of things.
I remember hearing years ago an EE opine that tube amplifiers tended to sound their best running at about 70% of their power rating.
Chris Merren's mention in the linked thread of the C-core (relative to EI in the same context) sounding "thinner" could be relevant to this conversation as well.
It seems to me that defining the audible effect of distortion in each particular case is a tough call. So, I prefer to push it down to levels that I hope won't be audible and go with that. One can always add even-order distortion in other ways if that's deemed desirable for some reason. I just don't want to be stuck with it for every tune. :)
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