Tube DIY Asylum

Posted by Majestic (A) on January 31, 2006 at 23:58:41

In Reply to: Discussion: 2nd harmonics in a PP amp??? posted by Jimmy on January 29, 2006 at 21:35:31:

I believe this is actually true.

I've also read somewhere (though the source has infuriatingly never turned up again for me to be able to confirm or cite it) that the ear's distortion products are a gently decreasing curve made up of even and odd harmonics.

(Something like this:

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'scuse the ASCII, but you get the idea :-p )

Someone also noticed that this curve was almost exactly the distortion curve of a 300B. Which might be an interesting reason to ponder that might go some way to explaining this particular tube's pleasing sound to so many people. (Though why we wouldn't prefer an *inverse* distortion curve is also interesting...)

All this kinda has me a little worried since I was planing on building a 'balanced' preamp design. Whilst, in deference to the original poster, I'm not exactly interested in deliberatly generating them(!); the idea of thowing all my second harmonics out the window makes me similarly uneasy. :-s