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RE: class A

We are both on the same page with that. I don't care for the rancor either.

If you have a fixed point then that is all there is to it.

When the bias is allowed to move in response the music it does allow for additional flexibility. The question is whether or not doing such a thing will mess up the sound. But what we found was that without it, the amplifier was much more restricted; that class A (a goal of the design) was going to be *very* inefficient and didn't sound nearly as good unless all the same design aspects of the sliding bias point were incorporated anyway.

So it appears that in an OTL there are more important fish to fry than the specific class of operation. The most important thing I have found is to be able to effectively control the power tubes. You might think that that is elementary but its a fact that most manufacturers skimp in this area, which places a tension between bass response, overload recovery and bias stability. Essentially, its a reliability issue and an overall stability issue. When we came along we were essentially making the first OTLs that were unconditionally stable- something that had not been seen before. The reliability and stability is why we are still in business where others have failed. To that end, its not like its a huge business either- its a fact that OTLs are so far seen as a niche market, and most of the reasons are misconceptions seen elsewhere on this thread.

We have been looking at a much more active form of sliding bias for nearly 20 years. But IMO to implement it correctly means to use a tube that is not in production, even though there are 10s of thousands of them out there (some tube vendors have offered to send them to me for free- they don't have a lot of use right now) but our 20-year rule prohibits the use of tubes that are not in current production. So we have gone with the passive system instead.


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