Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

I have today a local audio guy stopped by in my room and listened my playback. I have almost painful reaction from this listening session and could not wait when it will be over. The playback sounded very unpleasant, I mean so unpleasant that I was forced myself to stopped play in the middle of the tracks as I feel it was too insulting to listen. What annoyed me was incredible compression and distortions of MF, not the compression as it was during the electricity saga but it was different. I feel that the Focal tweeter in MiniMe nowadays is more dynamic and more articulate then  Macondo MF with is ridicules as Vitavox shall eat Focal MF on breakfast without creams cheese.

I was playing to my guest the different tracks and was thinking what the hell was going on with my playback and the saddest this that I have no idea. The leading blame is that my MF out tubes are gone but I can’t confirm it. The MF tubes still have an acceptable cathode emission but they work at full 8W for a year – a VERY heavy operation for this short-life tube. I can’t replace the tube as 30 other 6E6P that I brought from my storage were not acceptable by amplification or current – I need a full 35mA at 35 time of gain. So, I would say that one of 50 of my 6E6P can handle the operation – how long the tube might live in this mode? Not too long. The tube lost 1.5dB during the last month and MF sound a bit too soft. To compensate it in a way I was, perhaps stupidly decided to drive the tube even harder and now I have 200V and 38mA on the 6E6P’s anode.  However, the MF channel is loaded to Tribute amorphous core OPT with 40mA gap. I did measured how my Tribute entered over-powered clipping at 30mA a few years back when my former 6E6P was able to give 35 time of gain at 30mA. My current 6E6P can do only 32 times gain at 38mA-40mA, so I think I drove the Tribute core into saturation that comes as avalanche in amorphous case.  Driving the out output stage at lover current does not produce enough gain and killed the MF transients. I did not make any efforts to address it as my single-stage MF is living probably last week and will be replaced soon with two stages.

The guy who was listening my playback generally liked the Sound. What truly pissed me off was that I, as usually, asked if my guest can comment upon problems with Sound that he can recognize.  The guy made some semi-irrelevant critiques (in my view) but he did not stop the session with complain that it was absolutely un-listenable. I was not sitting at my sweat-sport and was way off the axis but at my location the sound of MF twisted my teeth. In his location he had to have the same effect only at 10-20db more focused and he did not complain!!!  Hm, interesting! If somebody played THIS type of Sound for me then I would spend a half hour of bitching about the heard instead of insulting myself by further listening.

Well, I do not know if my idea about the deal MF tube is right but I have no other explanations. Let hope that it is what it is as otherwise I have no idea what it is.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site