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In the Forum: Melquiades Amplifier
In the Thread: About the pre-warming of playback

Post Subject: About the pre-warming of playbackPosted by Romy the Cat on: 8/14/2009

I did not play my playback since Sunday and turned it last night after 4 days not being off. It was very pity sound. Even I felt that it was getting better after 2 hours I shut down the system as I has other things to do.

In the past I have mentioned that Melquiades, as many other amps, need time to heat up to build up own default sound and that 3-4 non-operational days it require 3-4 hours of containing burning to return back to its proper sound.

http://www.romythecat.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?postID=2201

I have no definitive idea if to attribute it to tubes, caps or anything else, anyhow this is not the subject.

What I think now is if it possible to design an amp with the notion of pre-warming intrinsically built in? It is too late for Milq as it uses full-voltage delay circuits. Be let look what BAT did in 90s with this preamps – they had filaments are raring in a very low voltage in a stand-by mode in order to prolong the life expectancy the tubes. I do not care about the life expectancy but how about to play the very same concept to cure the need of an amp to be pre-formatted for it’s best operation?

Pretend we have a SET amp with no regulators; most of the SET are not regulated. Then pretend that in front of the amp, before it primaries of the power transformers we have another 6:1 power transformer that constantly feeds the amp with 20V. Let call it Lead Transformer. Now all magnetics, diodes, caps, filaments, breeder, the whole circuitry is slightly heated by the 1/6 of the voltage. It does not take a lot of power and in case of Milq for instance the gas regulators will not do off, still the bias circuits will be under the voltage as gas regulators are shunt regulators.

Now I wish to run the amp. All that I do is shorting the primary and secondary of the Lead Transformer, allowing the full wall voltage to drive the amp. I think it might be a good solution and I do not know why it is not being used, at least I never have seen and I never heard people even talk about it (in SET environment). Certainly it is not something that I would propose at $1000 amps. However if people buy $50K or $100K amps (that presumably deliver better sound) then would it make sense to demand the pre-warming feature are mandatory? If to presume that Melquiades sounds like $100K amp then after 4 non-operational days it sounds flat like $500 amps or as a dog that just walked under rain. It also sounds not as it shall for the first 30-40 minutes, but this is how most of tube amps behave….

What I wonder is the electronics incidents that we use in amps have any problem to work continually under a fraction of normal operation voltage. I know that some expanse SS amps use this concept but I never have seen any SET power amps to go there…

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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