All about electronic valves and hi-fi
Finally after many years, I managed to document this great PCB. If you already have this PCB and want the build guide and BOM please let me know.
Here is an extract of the build guide for the ones who are interested in this circuit:
Continue reading “Cap Multiplier PCB: build guide and BOM”It’s been a long while, yes, I know. Life goes in particular ways, you can help that. Having said that, I’m now back after a long absence.
Life has changed for me and have some more free time for a while so will crack on some project. There’s plenty I want to work on and we always fall on the same trap: there’s not enough time. I’ve been very much involved on music and synthesisers. That’s where all my free time and design/build effort has gone into over the last few years.
However, I have some RIAA project, 845/211/GM70 amp, second turntable and probably an RL12P35 Amp I want to get working on, hopefully all soon
In the meantime, a lot of people are writing to me for advice. I sometimes get frustrated as people seem to try a shortcut and not do any homework before they ask for help. When I’m short of time, this kind of frustrates me. Anyhow, there is a big up tick on building a lot of my designs which is very rewarding.
The lovely look of the 46 drivers into 814s which I won’t forget.
Thank you for holding on out there. I hope I’ll post back soon
Firstly, my apologies. It’s been long overdue to get back on this blog. I receive several emails from people asking me to share more. I hope I will, when I get the time and energy to get back on hi-fi audio projects. I still work a lot on synthesisers which keeps me very busy when I catch a glimpse of free time from my hectic day life.
We’ve all been hit by the short of semiconductors. Yet, the HV precious parts are in shortage as well. Luckily some of the key parts like LDN150 and IXTP08N100D2 are back in stock, not sure for how long. These are key parts for building any CCS or hybrid mu-followers for audio circuits.
Continue reading “Short of sand”It’s been a while indeed. Mostly busy with my day job and family. However, spare time is dedicated to synthesisers – I’m designing and building modules for Eurorack – and playing and listening to music.
I’ve been asked about the GU-50 triode curves. I have misplaced them, however I have something even better to share which is the accurate model created for this great valve.
Ok, title isn’t very appealing. I know, however it truly reflects what I experienced over the past few days. Let me clarify before I start: a gassy tube developed a nice fault-finding journey. You always learn a lot from all this, for sure. Luckily, due to the holiday season, I had the time to work on this. I’d rather have spent it otherwise, but my 300B amplifier was dead.
I had a gassy 6BY5-GA damper rectifier tube. I should have changed it, but I was lazy and I paid the price for it. When turned on the 300B HT power supply, it will flash blue for a sec or two and the gas ionisation will disappear after a minute or two when tube was warm enough and operated as expected. Problem was that my stash of these damper tubes was up in the storage, who knows where.
Continue reading “Gassy nightmare”It’s been long overdue, I know. At least we are here. Another Christmas to celebrate in a good way. A couple of days late this post, but hey at least I’m writing this entry 🙂
Here are some curves of this great valve I traced time ago, hope these are useful when designing a stage with them.
Unfortunately the variance of the valve’s parameters is all over the place. Hence you should use these curves as reference and not as sacred data. Luckily, I have plenty of them and can match/select pairs as needed.
It’s been a few painful days, however the website is now back up and running. The site suffered a malware attack and was used for phishing attacks. Who knows how it happened, despite having malware scans and used solely to blog on WordPress it happened.
Thanks to everyone who drop me an email asking for the site. I hope all the content is up there. We had to delete 65K generated PHP files and the whole thing was damaged. Thanks to my friend Nico who helped me getting this back on track.
If you see that anything is missing, please let me know.
Ale
Firstly, my apologies to all readers for not writing much over the last year. Things have gone a bit crazy between work and family commitments. Also, modular synthesiser work has taken a lot of interest lately to me. Finally, this blog was hacked twice and have been painful to get it back up again. Needless to say, I’m not an IT expert so I do the best I can!
All good things come to an end. In this case, my loved 4P1L PSE Amplifier. I moved listening rooms with the growing family and space is now an issue. I no longer can store this beauty and I think it would be wise for someone else to enjoy it rather than collecting dust somewhere my attic (which is mostly full).
This amplifier gave me a lot of joy and sums up a “no-compromise” approach to DHT considering the design and component selection of the power supplies. It’s a very flexible beast as the power supplies (HT and LT) can be used in many different configurations – all the way up to a 300B and more.
This is “the one and only” Bartola 4P1L amplifier. It has gone back and forth to ETF.18 and got into quarter finals on the competition (personally and a few others think it could have gone further but listening levels and setup were not the best).
Needless to say:
I haven’t got idea of what price to ask, need to think about it.
If you are interested, ping me.
Cheers,
Ale
It’s been long since my last post. Life is busy for me these days, so not much time free for Audio work. I managed to rebuild my listening room after nearly a year of disruptive and delayed building works. So am a happy man on that front.
I hope I can upload some work soon. In the meantime, my friend Geoff raised to me this particular scam, unbelievable:
https://archivebooks.online/download/4677785-bartola-valves-all-about-electronic-valves-and-hi-fi
Amazing to see that there are people out there trying to get your details with this. I can’t even imagine what they are expecting you to do after registering in order to download allegedly some “book” which I never wrote or commissioned.
Anyhow, you’ve been warned. Don’t even it 🙂