46 driving 45 – SE Amp

My favourite valves together

Recently I revisited a beloved amp, the SE 45. This time I will share a more orthodox design without sand in play. Surprised? Well, I love lots of iron as well and here is a design I’ve been playing around for some time as I have all the components at hand. 

Driving the 45

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4P1L driver – LL7903+LL1671 tests

Last week I did some preliminar tests with the LL2746 in 1:2 step-up mode.  Despite having measured good results with it, it will be a challenge to drive grid current given that the output impedance of the 4P1L will be multiplied by 4 so about 5KΩ.

Before looking at the LL1671/20mA which is suitable for multiple driver valves, let’s see how the LL2746 driver performs with the addition of the input step-up microphone transformer LL7903. I’m currently using the LL7903 in my 814 SE A2 amplifier and sounds really nice. The LL7903 was wired up in 1:4 setup so gain can get about 63:

4P1L-LL2746 test2 4P1L -LL2746 test 3 zobel optimised 200Vpp Continue reading “4P1L driver – LL7903+LL1671 tests”

4P1L – LL2746 driver test

After a recent discussion in the DYI Audio forum about the 4P1L drivers, I decided to do some quick tests on an idea I had around to use a step up transformer (1:4) – 4P1L and step up interstage transformer (1:2) to drive a 300B or similar using the 4P1L in filament bias.

First suspicion is on whether the 4P1L has the grunt to drive a capacitive load which would be a real challenge in a 1:2 step up as load capacitance is multiplied by 4 when impedance is reduced by a factor of N^2=4.

I built a test rig with the 4P1L in filament bias using a 15Ω wire-wound filament resistor and connected the filaments in parallel to obtain easily a nice bias voltage with 650mA of filament current. Also lower Rf will improve the low frequency response as helps keeping low the output impedance:

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4P1L rat nest

The valve was biased at Ia=30mA / Va=160V and grid bias is about -10.2V. A 10KΩ resistor was added as a primary Zobel as per recommendation of the datasheet. Then it was replaced by a 25kΩ potentiometer (P1) and the right value was found by looking at the frequency response.

Initial tests showed a very good response at 1kHz with only 0.24% THD @200Vpp output. The gain is approximately 16. The mu of the 4P1L with paralleled filaments is around 8 and lower than when used in series which is approximately 9-10.  Albeit the results were promising initially, the real test of this stage is by looking at high frequency response where the capacitance will makes it real pain.

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