Aa DHT Preamp (Part I)

Obviously it was time to test the little brother of the “Ba” DHT. In particular, as I have such a low DAC in place now, I need the gain. With nearly a gain of 30, it’s an attractive fellow to work with.

First good sign is that it doesn’t pick up as much hum as the Ba. That’s good, nevertheless I placed a back copper plate which acts as enough earth shielding to keep the Ba quiet.

I worked with my breadboard to find a good “sweetspot”( at least electrically) for this valve. Given the low signal source level, I aimed for a low bias. I played with my fixed bias setup before replacing it with the SiC bias board. I found that 2V/160V was very good in terms of keeping the distortion profile to minimum. Here is what I ended up with:

Only 2 SiC diodes are enough. The source follower PCB is mandatory given the low anode current. I run it at 20mA (hot) to get best results of the stage. Rest of the circuit is very simple, achieving a gain of about 30. Here is the distortion profile:

There is no shielding and you can see some minor IM distortion with mains hum. Harmonic decay is nice with H2 being strongest. THD is very low at 4Vrms which is good sign. Let’s see the frequency response now:


Nearly 140kHz of bandwidth which is plenty for the stage. Great response. I just need to plug this one in and listen to this promising German DHT.

 

DHT Phono Stage Test

High gain stage with DHT

Some time ago a colleague  (Shawn Fox) contacted me to find out whether I could test some rare high-mu DHTs. I didn’t have them in my stash, so he offered to send them across for testing. He was quite keen to find out the performance with a gyrator load due to the particular characteristics of the DHT in question. The valve in question is the CX-340. There isn’t much information about this valve am afraid and coincidentally, Thomas Mayer (Vinyl Savor) wrote not long ago a review of this valve.

Tracing the curves, the first step

The high anode resistance as well as the low anode current in which this valve operates makes it a real challenge to implement successfully. Hence, this is why the gyrator load plus an output follower stage comes into play as the best companion for this valve. Before we look into the circuit itself, I submitted the 40 valve to the mercy of my tracer:

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