Quote:
Originally Posted by woomanmoomin  Somebody was on here a couple of days ago speculating that this might mean there was -150V at the plate and +150V through the valve or something. Electronics is not my strong point, but if there's just one reason the ART doesn't quite sound like a boutique valve unit, it probably has to do with the voltage at the plate. |
I suspect it's more to do with the chinese valves and circuit design and capacitors and op amps used and type of or lack of transformers in the art. But either way, the high plate voltage does work as it should, doesn't matter if it's 300 volts or 100 volts, it's enough to power the tube properly so it can handle the higher gains required of this preamp without distorting as it does on low plate voltage mode. As a semi-old school engineer I do understand a fair bit fo the design of the components in my signal chain, although I'm not going to be building a boutique preamp of my own design any time soon, what knowledge I do have tucked away tells me that for a preamp 300 volts isn't necessarilly what it needs or requires to run at peak performance for a given tube. However I'm certainly not an expert at it either.... but I would bet good money that the plate voltage running at whatever it is in an mpa gold at "high" voltage is plenty high enough to run the tube properly (as opposed to all of those low voltage distortion boxes), and the tone of the mpa gold is created from far more than the tube gain voltage. For one thing, it has no input transformers, along with most of the less than $800 or so preamps around (except the sixQ, running from memory here...), that is certainly one thing that separates boutique from ART. There are many other things too though... if you use high end gear for a while you start to learn what the differences are, and if you repair it once in a while as many of us do in studios then you really learn what makes them tick, the quality is just so different compared to anythign mass produced.
Cheers,
Don