Triode preamp : part 1

My recent purchase of my Harmon Kardon A300 amp has created a serious fascination with vacuum tubes. The sound of this amp is so good and the electronics behind it are so simple. I was able to find the schematic to my amp online, which was very important when I began replacing the caps in it... the labeling on them wasn't the best and it was hard to make out the values on some of them. Looking at the schematic, this amp was so simple! If you took out the electronics necessary for the turntable preamp, and removed unnecessary features such as presence, stereo reverse, and the bass and treble controls (which I always leave flat anyway), there are only a couple dozen components remaining per channel.

I decided I had to start designing my own amp. A few years ago I was fed up with the cheap 1-bit D/A converters found in most CD players and wanted to make my own with nice Burr-Brown 16BIT DACs. I would finish the output stage with a nice tube preamp. Of course I never built it, so I was due. I decided to make a simple preamp with a basic triode.

I first needed some tubes. eBay of course would be my source. The most common triodes such as ones in the 12**7 family are expensive! 12ax7s' go for some serious money, mostly because almost every vintage amp out there uses them and the sources of new old stock 12ax7s' is disappearing. The Chinese are making tubes again, but apparently they sound like ass. My solution is to buy large lots of tubes on eBay for cheap and hope for the best. Besides, there are tons of other triode tubes out there, others will be suited just fine for my purposes.

So several boxes of tubes showed up at my door about a week later showing why drinking a bottle of wine while eBaying always leads to suprises. The good news is everything I bought was only $20 and I had about 150 tubes to work with. In this lot I found a bunch of NOS 5963 triodes. Perfect.

My first design is crude, quickly made, only a single mono channel, but it works!

Yes, it's built on a piece of pine (clear pine that is!). Remember, I already admitted it was crude...

It's totally simple, there are only about 15 passive components. Ill have to upload the schematic once I have a legible version of it that is finalized. I made some component value changes during testing for level adjustments. Here is what the input(top trace) and output(bottom trace) looks like on my scope:


There is some noise in the waveforms, but ignore this as it is from my signal generator which is garbage. The left traces show a 1v peak to peak input and the output of the preamp, which looks very clean... and inverted. The right traces show what happens when the input is increased to 2 volts peak to peak, which drives the tube a little harder. The bottom trace shows the output result which is clipped, or in the case of tubes, more compressed or squashed. This is one of the most interesting properties of tubes. When their headroom is reached, they don't have a hard 'clip' like a transistor, it is a more 'squashed' effect on the waveform, which creates a more pleasing distortion.

Here is another view showing the effect on my scope with an X-Y plot:


I had to turn the scope illumination on to give my camera something to focus on, but you can see the squashed waveform on the bottom right which has the soft curves instead of a hard flat break if this was a transistor clipping.

I still have a lot to play with the circuit, I want to figure out why the bottom of the waveform is squashed a little more than the top. I'm only running the tube plates at about 60V, instead of the usual 120v. (This was a limitation of the transformer I was using for this circuit.) Overall i'm pretty impressed with the sound of it, especially with the complete design and build only taking about 5 hours. Listening to music through it definitely sounded good, and playing my Roland synth through it while overdriving the tube for distortion had some sweet results.