Originally Posted by ericj
We call it the van Waarde amp, but Dr. van Waarde attributes the original design to Rudy van Stratum.
OTOH, I guess for the purposes of this thread, we can keep calling it a van Waarde.
Well, regardless of what we call it I think it's important to give credit where credit is due so your information is appreciated. But really, this all probably goes back a lot further than that so I hope no offense will be taken by those who paved the way.
It looks like you're paralleling both sides of a 6080 per channel. I have seen
small speaker amps like that.
That is correct, the output tubes are run in parallel.
So, this seems like big overkill. Am i not understanding the amp?
Overkill might be a strong word in the same sense that the beta22 is overkill.
The basic premise here was to take the Wheatfield HA-2 model and do some things to improve upon it that simply couldn't be done in the commercial realm. For example, the power supply weighs nearly 50lbs by itself. No commercial man'f is ever going to want to deal with that! So were all of the changes strictly required, of course not, but where would be the fun in stopping there. The parallel tubes and increased output coupling capacitance on the other hand allow the amp to be much better suited to driving low impedance headphones like my HF-1s. So to me those were required. Also, I wanted to retain as much of the original amps characteristics so I made choices based on that requirement that are clearly unnecessary for anyone but me.
I'm not trying to claim that what is presented here is either the most efficient or cost effective way of achieving a given goal. Just an approach that I chose based on my ideas and priorities. If only one of these gets built (mine) that's fine by me, maybe someone else will look at and find inspiration to do something different. The idea is just to share.