Quote:
Originally Posted by dslknight
Now I'm confused ... the regular ear+ uses 3 tubes but the special edition uses only 2?
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The ECC99 is a dual triode, like the 5751 or 12AX7, albeit more powerful. The typical 12B4A is a single triode. He could have used two ECC99s, utilizing half of each (or paralleling them), but the best matching is often within the single envelope, and the separation is very good.
I think it makes for a tighter layout by a good margin. It would have been nice to have the two active tubes in the forward two sockets, but then you'd have a tall tube on one side, and the short tube on the other, with notably different levels of illumination, too. The tubes are somewhat hidden from forward view by the transformer covers, too.
It's possible that you could wire up the heaters of the storage sockets, it would total about 1.5A... but it seems wasteful. Alternatively, you could illuminate the two storage sockets from beneath with orange LEDs.
I'm glad that Lloyd favored signal path over appearance, in the end. It would have been nice to have it more balanced in appearance, but also having a tall tube on one side and a shorter, dimmer tube on the other would have been at least as strange.