Point to Point wiring

[9pintube]

I thought I'd throw this into the arguments, or the two camps on the issue that wires/cables don't make a difference!     IF you are building or buying a tube or even Solid State Amp or Pre-amp, do you believe that point to point wiring is far superior in sound quality and reliability in the operation of "said" amp/pre-amp, or really any other piece of audio equipment. Many designs that use circuit boards with their "trace" soldering including many plug-in parts and even some cheap computer ribbon bundles carrying signals,etc,etc. to other boards used in their equipment for sale today.. I'm not talking about the guy/company's that just throw Pt. to Pt. wires in the chassis and claims "ITS" been built using Point to Point wiring....I'm speaking of the builder who routes his wires with the signal path being very important. My amp equipment builder even uses different types of conductors, (solid copper or silver with Teflon dielectrics) in his designs and so on!  I know you pay more for a lot of these designs that also use premium caps, transformers,etc.etc., even the I.C.and IEC plugs and jacks...There are so many design steps that do alter the SQ of a great sounding piece of gear!  What's your take on these issue/s.......Does the right wire make a difference??Besdes the other parts used...  I'm in the camp of "YES IT DOES"..

 

[El_Doug]

P2P surely increases reliability - PCBs eventually deteriorate, while many radios from the 1940s are still functional today! 
 
as for wire making a difference!? dude...

 

[9pintube]

 
Quote:

P2P surely increases reliability - PCBs eventually deteriorate, while many radios from the 1940s are still functional today! 
 
as for wire making a difference!? dude...

What I'm getting at in "The Difference In Wire" would be using lets say copper when you know that "It" will cut down on some of the brightness and the use of silver to help in the opposite case......when building or terminating, that's all

 

[revolink24]

And some of us don't even believe in silver vs. copper. The only things I care about in wire are that they are well made and well shielded.

 

[Sovkiller]

PTP is not more reliable in any way to a well designed board, that is why PTP have been replaced in every and any single industry by boards today...Audiophiles can rave and argue all they want, but the fact is that boards offer a lot of advantages and you can predict the problems better. It is hard to imagine NASA using a PTP device, nor the military industry, nor you will find any medical device that is built using a PTP techniques neither...just to mention a few of them...PTP was a technique from the past, served very well during some time, but was replaced by a more efficient one...that does not mean that it could not sound good, but that is all you can say about it...
 
About the silver vs. copper argument, you can also order or custom order a broad with silver traces, and high end connectors, but how expensive it will be is another issue...and BTW these apply to both techniques...I have seen poor soldering, cheap connectors and parts in some of the best well regarded designs using PTP...
 
I think that the problem is mainly that you can predict many of the problems using software and simulations in boards, as opposed to just guess in a PTP wiring system... 

 

[Cymbal Monkey]

I honestly think PTP is just an issue of classiness. But most amps aren't even PTP, they're turret, PTP means every component is directly connected to another board, eg. dead bug wiring. I've not seen many amps like this. This is how I think: as long as electrons flow somewhat freely, and you have good resistance in the speakers, then the voltage drop in the tracks/wires/turrets will be nothing compared to the drop in things like leads.

 

[spritzer]

True star wired point to point wiring has clear advantages over pretty much any PCB based solution by offering shorter paths and better control over the grounding.  Now very few people build this way as it looks to be messy as hell with wires all over the place and the average audiophile is ignorant enough to think this is somehow a bad thing.  A compromise would be to wire it like a tree, with a main stem and branches that reach all over the chassis.  This isn't as good as star wiring with higher impedance but I for one use this type of wiring in larger chassis just to save on the amount of wire needed.  It also looks neat and if done properly the performance tradeoff shouldn't be too great. 
 
Now the most common way of doing P-P is what you see in most production amps including the common headamps which sets out to cut down on the number of wires used (and thus labor) to the bare minimum.  This calls for ground bars (thick copper wires to carry the ground and to which everyting is soldered, pretty much like the ground plane on a PCB), minimum power wiring and even series heaters for the tubes.  This does look very pretty and minimalistic but the whole reason to do P-P is pretty much lost in the process. 
 
Now besides all of this there are some other points where P-P really comes into its own and that is physical separation of different elements of the amp.  Now signal and power lines should never be mixed let alond filament wiring for tubes and that's much easier to do with wires then a PCB. 

 

[9pintube]

THANK YOU spritzer, Well explained even the (Don't have a clue club) should understand your factual explanation of P2P building!

 
Quote:

True star wired point to point wiring has clear advantages over pretty much any PCB based solution by offering shorter paths and better control over the grounding.  Now very few people build this way as it looks to be messy as hell with wires all over the place and the average audiophile is ignorant enough to think this is somehow a bad thing.  A compromise would be to wire it like a tree, with a main stem and branches that reach all over the chassis.  This isn't as good as star wiring with higher impedance but I for one use this type of wiring in larger chassis just to save on the amount of wire needed.  It also looks neat and if done properly the performance tradeoff shouldn't be too great. 
 
Now the most common way of doing P-P is what you see in most production amps including the common headamps which sets out to cut down on the number of wires used (and thus labor) to the bare minimum.  This calls for ground bars (thick copper wires to carry the ground and to which everyting is soldered, pretty much like the ground plane on a PCB), minimum power wiring and even series heaters for the tubes.  This does look very pretty and minimalistic but the whole reason to do P-P is pretty much lost in the process. 
 
Now besides all of this there are some other points where P-P really comes into its own and that is physical separation of different elements of the amp.  Now signal and power lines should never be mixed let alond filament wiring for tubes and that's much easier to do with wires then a PCB. 

Sovkiller,Revolink24, and others, Do you still believe that P2P isn't hands down a better build, at a Greater cost,for sure, but IF You don't, That's FINE, too!!!
 

 

[Uncle Erik]

X2 for what Spritzer said. Especially about grounding. Grounding is very important to performance and you can get an excellent ground plane P2P much easier than you can on a PCB.

Sovkiller, have you ever wrenched on the old P2P devices as well as PCBs? I haven't done a huge amount of repair on PCBs (save from cleaning up my own errors), but have been through quite a few old tube radios and other tube gear.

I can tell you, unequivocally, that P2P is easier to repair. No question whatsoever. If you've ever accidentally scratched through a trace, you'll appreciate how much easier it is to repair. If I much up a wire in P2P, I can have it desoldered and replaced with a new one within a few minutes. A damaged trace? Well, you can drill holes and jumper the break. Try doing that without removing the board from the device, not to mention the possibility of the drill bit wandering and making a hole in another trace. If a PCB becomes damaged by heat and delaminates, what then? Do you know how hard it is to get a PCB out of an amp without desoldering a ton of different connectors and other items? And once you get the board out, what are you going to do, replace it with another one by desoldering and resoldering every component on it, assuming that you can find an identical unused board somewhere? Even if you have the board files, have you checked to see how much it costs for a board manufacturer to run a single PCB for you, and then have to wait a few days for it to arrive?

Really, there's no comparison when it comes to ease of repair. Further, the reason NASA and others use PCBs is because they run solid state stuff with a high circuit density. If you were to lay that out properly P2P, it'd never fit in a rocket or airplane. Second, most manufacturers take a "replace, not repair" attitude towards boards these days. Malfunction? Toss it. Slap in a new one. Now, if we're talking about a tube amp with 30-50 components inside and space/weight isn't a major consideration, there's *every* reason to wire that P2P for ease of maintenance and reliability.

Further, maintenance and troubleshooting is not a "guess." If you have the schematics and understand what's connected to what, you can systematically work through the circuit to nail down the problem. After you've worked on a few projects, you can usually diagnose problems right away.

As for wire... oh, please. The only thing I care about with wire is if it is the proper gauge and has a Teflon sleeve. There's no "magic" sound to Teflon, but it sure does well when accidentally touched with a soldering iron. Regular insulation usually melts or burns, meaning that you get to replace the wire. That's not a problem with Teflon, so the higher price is completely worth it.

 

[nikongod]

 
Quote:

PTP is not more reliable in any way to a well designed board, that is why PTP have been replaced in every and any single industry by boards today...Audiophiles can rave and argue all they want, but the fact is that boards offer a lot of advantages and you can predict the problems better. It is hard to imagine NASA using a PTP device, nor the military industry, nor you will find any medical device that is built using a PTP techniques neither...just to mention a few of them...PTP was a technique from the past, served very well during some time, but was replaced by a more efficient one...that does not mean that it could not sound good, but that is all you can say about it...

 
Wasnt the Rudistor Coriolan (original) wired point to point? Perhaps it was the Egmont? Its hard to remember when none of them have internal photos posted.
 
Just because there have been some iffy to bad p2p amps sold by people with wiring skills worse than Mikhail dosnt mean that every p2p amp is going to fail within a short time of construction. Thats the mark of truly shoddy QC not an inherent flaw of the technique. 
 
Quote:

I think that the problem is mainly that you can predict many of the problems using software and simulations in boards, as opposed to just guess in a PTP wiring system... 

 
The drawing error in PCB software is a stack of useless boards. The signal trace carelessly layed too close to a power supply trace is a noise generator that cant be fixed. I could go on... its not all black and white.

 

[Sovkiller]

Of course for a few pieces, 5 or 6 pieces, to do a board will be a waste, also the majority of the tube amps we have nowadays are done that way, they are a lot easier to build, and as a general rule a tube amp is a lot simpler to implement than a SS, but he asked about opinions on solid state as well, not only a tube circuit with a few parts on it. SS are a lot more complex and doing them PTP will be harder. And when you buy a product the least thing you think off is that it will break, otherwise you opt for other options...it is true that they are easier to repair no doubt about that...mainly all tube amps, as a gross generalization are a lot easier to repair than a SS circuit.
 
Nikon:
All the Rudistor amps "I have seen the guts to the date" used boards in one way or another, and sometimes they use separate boards and point to point to connect the boards in some places. I can not comment on the ones I have not seen the guts, as the Coriolan or the Egmonts. 
 
About your sarcasm of not posting the pictures you can always buy one and post them, no problems, just drop me an email and I could get you a good price..LOL...
 
But again as I said once, because Rudi do this or that doesn't mean that I must like the way he does things, just that I refrain to comment in the ones I do not like, as all of us...
 
But I try at least to be honest and clear in my recommendations, and mainly I based my reco in sound quality and reliability, etc...We do not care too much about the design, and what sounds good, is good to us. And most of the times the simpler the better they sound...We have in the market many fancy designs, that we all have heard, that sounds terrible. And others are criticized without even being heard.
 
I'm tend to be objective, and that doesn't mean that because our favorite brand does one thing, you necessarily have to like it, honestly I do not like point to point. Another example, Marantz dropped Class A in the integrated amps a few years back, the last was the 7200, and I have one that is not class A, and still sounds very good, while i asked them, they told me the same, that their new amps, sound better than the Class A... 
 
When I said "predict" was during the simulation of the design, you can have errors in any place, of course, and you can do prototypes one by one in boards as well and once tested then run a mass production... 

 

[Uncle Erik]

Sov, what's the reason you dislike point-to-point? The criticism that I keep seeing pop up is that it "looks" messy. The problem there is that you can find really old gear wired point-to-point that's survived 70-80 years. My oldest piece of gear is a ca. 1925 Atwater-Kent neutrodyne radio that still has a bit of the original wiring. It was in good shape so I left it. The wiring has been in there for 85 years. It outlasted the people who designed it. Since it doesn't get much use these days, it should roll over 100 just fine. I don't think you can ask for much more from something.

I do agree that a PCB is better suited to solid state. They are more complex and they also run at lower voltages and usually produce a lot less heat than a tube rig does. PCBs make sense for chips except for some of the high-power output stuff run in class A that gets really hot. Even when they're heatsinked correctly, I still wonder about the heat exposure to the board. Another valid criticism is that point-to-point is a lot more labor intensive. Still, I think that's offset by the ease of repair and reliability.

 

[Sovkiller]

Erick with wires carrying high voltages you have to be very careful, chances of accidents are more prone to happen, if they are not properly taken care of, specially those old vintage with the guts expose from below, I have seen a couple of guys to get the attention on some of them...Also from the design point of view you have to isolate very well the AC filament wires (if any) and all the running AC from the audio to avoid hums and noise, and how to do it properly and with the shortest paths possible? In other words to create an optimal layout using PTP is very labor intensive and a very creative work, and most of the times, that part of the process is skipped.
Now we have very good quality wire, and very good quality solder, so that is not a promblem, but have you checked your vintage, I'm pretty sure the wires are cloth covered!!! At the end compromises in wire lenght etc...have to be made in point to point, so both show some disadvantages on that regard. 
Not sure when the first board was designed, but I'm pretty sure that a good board, will last a lot longer than 100 years easily, we have some vintage SS amps that are now running for the 40 or 50 years...and the failures will come from other parts, not the boards..of course to what extend you want to keep something for so long is another point to consider...and unfortunately today electornics are not designed in any way to last for long time, at least the mass market ones. I agree with you that for tubes, specially designs with few parts on them, point ot point could be more suitable...but anyway if i can get a decent board, I will...