6V6 SINGLE ENDED Stereo Power Amplifier

6v6hifi

Purpose Design

Pumping da jamz. Scratch build and original design.

Since I started all this audio DIY insanity, I have been trying to learn to design tube amplifiers. After much reading, websurfing, and a few discussions with old-school gurus, I have learned enough to get myself in trouble, as they say.

This amp is my first ground-up design. I had the power transformers from another project that never got built, and wanted to use tubes that are cheap and easy to work with. I settled on the 6v6 because I have a bunch of them, and it should be able to provide a couple watts even in triode mode. I also had a bunch of 5y3s so that will be a fine rectifier. Since this is starting to sound like a Fender guitar amp, the logical preamp tube would be the 12ax7, but I thought it would be cool to have an all-octal amp so I used some 6sl7s. Octals are much easier to work with too, since there is so much more room on the socket.

Also see rev 2 schematic below. I found a schematic for a design that used the tubes I wanted, and even in the single ended configuration I wanted, so I felt confident that the design would work and that I had a fall-back in case my design sucked. The schematic is from diyaudio.co.kr, which I believe is a Korean site - how cool is that? They have a single ended 6v6 amp with lots of different driver tubes, which is neat. The design of this amp is very straightforward. I wanted to build the simplest amp possible to minimize the things that could go wrong :) Therefore it had to be single ended, had to be triode mode, and had to have a simple single triode driver stage. I didn't use any negative feedback, and didn't try any tricks like parallel feed output or an SRPP driver stage. Perhaps the sound will suffer as a result, but I want to start at the beginning! I breadboarded the power supply with clip leads and a dummy load to draw roughly the current I thought the final circuit would draw, and so

was able to see approximately what my B+ voltage would be. I got about 300V on my test rig, which would be fine. I was hoping for 250-275V, but that looks impossible from a 275V power transformer without adding a dropping resistor which I felt woud compromise the design. Elegance at all costs! :) Now that I knew my B+ I was able to plot the operating point and load line for the 6v6. I decided triode mode was the way to go since I really would have preferred a real triode anyway. At 300V and 40mA bias the 6v6 would sit at it's maximum dissipation of 12W. The load line looked pretty good, but a little less voltage and more current would have put it in a slightly more linear region of the curves. A quick search for a power transformer that could provide less voltage and still have 5V and 6.3V windings showed that there is no such thing (that I could find) so 300V will have to do. For the 6sl7 driver stage, I used the tables from a GE tube manual to find a circuit that would let me use my 100k input potentiometer, and provide enough voltage swing for the 6v6. I'm not sure what is involved in matching a driver stage to an output tube, so I basically just crossed my fingers for this part. The values I came up with are very different from any other designs I have seen, but they seem to work just fine. On the input I used VoltSecond's "shunt mode pot easiest" input attenuation scheme. So with that I started building it. I had a pair of Hammond 270BX power transformers, so I had to go for a dual-mono design. The rest of the iron is Hammond too. 156L chokes in the power supplies, and 125ESE output transformers. I found a really neat old chassis made by Digital Equipment Corporation! Ironic, don't you think? The chassis was nice and big so I would have some room to work. I used a small hole saw for the socket holes, and a combination of drill bits and step drill for the rest of the holes. Octal sockets are salvage, binding posts are Radio Shack, input jacks are the teflon insulated ones from MCM, resistors are vishay 1/2W and 3W from Mouser, coupling capacitors are Angela brand, input pots are leftovers from my Bottlehead Preamp, and electrolytic capacitors are Sprague Atoms also from Mouser. The parts selection is inexpensive, but the quality seems to be plenty good. Once built, I powered everything up and discovered that I had overestimated the current draw of the tubes, so my B+ voltage was 335V instead of the 300V I was planning on. Damn, I wanted 275V but had settled for 300V which had turned into 335V! I guess that is how it goes :) So now the 6v6s are idling at 14W, 2W over thier maximum rating, and the operating point is well out of the sweet spot. But what

can I do about it? Fender runs the hell out of 6v6s in thier guitar amps - the Blackface Champ runs at 350V on the plate at 40mA which is 14W dissipation, so what the hell! Maybe the lifespan of the 6v6s will be shortened,but I'm using good NOS American 6v6s so they won't implode or anything. Let's have a listen!

Running my Radio Shack 40-1354 fullrangers with Motorola piezos, and the lowly discman as a source, the amp sounds absolutely beautiful! Yes, I may be a little biased, having built it and all, but I never expected it to be this good. I sounds like a real amplifier! I figured there would be *something* wrong at least! The biggest suprize was that the bass is quite strong and it plays suprizingly loud. There is definitely some compression as the volume increases, but given the design, that is to be expected. Thanks to everyone who helped me with this project, most without even knowing it. Marty, all the folks on the Bottlehead Forum, The fullrange driver folks, and all the crazy bastards with clipleads coming out of everything. That's what it's all about :) Update [2002-02-06]: I had accidentally left the non-center-tapped 6.3V filament connections floating instead of grounding one side of the winding. I measured the AC hum into 8 ohms before and after grounding them. Floating was 1.9mV, grounded is now 1.1mV. Both are acceptable into my allegedly 90dB efficient speakers, but grounding the filament connection did decrease the hum significantly. Update [2002-02-09]: So to get the plate dissipation of the 6v6 down a bit, I used the small

value cap first in the power supply trick. I had used the duncanamps PSUD2 power supply modeling tool to see what this would do, and discovered that a 2nd choke was necessary not to have too much AC ripple. So I ordered another choke and a 1uF angela brand capacitor, and put them in. Now the plate voltage is down about 20 volts and the 6v6 is only consuming 10W at idle. Much better. The sound is only slightly changed if at all. Maybe a little smoother with maybe a bit less bass.

I also discovered that I have been making a classic mistake calculating plate dissipation using the voltage present on the plate relative to ground. I believe it is correct to calculate plate dissipation with the plate voltage relative to the cathode, which in this case (schematic rev 2) would be 306V - 18V = 288V. That means that the 6v6 in the original amplifier was only dissipating 11.3W so it was within limits after all! I think the new circuit is better because the 6v6 is in a more linear region of the curves, but it might not be worth the extra cost and inelegance of the added chokes.