gofar99 Messages: 2015 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi Everyone. Just on a lark I decided to try some tube amps on my PC. Quite a difference. Now to be sure the previous set up was really high quality. Marantz 2265 driving Martin Logan Motion 4s and ML D300 sub. Just kind of massive and not quite as nice as my all tube main system. I won't get into the argument as to which is best. I figure they are just different. I prefer the tube sound. Anyhow since I design and build a lot of stuff of both types I have lots of prototypes to choose from. I settled on a pair of mini-amps. Class A ultra linear EL84 push-pull amps. 5 watts each. The ones I used are upgraded with SMPS DC on the driver tubes, Audyn True copper caps, extra B+ filtering and carefully matched tubes (presently IH El84s and NOS JAN Phillips 5751 from 1944). The rest of the gear is my OMEN I7 PC, a SMSL DAC, and the same speakers. I built a stand alone "passive preamp" for it. Lovely sound. I use only uncompressed audio files (storage is cheap now). Most are .wav versions. The PC player is Groove Audio Media Player. I have about 5 others loaded but this one seems to do best what I want.
I like using tube amps on my PC because of how it improves the sound quality when I play games on the PC, making it fun while giving that better sound. I would want to know if you've used any of the other ones since then?
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