It felt that I was missing huge part of the song listening through other amplifiers. And here came the next test, this time Diana Krall – You Are My Thrill. With Sylvania things improved significantly, the depth and richness expended to fill the space, the soundstage doubled. For the price, it’s like stealing a piece of joy. If you were reading this site, you know that one of my favorite tubes is Sylvania JHS 5814 – can’t say enough good things about them. So good bye EH & Raytheon, hello Sylvania & Svetlana. However, EH did exhibit its deficiency immediately by sharpness in the HF. There was no fat in the bass even with the EH tube connected. I was expecting a lot of clarity from the amp, but it exceeded all my expectations. It immediate weeds out all the crappy tubes because it has two acoustic guitars and covers very high spikes in MF and Bass. So I started listening…įirst track is my “check for crap” performance by Joel Xavier & Ron Carter called Silence. Driver tube, 12au7, was Electro-Harmonix. Instead of including some current production 6as7 with the kit, Bottlehead included very solid Raytheon 6080 – based on the label produced in 1970 – that is a huge step up compared to a lot of other tube amps. As expected out of the box the amp sounded OK. I connected my Sennheiser HD650 to the amp (after I tried it with a $5 headphone set 🙂 ) and used the tubes that came with it. It took me approximately 4 hours in total to have the amp all connected and playing.
The good news was that due to the simplicity of the construction of the amp, I didn’t turn into a sleepless zombi. You have to know me to understand that having the amp in my hands I couldn’t go to bed before it was all working. It took me 2 weeks to get the package in the mail – Eileen from Bottlehead was very helpful and responsive – kudos to the company that not only provides a well regarded product, but also has great people working there. I decided to go DIY route – it’s much more fun like that and I would be more familiar with internal structure of the amp that way. Now it was time for OTL (Output Transformer Less) and based on my research one of the best representatives of the OTL amplifiers is Bottlehead Crack (price $279).Ĭrack comes in form of a kit or the company can put it together for you.
I’m going though phases of getting different types of tube amp -PP, SET, Hybrid, OTL – and comparing them to one anoher. I had my eyes on Crack for quite some time.
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