Listening

After finishing the amplifier, I could plug in the mains plug and swich it on. Quite a special moment. Will it work or not?

First, I used it without a source. I heard absolutely nothing in the headphone, even not with the volume full open. No noise, no hum, just nothing. Was it non-working, or was it just perfectly silent? Furtunately, the latter was true.

Then I put the amplifier two weeks on the mains and played music regularly to breaking it in.

In combination with my Philips HP910 headphone I got an impressively nice sound, very rich in details that is very joyful to listen to. The only direct comparison I could make was by using the headphone socket of my preamplifier. Although this preamplifier is not really low-end, the difference was huge, and the tube amplifier was the better of the two.

Unclear to me is if this high-quality sonics originates from the simple design, the quality of the parts or the single-ended-triode principle or a combination of these items. My conclusion is that my first amplifierr project yielded a very nice result that makes listening to a headphone much more attractive. I will use it regularly. But the downside is that the project is finished, since the construction work was nice to do....

Home -->