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Peter Wieck Peter Wieck is offline
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Default What is the most powerful audio output tube?

On Thursday, December 8, 2016 at 10:20:48 AM UTC-5, wrote:
What is the most powerful audio output tube, as far as RMS wattage
output?


Unless you want to go into the esoteric and include commercial level transmitting tubes, stick with the established types. Leaving you with the KT88/6550/KT90 family of tubes, probably eight of them in PP to get anywhere near 500 watts and within a comfortable operating range for the tubes. 813s will be operating at 2,500 V on the plates, or thereabout. You would only need four of these.

I expect you will be winding your own transformers. For, if you "pay the man" for them, and unless you go to Piltron for a custom wind (their 400W toroidal OPT is considerably over US$400) you are not going to find any off-the-shelf devices in the 500 W range

Or, for the price of one single 400W off the shelf OPT, you could go "Class D" and fit it onto one small chassis for all 500 watts per channel.

http://www.parts-express.com/sure-el...campaign= pla

All that, keep in mind that owning a very large tube amplifier is much like owning a horse. Every tube is a "consumable", and around here at the typical output watts x 2.5 = input watts, you would be spending $0.35/hour to operate the beast. Keeping in mind how much of a tube amp's consumption goes up in heat vs. a solid-state device.

At this moment, I have four (4) tube amplifiers in the inventory, from the honking Scott LK150 at the one end, to the Dynaco ST35 at the other. When I need brute force (Maggies, AR3as), I have a couple of very large HK SS power amps to pull those trains.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA