Tube preamp with a dazzling wood case

posted Aug 28th 2010 8:00am by
filed under: home entertainment hacks

It’s been a while since we’ve looked in on the world of vacuum tube audio equipment. [Bruce] just finished documenting a tube preamp he built. He actually made a couple of these with slightly different cases but they use the same circuit design. We found his discussion of common errors made when tying into ground quite interesting. It seems that many folks struggle with noise in their circuits because of ground loops. There’s some details about isolating the signal ground from a metal chassis, and also an admonition about not connecting the input or output jacks directly the chassis.
If you like this, don’t miss on of our favorite tube projects, [Bruce's] Poddwatt.

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8 Responses to Tube preamp with a dazzling wood case

  • vlc says:
    August 28, 2010 at 9:04 am

    Is this dolby digital? :D

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  • Bob says:
    August 28, 2010 at 9:29 am

    What a glorious wooden enclosure.

    I would love to replace my solid state gear with that preamp and a matching amplifier.

    Reply Report comment
  • Osgeld says:
    August 28, 2010 at 11:15 am

    It looks very well built, but IMO its much too busy with every single surface being a different material

    Reply Report comment
  • cath0de says:
    August 28, 2010 at 2:29 pm

    a human needs to start proofreading mike szczys articles. spellcheck does not a sentence make.
    whenever i see a word missing or replaced with a similar word i know he did the write-up. i can barely spell myself but i don’t write for a high traffic blog.

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  • Hirudinea says:
    August 28, 2010 at 3:24 pm

    Well if he ever gets tired of building amps he could make furniture.

    Reply Report comment
  • Addidis says:
    August 29, 2010 at 11:34 am

    Awesome woodwork. I used to be a cabinet maker, in a woodmill. This is really nice.

    Reply Report comment
  • ibedazzled says:
    August 29, 2010 at 2:03 pm

    dazzling?

    nice word choice. lol

    Reply Report comment
  • Dino Sawyer says:
    August 29, 2010 at 5:03 pm

    One suggestion: Those aluminum disk/donuts around the waist of each tube…. I would add one more to the stack on each tube. The additional donut should be positioned with spacers to just-above the nipples on the glass envelopes.

    The point is to protect the nips if something should ever fall on top of the amp.

    Very nice project, in any event.

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