I finished building our first finished production Ultravalve vacuum tube amplifier today. It is up and running in my test system and sounding out of this world musical.
Its a pretty little thing with polished stainless steel chassis and a clear anodized faceplate with black graphics and test.
The front has a lighted power switch.
The back has premium input jacks, 5-way binding post output jacks on 3/4" centers for 4 ohm, 8 ohm, and 16 ohm taps, and a line fuse and captive 16 gauge polarized AC line cord.
The chassis top has small pin jacks for bias adjusting and the bias adjust pot controls.
It uses a 5AR4 rectifier tube, two 6U8A or 6GH8A small signal tubes, and four output tubes. We supply it with EH 6CA7 tubes but EL34 or KT77 tubes can be used too.
Power is 30 watts per channel, but you can use it where you would normally use a 100 watt solid state amplifier. It does a great job of driving my 85 dB efficient Salk HT3 speakers full range.
The audio circuits are internal to protect the user from exposed high voltages and to keep the circuits from being exposed to the output tube's heat.
We will be able to ship within six weeks now and are ready to take orders. The introductory price is $1699.
We will have photos as soon as we get the finished faceplates from our supplier, which probably with be in 3-4 weeks.
Is there a better tube amp out there? We have not heard one yet. We will be running it (actually a pair most of the time) at our display room #2002 at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest next weekend, sharing a room with Salk Sound.
Come and listen please.
Best regards,
Frank Van Alstine