T-amp (Off Topic)

by soundcheck @, Germany, Friday, October 06, 2006, 12:46 (6384 days ago) @ Bert

Hi Bert and other folks.

Great that you bring it up. :grin:

I am running a T-AMP as main-amp, since roughly 4 months now.

To make a long story short. I havn't heard a better AMP in my chain yet!
(Though it needs some tweaks!)

I was running ICE-Power before. These are driving my subwoofers now.

The way I went:

I bought the Charlize version, which is far better than the standard T-amp
and some other modules which are available.
80$ is a real fair price for the delivered quality and quality parts on the board I'd say. And it is more or less plug and play. I like the combination of smd and standard parts a lot - makes tweaking at the right spots much easier.

Still, not very much survived on the original board:

I replaced all caps with Blackgate NonPolars. And very important changed the input caps to Mundorf Silver/Gold.

Charlize is using Air-Coils in the output. Which is OK.
I replaced it with Mundorf AirCoils which is better. Lower level detail
increases a lot. The Mundorf coils are getting the vibrations down to an absolute minimum. (Explanations can be found on the Mundorf homepage)

Power is again a Nortstar NSB 90 Battery buffered with BlackGates NP. Dynamics and transients are just great. Smaller batteries (and most probably other brands) will always be a compromise and no option for a non-compromise system.

All cabling/wiring is Vooddoo silver solid core.

And one of the key issues: I glued a Shakti-Online to the back of the Tripath chip. Noise is gone! Lower level details again improved a lot.

This amp plays just great.

I had a Tube-"Maniac" at home the other day.

He was nothing less than shocked!
I got him my spare-amp for testing. :grin:

I love this little amp. With all the mods I applied and the battery
you are ending up at roughly 400-500€ (200€ for the Battery only!) in parts for the stereo setup.

The amp is quite load sensitive and with 5-6W on 8R not very powerful. On 8R or higher you really should have a very sensitive system above 98db to play at a decent volume. Distortion increases quickly on higher volumes.
Here a tube shows nicer/smoother sound if you run it into its limits.
Consider that you also need to have a different filter for different loads in the output. Standard is usually the 4R setup. You have to lower some caps here. That'll change/adapt the roll-off in the upper range.

My summary. This amp is a great amp. If tweaked a bit it does everything right.
On my wishlist would be a differential input and 5 more Watts to get some headroom on live volume levels - to name the small disadvantages I see.


Klaus

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