T-amp (Off Topic)

Hi Bert,

Any users who can give me some good tips to improve this thing?

I'm not a user, but I have read that people have the same experience as you do. Then they change the power supply to battery power, they change the connectors, internal cabling, they change a capacitor to get lower bass, they replace the plastic housing with something heavier...

I think there comes a point when their T-amps stop being T-amps and stop being cheap. But of course, people are using them, so it's good that you try them out with your stuff to know what's going on.

Ivo

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Hello Bert,

I have the same experience with the T-amp. Upgrades are as Ivo has outline and they help but it is still a long way from a good valve SE amp...

I also have built two of the 41KHz module 5s and they are better than the upgraded T-amp but still behind my valve amps...

Most people (all) who have good valve amps and BD-Design speakers have a rather different standard than the typical person choosing a T-amp. After all we are listening every day through very revealing and toneful speakers

James

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Hi,

I have had a modded T-AMP (new case, battery supply and MKP 2.2u input caps).

Compared to a gainclone with standard components it sounded, after some break-in, significantly better to me on my supravox 215rtf64 open baffle speakers with Aurum Cantus ESG-1 ribbon tweeters.

The T-amp was sweeter and had a very black background. Imaging was very precise. I gave the T-amp to my mum as a present. I now listen to a Charlize from diyparadise. It has a different chip - 2020 rather than 2024. It has less detail, less precise imaging and I think it is slightly noisier than the T-amp. Its tonal balance is less tipped up though.

I think you may not like the tonal balance of a T-amp compared to a valve amp, but its imaging and prat abilities are quite good in my experience.

Best
Giulio

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Hi Bert and other folks.

Great that you bring it up.

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.

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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Disclaimer : All what I say in the below may be the truth, the half truth or just complete lies after all.
:wacko: :wacko: :wacko:

Well, it seems that more of us tried the T-Amp. Possibly that is because we ran out of money because we *had* to buy a couple of BD speakers ...

I used the unmodded Super-T, you know, the one with metal case, gold plated speaker terminals, with a weight of a few 100 gramms, including the PSU.
The only amp which blows itself out of place, once connected to a pair of 112dB speakers ...

The T-Amp was connected to the mid/high part of the Swings, AKA the Orphean.
By means of the way Bert applies the filters, it also was used as a pre-amp for the bass part of the Swings, those in the end fed by my 110W RMS SS amps.
My reference : the same SS amps, their other halve used for the mid/high (two stereo pairs).

The player ? GC.

The differences

First of all, and this is important to the story, I am trying to get back the imaging which in my old house could be even many meters behind me. I already determined that the most important "phenomenon" to achieve this is not the speakers, although it will be phase related. It's also not exactly the room (though that will help I think), and in the end it will be the complete setup. (Length of) Cables, I'm not sure yet. But as I said to myself the other day ... it's coming ...

The night the T-Amp was connected the first time, coincidentally all came together for some song, and a particular lower note guitar riff played at about 30 degrees at the right behind the listening position, at a few meters distance. In such a situation you just can point to it ... and it's playing at a few square decimeters ...
Reflections, right ?
I can tell you, 4.5 meters behind the listening position I could point out the exact same position where the riff was playing. Btw, nothing new for me (old house), but coincidentally this evening it was the first time that there was sound right behind the listening position in my new house. Note that this position was in front of the 4.5m distance position.

Of possible importance could be that it was me at the 4.5m distance, and it was another person at the listening position, turning around and shouting about the sound behind him, me myself shouting the same thing because the phenomenon happening. So we both pointed to the same place in space.
Btw, of complete unimportance is the fact that the person at the listening position has the initials B.D., really.
:drinks:

Oh, not to forget, the above story was with my non-T amps playing ...

Right. So what's the use of the above ?
Well, for me, everything;

Because we had a kind of formal session to workout results with the Swings, filters, placement and all, I prepared this stream of example songs for B.D.
And, because we for fun connected the feather weight T-Amp, we played part of the same stream to compare ...

With the T-Amp the riff playing behind the listening position, did not change 1 cm for position. Same for the 4.5m distance from the listening position. But, where before we heard a riff, now we heard a *far* more complete and bodied instrument. Wow !

More positives

Nice title, but no.
And this is exactly why I personally can't understand this thingy.
Remember, it was the unmodded far to few weighing amp.
At the third song we just had to switch it off.
Oh, I forgot ... at the first 10 seconds of it playing I already wanted to switch it off (witnesses present), and only because it was stupid to do so we encountered the far better imaging. But the rest ?

I tried to play with it for two more days before I said "the hell with it", and then I shut it off.

The vibes of the bass just weren't there.
The highs were smeared enormeously.
No emotion whatsoever. Complete "Grey" sound.
To me it appeared that there was no way this thing could be modded into something with decent sound.

But still there was this strange better imaging. In the beginning.
I'd even dare to say that the more it had breaked in, the worse it became.
Really really strange, and in the end I felt my judgements were worthless. I have heard something which wasn't true or so.

Later, I found that -indeed- the T-Amp Super-T will have distortion of no less than 20% or so, when it's driven over 6 Watts.
But also I found that other chip versions could do 100 Watts (4 channels, per channel) and can be bridged. This chips cost nothing, and a pair of 4 channel chips really would remain under the huge distortion level (by heart : 0.01 %).
About all around the chip can be improved, and who knows what it can bring.

One last thing to confuse the story once more :
Because the T-Amp is as it is and I didn't have two of them, it had to be positioned in the middle between the speakers. This meant different speaker cables from what I was used to. Later, when I shut it off, I kept on using the same cables with my own amps with more or less similar results now opposed to the T-Amp.
Because I had changed cables anyway, I tried more cable setups, all with the minimum length possible (which is about 20cm). Nothing satisfied me.
I ended up with the original cables of about 1,50m long. Cables ? better call them wires, because the plus and minus each consisted of one twisted pair of CAT5 Ethernet, as originally advised by B.D. ... (remember, this is to the mid/high).

You can do NOTHING with this "information". But I think the T-Amp chips have a potential which really should be tried out. I'd use the 4x100W chips (50W RMS I think), bridged to 400W (200W RMS) per channel to remain under the distortion level for sure (which would be 30% of total RMS level).
And you know, because it's a chip thing, the whole design is layed out in a data sheet, and you'd know what to tweak.

Give it a chance !

Peter

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