Wanted: Valve Integrated

[montesquieu]

Dont know if this would be of interest to you but it is a bit of a bargain

Definitive is selling their ex dem Trafomatic SM300B for ££1900 but I'm sure you could haggle.

Possibly good with Monitor Golds (would depend on the output impedance) which can get away with 20w. Would struggle with the 15in HPDs.

[mikeyb]

Built in DAC, remote as well, oodles of power, what's not to like.

Jerry didn't rate one when he tried it and I trust his judgement.

[mikeyb]

Possibly good with Monitor Golds (would depend on the output impedance) which can get away with 20w. Would struggle with the 15in HPDs.

Yeah I did check that one out but again discounted it.

[Firebottle]

Jerry didn't rate one when he tried it and I trust his judgement.

Fair play and no criticism of your stance, it sounds a pity that evidently Pathos don't use circuitry similar to my hybrid power amp

[montesquieu]

Fair play and no criticism of your stance, it sounds a pity that evidently Pathos don't use circuitry similar to my hybrid power amp

At the risk of going OT, what would you say makes a hyrbid amp work vs one that doesn't? My (albeit limited) experience with them suggests that more often than not they fail to gel in some important aspect or other (the tube often muddying the sound but failing to mollify the less desirable aspects of solid state power devices), being far from the win-win they are often presented as.

Radford famously of course went the other way to today's hybrid orthodoxy and had JFETs on the input with KT88s on the output, something that to me intuitively I would expect to work rather better than the more usual mixed configuration, since it's power transistors that are usually the most problematic.

[Firebottle]

Going hybrid for me is taking the best from either technology, however one could think of a Mosfet as a solid state valve with the great benefit of offering low impedance.

The valve driver stage is assisted by SS to work in as linear a configuration as possible whilst the output Mosfets are in effect just a low distortion power buffer.