Valve MC headamp

[Chris]

I use a tuned Hagerman Piccolo headamp powered by an R-core tranny and Salas LV shunt mosfet regulator upstream of my similarly OTT tuned P10 valve phono stage. OTT no doubt but very quiet. I am intrigued by an old valve design I found on DIY Audio called the MC Hammer which uses a pair of common ground, common grid ECC88s. Nowadays no-one seems interested in valve headamp designs presumably for reasons of cost and noise but does anyone know of any other valve headamp designs ?

[Arkless Electronics]

It's just not practical from a noise POV... believe me I've been there, done it and got the T shirt ;) If you have loads of good ECC88's and don't mind having to select good enough ones... and then repeat this probably every 3 months 'cos one of the selected good ones has started making funny noises... then yeah they sound great :eyebrows:

[lurcher]

In my experience you can get better results from a high gm pentode than ecc88, E810F, D3a, E280F, 6J52p that sort of thing. You wont get noise down to that of a 2sk170 or similar, its doable, but hard work.

[Chris]

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/attachments/analogue-source/9947d1051321584-mc-hammer-mc-headamp.gif

This is the circuit I found. It´s quite old and indeed he says the power supply is eminently improvable nowadaysbut that he used it for years and no hassle. He also mentions that probably high GM pentodes tend to self oscillate which would complicate matters.