Violeta - a single Ended Story

[honeydip]

Hello everybody,

after finishing my Idea of a self designed single-ended d-style amplifier for home use, I would like to give something back to the forum. So here it is, I called her Violeta 5 and here are the Ideas:

1. Combining a tweed clean channel with a d-style OD Section.
2. Champformat Combo using a 12" Speaker.
3. Just a few white knobs
4. Great Sound in both channels at bedroom volume level
5. Purple Tolex and cane grill

I came up with the Idea after finding an old radio, using a tube recifier ez80 with some tubes and I wanted to use the power transformer for the build.
I already had a OT of a single-ended 6BQ5 Tube Amplifier which I would also use. So I started building an started a CleanChannel like an old tweed princeton with volume and tone knob. The OD Section is a typical D-Style OD Section.
The Chassis is very simple and I needed to stack the Smoothing Caps on the bottom and the Board on top of them.
Channel switching is achieved by a pushPull Knob. The TrebleBleed I called Mild and it works, as everybody would expect, like a presence in the od section.

And how does it sound? It's kind of funny but It can sound like almost everything from clean to d-style OD to Marshally Crunch, just like you want it. Here are some gut shots now and some sound files later. BTW It can be quite loud.

How do you guys like it? Feedback appreciated.

Regards
Jan

[dr. who]

Got any soundclips?

[10thTx]

That's cool! Thanks for sharing it. Any chance you have a schematic that you'd be willing to share?

Looking forward to the soundclips.

With respect, 10thtx

[honeydip]

Thank you, I will draw a schematic from the actual circuit, the one I have is an older version, so I need some hours. Now I'm going to record some clips...now.

Jan

[Structo]

Nice job on the amp!

[honeydip]

Here is a soundfile I just recorded, a simple Blues with a lespaul type guitar on clean and lead channel. All guitars are recorded with the Violeta, the les paul and a sm57 and a room microphone 2 feet away from the speaker. A little Reverb and delay that's it.

How do you like it?

Jan

[Structo]

Man, that sounds really good!

Helps that you have the chops too, but the tone is very nice.

Sounds big!

So are you using the 6BQ5 for a power tube?

4-5 watts?

[honeydip]

Thank you.

Yeah it's about 3.5 Watts due to the low plate voltage of about 235V but it's louder than I would play when I practise, so loud enough for at home. I use the 6BQ5 but also tried the 6AQ5 which I use with an adapter. The 6AQ5 is not as loud as the BQ5 but it sound more like a 6V6, ie. cleaner.

BTW while building I had the effect that the clean sound was so much louder compared to the OD sound and I could not figure out why. Any Ideas?

Jan

[Structo]

Not sure but I would love to see a schematic of that amp.

[topbrent]

Well done man! I bet that amp is very fun to play.

It sounds really great. The OD tone starting a 0:34 is seriously awesome.

I would love to see a schematic & some voltages if you have it drawn up.

[rogb]

Great job! Cool playing! Love the EZ80 . Have you tried the circuit with a diode recto too?

[wicker]

Man, that's soo cool, can't wait to see schematic, I suffer to lack of simple amp that could be used at home, 50W monster is waaaaay to much.

[da Geezer]

Thank you.


BTW while building I had the effect that the clean sound was so much louder compared to the OD sound and I could not figure out why. Any Ideas?

Jan

Without seeing the schematic (yet), here is something that helped me with the same problem....that is, IF you have a "clean master" volume.
The attached drawing shows how to bypass the clean master volume when in OD mode. Simple to try by just adding a wire & moving another to a different position on the relay.

Once again, don't know if this will apply to your circuit or not........

Oh, and the amp sounds fantastic, btw! Good work!

Geezer

[Dr-Joned]

Sounds great !!

[honeydip]

Thank you all for your answers and Ideas so far. I just finished drawing the schematic from the actual circuit, rev4. I hope you can read it because it's drawn by hand.

Geezer: Thank you for your idea on aligning the volumes. Because I ran out of ideas, I just limited the signal by a 330K Resistor which is OK but not the way I would like to have it. My Idea was, that the regular EQ dumps more signal than the one I implemented. Could that be true? Like playing with PAB all the time?!

rogb: I have not tried solid state rectification yet, because I'm so happy with the attack of the EZ80. It's a good idea if you would like more headroom with the increased voltage of solidstate rectification.


Basically it's a low power amp with about 240V on the B+ and accordingly there is only 150V or so on the plates of V1 and a little more on V2. I wanted to have an easy way to switch channels so I decided to leave the od channel on all the time and just switch the outputs. This I did in other amps too whithout any problem. It just makes switching easier.

Caps are all OrangeDrops 6PS Types and the rest is what I had at hand at that time. The bypass caps von V1A and V1B are to my taste and could be a place to experiment.

Hope you can read it. I'm looking foreward to your feedback and Ideas.

Regards

Jan