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Tube amp, more low end

I've just taken my first step into tubes, with a TAD-60. My speakers are Gallo 3.1's. I really like this amp! I can't believe how "real" the music sounds. It really is amazing. The one thing that I do feel is lacking however, is low end "slam", as well as control. I know generally speaking, this is a characteristic of tubes. But I'm wondering I there's an affordable tube amp ($1500-$2000), that will offer the magic of the TAD, but with some more low end control?

Also, the TAD is currently running el34's. Would switching to kt88's make much of a difference? If I need to spend $300 or $400 on better tubes, I'd just as soon upgrade the amp.

Than
ecruz
efner's avatar
efner
99 posts
 
With the Gallo sub amp it will be like having stereo sub woofers,and they blend in perfectly wth the rest of the speakers
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efner's avatar
efner
99 posts
 
I definetly would keep the EL34's!
xti16
1,495 posts
 
I did mention that I only listened to the EL34's for about 5 hrs and put the KT88's back in. I did that because when I was auditioning a demo Octave I only had 3 days and 3 sets of tubes (EL34's - KT88's and 6550's). BTW the tubes belong to Dynaudio and my dealer. I Like them all and was doing the demo without my sub to compare just the amps. The EL34's were light on the bass. Now that I bought the Octave I've decided since the 6550's were on order I was going to listen to each set of tubes for at least 2 weeks before rolling to the next set. The KT88's are the ones in now. It also takes a little time to adjust the sub for the different tubes. Tube rolling is fun - at least for me. Oh yeah I have a Rel B3 sub FWIW.
raquel
841 posts
 
The ability of a tube amp to control woofers on low impedance (4 Ohm) speakers is mostly a function of the quality of its output transformers and size of its power supplies. Beefy power supplies are not at all cheap, and output transformers of the quality required to really do the job are extremely expensive - they only show up in the very best tube amps. There's no solution other than moving to speakers with a much more benign impedance (or switching to a similarly priced solid-state amp, which of course brings its own set of compromises).
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