Best Balanced Tube Amp To Pair With Meridian G02?

Ralph, I had seen a similar comment in an ad listing that your amps do not require all of the tubes to be installed to operate. Is there a minimum number of tubes, ie. half or something like that which is required? Is this true of all tube amps (for the power tubes at least)?

I would love to own one of your amps, sound fantastic but I always think to myself, how much does it cost to replace all those tubes? Which may say just as much about my ability to afford one of your beautiful sounding amps.

Ckoffend, you can usually run the amp with half the power tubes. Its a good idea to derate one of the power fuses but that is easy- just change the fuse. This is not something you can do with any tube amp BTW.

The tubes are inexpensive since they do not require matching.

Ralph, is the S-30 equal in sound quality to the M60's? I read something a while back that stated that, other than the wattage differences, all Atmasphere power amplifiers had the same sound quality.

Just wondering as I wait for either the M60's MkII.3, or an S-30 MK.II to show up for sale. I would then plan to send the unit(s) to you to upgrade to 3.1 status.

The more that I think about it, and given a great deal of input from audio aficianados here, and elsewhere, my speakers would almost certainly be driven better by 60wpc than 30. Which means the M60 MKII.3 are clearly my best option. And, having given this a tremendous amount of thought, that is what I want, heat be damned.

The issue now, is that I've seen these on Audiogon no more than a couple times in the past few years. They were only made from October 2003, until December 2005. And I really just don't like the look of the newer, wide chassis.

Sadly, this makes it almost certain that I will have to make a secondary choice of amplifiers to purchase. And I really, really, want an Atma-sphere. Based on that, I can hold out for, say, six months, but after that, well, I will have to make a hard choice and actually buy something.

Ralph, thanks for the explanation on the modification. Can you elaborate a little more based on the following:

First, is what you describe the same technique that is referred to as cathodyne? From what I have gathered from this technique the signal is applied to the grid, one side taken from plate and the other phase on its cathode. I have also heard that there could be issues where the impedances are not the same. For example, plate source Z is say 20K and cathode source is 1K. In this situation the problem is at high frequencies, capacity overtakes the plate side and it rolls off highs, while the cathode side still works. The signal is then an algebraic sum of the original signal.

I'm not an engineer so I'm trying to digest this because it appears to be a very simple and inexpensive mod, but then I have to wonder why more people don't do it this way versus using an input transformer. Any additional comments and insights you have would be appreciated.