Ultrasone Unveils Volcano Headphone Tube Amplifier

The Bavaria-based headphone manufacturer just introduced a new high end product to complement its existing high-end Edition Series headphones. Designed by Ultrasone and manufactured in Hungary, the new Volcano headphone amplifier continues the brand's tradition of aiming for reference products with superior sound quality, also perfectly matched to the Ultrasone Edition 15 reference headphones. Each Volcano is a carefully handcrafted unit, in a solid metal chassis and front panel with real wood side panels.

I ordered this book, Getting the Most Out of Vaccum Tubes, from KCK Media Corp. while I was researching tube service life issues. It is an unusual book, not discussing what you can do with tubes, how to use them in circuits, operating parameter calculations, or that sort of thing. Instead, it is solely devoted to factors that decrease useful service life or cause catastrophic failures.

High-end audio adepts do not only like music. Many of them also like to construct their own tube amplifier. For those, Menno van der Veen (electronic design) and Guido Tent (mechanical design and realization) created their newest Valve Amplifier kit: the Vanderveen-Trans-SE10. All parts of the case, the components and the transformers are of the highest quality. The DIYer only has to combine all these fine components into a great amplifier.

We invite our readers to a return to the past, when the original Blackburn manufacturing site where Millard tubes were once made, was shipping the TechTube Blackburn E813CC - an engineering effort to redesign the ECC83 dual triode, claiming more accuracy and more consistency. "The famous Blackburn MicroTech Solutions tube factory has launched the first in a line of audio tubes featuring the first radical re-design in tube technology in over 40 years," writes Neville Roberts in his original 2009 report for audioXpress.

audioXpress May 2020 Glass Audio/Tube Focus edition is now available. Highlighted on the cover is a review of the RødeTest FuzzMeasure Audio and Acoustic Measurement Software and Ethan Winer's experiments to measure capacitor distortion. For tube enthusiasts, Bill Reeve repurposes an old Shure preamp for line-level duty, and Bruce Heran details how he built his two Mini Blocks tube amplifiers. Mike Rothacher shares an inexpensive MOSFET Follower (MoFo) Class A amplifier project, Richard Honeycutt provides valuable lessons about repairing guitar amplifiers, and there's plenty more audio electronics focused articles. Download now!

Audio Media Research (AMR), the company originally founded by Hartley Peavey as a research and development branch of Peavey Electronics, announced the acquisition of the ReValver guitar amplifier modeling software line from Peavey Electronics. AMR is now a stand-alone entity focused on audio software and digital signal processing for the music creation market, specializing in sound emulation with tube, circuit and component level modeling.

This approach to RIAA equalization results in a high-quality phono preamp featuring the high-transconductance 5842 tubes. The author adapts Erno Borbely's project of a transistorized phono preamp with a vacuum tube implementation. These articles were originally published in audioXpress, October 2003 and January 2010. For this repost, we decided to merge the two articles in one single page.

audioXpress December 2019 dives into the latest wireless audio and DSP platforms and solutions in a dedicated Market Update, followed by a review of the latest Audio Precision APx555 B Series audio analyzer. David Logvin shares his experience with the xCORE VocalFusion development platform by XMOS, while Michael Steffes re-confirms a theory that cascaded amplifier + ADC harmonic distortion combine as voltage swings. Christopher Paul explores alternative approaches to the design of a linear current regulator for audio tube amplifiers, Menno van der Veen details an 18 W single-ended valve amplifier using Trans technology, and Richard Honeycutt investigates whether or not swapping out comparable tubes makes any audible difference in a guitar amplifier’s sound. Download your own copy now!

The November 2019 edition of audioXpress is now available with a wide range of technical topics in audio electronics and design. We review the Benchmark LA4 Line Amplifier and the new Hooke Verse Bluetooth Binaural Recording Headphones. Jan Didden proposes an updated version of his High-Voltage Delay for Tube Amplifiers, and Thomas Zarbo, Jr. explains how to build his Tenacious Bass-8 Powered Subwoofer. And, learn more about Data-Over-Sound, MU amplification topologies, and Auverdion’s Aurora open-source DSP platform. Now available!

Allen & Heath has revealed a new stunning new mixing console design. Avantis is the third model to be based on the company's XCVI FPGA engine, allowing 96kHz operation and puts this next-generation technology available across all its 64 channels and 42 configurable busses, with twin Full HD touchscreens, extensive I/O options and processing from the company's flagship dLive mixing system. The new console is also designed with a surprisingly robust all-metal structure inspired by tubular exo skeletons of super-bikes!