audioXpress May 2024 Glass Audio Special Issue Now Available

In the 2024 Glass Audio Special issue there’s Menno van der Veen’s TubeSociety TS-2022-OTL hybrid amplifier, and a Low-Feedback Triode Amplifier With Zero Output Impedance (ZOI) as DIY projects, designed by Tim Mellow and Peter Farrow. More great audio electronic articles by Rudolf Moers, Christopher Paul, and Dimitri Danyuk. Read about sustainable acoustical absorption, the Pure Acourate Sound Project, and The Neurochrome Story. And Andrew C. Russell concludes his High-Performance 60-Watt Class A Amplifier project.

With the entirely new TAD 6V6GT-STR REDBASE, German company Tube Amp Doctor Musikhandels GmbH introduced a new family member to their REDBASE high quality premium tube series. An ideal tube for Fender Deluxe Tweed 5E3 or Blackface Princeton Reverb guitar amps, single ended Class A amps like the Fender Tweed Champ, Vibro Champ, Fender Champion 600 or the Univalve. As the company explains, many boutique amp builders have already embraced the TAD 6V6GT-STR REDBASE and the company is ready to ship worldwide!

Schiit Audio is promoting the 10-tube Folkvangr, its first limited-edition headphone amplifier. The first DC-coupled, output transformerless (OTL) and output capacitorless (OCL) headphone amp, Folkvangr also includes an 8X impedance multiplier to increase versatility with low-impedance headphones. Limited to a 250-piece run, the Folkvangr headphone amp is priced at $1799, including a full complement of input and output tubes.

Targeting project studios and musicians, Automated Processes Inc., unveiled a new line of professional audio equipment, called API Select. Still designed, built and tested at the API factory in Jessup Maryland, the new API Select range is specifically engineered to complement API's classic mix of microphone preamplifiers, equalizers and compressors, and adds some tube-based designs and guitar-pedal form-factors, which are new to the brand.

Eplex7 DSP, a music software company from Europe specializing in emulations of classic synthesizers and analog processors, introduced a software plug-in that basically explores all the creative possibilities of a tube stage. The VD76 recreates the full audio path, based on Eplex7's analog emulation technology, combining the emulation of actual analog circuits and effects of individual components, in this case, pentodes and triodes. The result, enables adding the typical warmth and coloration effects of vintage tubes.

For the May 2019 "Glass Audio" special edition, audioXpress asked Erik Owen to share with us his experience with the new Nu:Tekt HA-K1 “Tube” headphone amplifier using the novel Korg Nutube 6P1 device. This interesting headphone amplifier is sold as a kit for $199, it's relatively easy to assemble, and - more interestingly - makes for a practical way to actually induce some of the magic of tubes in a relatively portable configuration.

audioXpress readers are well familiarized with Richard Honeycutt's Hollow State column. In many of his articles, Honeycutt explored distortion in a quest to find the origin of “tube sound.” In this article, he takes a more general view of possible amplifier differences, solid- or hollow-state, focusing on different amplifiers’s differences in sounds, and a correct subjective evaluation process of components and systems. This article was originally published in audioXpress, October 2012.

Which sounds better — a tube or solid-state amp? The "Great Debate" has been going on for decades. Now it's time to put the debate to rest. In audioXpress, November 2012, Richard Honeycutt's published this article exploring how to detect audio amplifiers’s differences in sound and the need for a correct subjective evaluation process of components and systems.