One Texas native who builds a line of boutique amps mentioned in his books, seminars, and magazine articles that it makes a "tonal" difference when using the taps in multi-tapped trannys.
He says that you should use the tap that has the most winding or iron in back of it - ie in the case of Heybours for a 'wreck that would mean the 16 ohm tap.
In The Ultimate Tone 3, Kevin O'Connor refutes that statement. Kevin says the entire core is in play even if only a partial winding is used.
Oh man.. I feel dumb.. it took me this long to finally figure out why allynmey always calls him bbqboy... Dan, I might need to borrow your dunce avatar, if you read this..
I always thought it was another person with the same last name? Ive been to seminars by the texas native and have all of his books and stuff. He's a good guy and has a lot of good ideas and perspectives, however we disagree on some things and I always like to hear other opinions, especially when I don't hear the difference. And Ive done a couple of tests.
Amp building is very subjective - I have an EE friend who thinks trainwrecks are nuts. He says Ken broke just about every rule in making an amplifier - maybe why I like them so much!
DerStever wrote:
Amp building is very subjective - I have an EE friend who thinks trainwrecks are nuts. He says Ken broke just about every rule in making an amplifier - maybe why I like them so much!
He did but he knew what he was doing and why. Tell your EE friend: it's not an amplifier, it's a distortion generator capable of producing high sound levels. He'll probably see the light....or not
Aleksander Niemand
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Life's a party but you get invited only once...
affiliation:TUBEWONDER AMPS Zagray!-review
That “Texas” guy used to also write for VG magazine. He makes some surprising blanket statements at times. Some are just wrong (or typos.) My favorite is when he recommends “upgrading” the main filters in vintage (tube rectified) amps to colossal levels. “..they’re so under filtered….go with 600u…..”
(Yes I’m exaggerating a bit.)
That being said, one of the best tones I ever heard live was a Tele thru (what I though was) a BF Princeton. I talked to the player and he said it was a Kendrick inside.
It's interesting to me that this came up. I work with a guy who swears up and down that anything 8 ohms sucks and he can hear the difference. It doesn't even matter if it's 16- ohm speakers in parallel, ANYTHING set up with 8 ohms is to be avoided according to this guy. I guess George Harrison didn't know what he was doing when he used that Deluxe on Abbey Road! (He's a HUGE Beatles fan)
I just can't see how he came upon this conclusion. It makes no sense to me. Can you gentlemen explain it?
Since all OT output windings consist of at least one turn, all the core is used by each output tap.
However, when you're using a 4 or 8, you have an unterminated coil, in the magnetic field, hanging off the end of your OT->speaker connection. This could theoretically have some minor effect.
I must confess to not matching impedance all the time (mostly with SE designs), and different taps do sound different, but I suspect it's more because of the impedance mismatch rather than because I'm using a tap on the secondary coil.
The hi-fi crowd insist on oversized OTs on the premise that more iron and more wire sounds better. They may have a point. In my experience bigger transformers sound bigger.
I prefer 16 ohm speakers and I wire them so I don't end up with less than 8 ohms. The difference is subtle but tangible. It seems a waste to tweak and amp to take best advantage of its nuances and subtleties and then ignore that little bit extra if it's available.
For one of my applications the 16 ohm version of the speakers I use yields 1db more sound pressure than the 8 ohm version.
0 ohms is a dead short. 2 ohms is only 2 ohms removed from a dead short. On an emotional level the more I can put between me and a dead short the better I feel!
IMHO a 4-12 16 ohm cab wired in series parallel like many Marshall cabinets most definitely sound different at 16 ohms than at 8 ohms or 4 ohms. Having a cabinet with an impedance selector on the back makes it easy to experiment with and certainly helps to confirm this considering our "sound memory" in general is kind of weak and the faster you switch, the more accurate the test.
However, again IMHO a SINGLE speaker (same brand, same model, same size, same cabinet) different impedances, all sound the same.
Regards to all
roknroll wrote:However, again IMHO a SINGLE speaker (same brand, same model, same size, same cabinet) different impedances, all sound the same.
No, they don't.
If you think about it it's the same "more wire" issue. More wire around the voice coil equals higher impedance and for some reason equals a slightly higher sound pressure level. That extra little bit of sound pressure level is actually measureable if you have a real time analyzer.
roknroll wrote:However, again IMHO a SINGLE speaker (same brand, same model, same size, same cabinet) different impedances, all sound the same.
No, they don't.
If you think about it it's the same "more wire" issue. More wire around the voice coil equals higher impedance and for some reason equals a slightly higher sound pressure level. That extra little bit of sound pressure level is actually measureable if you have a real time analyzer.
Just to play the devil's advocate, just because a real time analyzer picks it up doesn't mean you can hear it.
