DGNNAHA, Once Again
The acronym has been submitted to the federal Acronym Selector Service, and DGNNAHA awaits its approval. What? You don't know what stands DGNNAHA for? It is simple enough; but before I explicate how this word was formed from the initial letters of a series of words, let's recall a familiar experience. Your favorite DIY audio magazine (or web-site) loudly proclaims: A New Hybrid Amplifier. Whereupon, your soul plunges. You brace yourself for yet another tedious SRPP stage followed by power MOSFETs, a feeling matched by picking up a five-year old Time magazine in your dentist's waiting room, discouraging and disheartening in the extreme—even a recent issue of Time magazine is a dreary affair, but a five year old one is miserable beyond endurance.
Because the SRPP-input-stage-MOSFET-output-stage hybrid is so simple, so obvious, for the last four decades it has been constantly reinvented by earnest audiophiles who imagine that they have discovered the Holy Grail of audio: all the sweetness and fluidity of vacuum tubes and all the heft and command of solid-state devices. The entirely expensive sounding results of wedding a little bit of expensive glass with a lot of cheap silicon. If only. Possibly the saddest short phrase in English. (The disillusioned defense attorney laments, 'If only my clients weren't so guilty.' Yes, indeed, if only.)
Thus, DGNNAHA stands in place of Dear God No—Not Another Hybrid Amplifier!
A hybrid amplifier is a design of mixed composition, usually mixed technologies, such as vacuum tubes and solid-state devices. To lesser extent, we might call an amplifier a hybrid effort that used both pentodes and triodes or an amplifier that used both OpAmps to drive discrete transistors or an amplifier that used FETs to drive a GainClone power OpAmp, such as the LM3886. To a greater extent, we might envisage an amplifier that accepted electricity at its input and put out fluid pressure or light or a force field at its output a hybrid design. In other words, there are no tight rules restricting what makes a hybrid a hybrid. For example, early on, the first hybrids designs held tube output stages driven by solid-state devices, as power transistors had yet to be created.
In most hybrid designs, one technology passes its signal to another technology, a cascade of signal. But what if both technologies worked in parallel, rather than one after the other? For example, below are three possible arrangements of triode and MOSFET in parallel.
Two Mosfet In Series
Although a PNP transistor was used below the rightmost 6922 triode, a P-channel MOSFET could have been used. Indeed, one was used in the following schematic from that post.
I have been thinking about this hybrid topology lately. It's interesting, although it might fail rule 2 and surely rule 3, being neither entirely safe nor free from poor performance issues. DC coupling is dangerous with tubes and particularly with hybrid power amplifiers. What happens to the speaker, if the 6922 input tube is pulled or wiggled in its socket? I would hate to find out. (The DC servo might save the day via the the 1N4001 rectifier, but then it might be too late.) How many watts can the output stage deliver with a 5.4-ohm source resistor? Not nearly as many as the -60V power-supply rail might imply, as this large-valued resistor steals 5.4/(5.4 + 8) or 40% of the output power. With a 4-ohm speaker, it steals more than 50%.
So is this design irredeemable? No, I don't think so. The 5.4-ohm source resistor was used to weaken the MOSFET's transconductance to the level offered by the ten 6AS7 triodes in parallel. In the following schematic, we see two ways used to reduce the MOSFET's transconductance: the 1-ohm source resistor and the two-resistor voltage divider (14.3k & 10K) that throws away some of the P-channel MOSFET's input signal, effectively reducing its transconductance.
Because eight 6AS7 triodes are used in parallel, the eight 10-ohm cathode resistors are effectively in parallel, so the effective resistance is only 1.25 ohms, which against the peak current draw of 4A, equals a peak voltage drop of 5V. In turn, the the same 4A against the 1-ohm source resistor equals a 4Vpk voltage drop. In other words, in spite of these two resistances, we should easily be able to get ±32Vpk into an 8-ohm load, which equals 64W. Not bad for only four 6AS7 tubes per channel. Okay, we just passed rule number three, no huge compromises in performance, but what about rule two, the safety issue?
Note the DC servo loop based on the OpAmp. It both works to eliminate any DC offset from the output and to ensure that he MOSFET draws the same amount of current as the the eight 6AS7 triodes do. Well, what happens if the triodes are missing from their sockets? My hope is that nothing bad occurs. The DC servo will still control the BUZ906 MOSFET, adjusting its gate voltage to prevent a DC offset. Even without the triodes, the BUZ906 will see a current path to the B+ voltage, through both the 10.5k and 10k resistors. In other words, I think we are safe. In contrast, the previous hybrid also used a DC servo, but its servo directly controlled the 6922's grid, and then indirectly controlled the output MOSFET's gate via the 6922 and the PNP transistor and the 1N4001 rectifier, which made me nervous.
Using four 6AS7 tubes per channel is not as arbitrary as it may seem. My idea was that that a stereo amplifier could be built that held eight 6AS7 tubes, with all eight heater elements stringed up in series and placed across the -50V power-supply rail, each heater getting 6.25Vdc.