Choking my amps...

[ALL212]

There are many reads on putting in a choke.  What do they do for me? 

[Lar]

Lower the noise floor.

[Paully]

Do they lower ripple, make the sound smoother?  When I put the CX-7 in my Pramounts, smooth was my feeling.  Both Grainger and I heard a noticeable improvement.

[Daikini]

Chokes as opposed to resistors in the power supply do result in less ripple, but for me that's not the main attraction. Power supplies on bottlehead gear are plenty quiet as designed. With chokes, you can use lower value caps to get the same smoothing, which makes putting a film cap in the last position feasible. Just about any film cap will have lower ESR than the best electrolytics, and that's where I think much of the sonic benefit comes from.

[RayP]

You might find it interesting to play with a utility called PSUD that many builders use to design their power supplies. There is a learning curve to become proficient in its use but it is quite easy to play around to get an idea of what a choke will do for you.

http://www.duncanamps.com/psud2/

In addition if you search the Audio Asylum http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/tubediy/bbs.html there are differing opinions on how big a choke you need in terms of Henries and how much current they should carry. Search on LSES or flywheel and read but please do not mention the subject on that forum. The conversations became very heated. However it is useful to see how PSUD was used by some of the posters to illustrate their findings.

ray

[Paul Birkeland]

Just an FYI - LSES will not provide a sufficiently low noise floor for many of our products - especially the Crack, Reduction, and SEX.