The plates of the 12AU7 are about 240V at startup and they drop down to 60-100V during operation. If you don't want to load this stage, you need to directly couple a device to those plates with very high input impedance. I'm not so sure an opamp is going to handle those voltages well.
I was thinking about this the night I wrote it, one of the reasons I was choosing an OP AMP in my thoughts was because they should be able to have very, very high input resistance. However maybe I am just too inexperienced and hung up on theoretical OP AMPs. Once I thought more about the voltages I could be dealing with I started rethinking the OP AMP route because getting something that can handle those higher voltages is probably very expensive, and probably even harder to find one with a good slew rate and also being unit gain stable.
There is no DC part of the signal; the signal is all AC. The amount of AC present depends on your source output and the position of the potentiometer.
Hm, I guess I was confused with what I was looking at on the Crack schematic that I was looking at.
I have attached a picture to try to clarify what I got the idea from, maybe I just have a fundamental misunderstanding? I assumed I would need a capacitor to get rid of this DC component in my signal.
I still don't see how you're going to implement a unity gain buffer with an op-amp without loading the circuit. The source follower will not load the driver stage.
Draw one up and post it.
I will work on this however I still think that there must be some misunderstanding on my end about the schematic.
Well, the source follower requires one fet, one loading resistor, one coupling cap, and one resistor to keep the output side of the coupling cap at ground potential. What does your opamp circuit require?
I had assumed that the source follower would require less components to achieve however I was unfamiliar with how high the input resistance would be, I am also pretty inexperienced in what constitutes high output resistance, or what would be high enough. As said before from my limited experiencing of op amps I would assume they have very, very high output impedance, granted maybe what gives them this feature from the beginning could be a source follower at the beginning stage, I will have to look into that.
I want to thank you for dealing with me, to be honest right out of college I have been mostly doing systems engineering work for the past 2 years and I am rusty on my real electrical knowledge, plus even in college I somehow wondered how I was even passing. Kind of sad to admit that I guess...