Dreaming of a Bottlehead integrated amp with phono...

[ajkdc]

Recently I finally found the unassembled Stereomour and Seduction kits that got misplaced and lost in my storage space during a particularly hectic time in my life. In the interim I acquired a Stereomour II and Eros II and so need to figure out what to do with the rediscovered kits. I could, of course, just sell them unassembled at a loss, but I had an inspiration that may or may not be feasible.

Recalling the TV commercial where a guy eating a chocolate bar collides with another guy eating peanut butter, thereby inventing the Reese’s peanut butter cup, I’m wondering if it’s technically possible to graft the Seduction phono stage into the Stereomour and power it from Stereomour’s power supply. In order to free up space on the top plate for the two phono stage tubes, I imagine having to drill holes in the wood base and relocate the input selector and volume/balance pots there.

My preference, of course, would be for the next iteration of the Stereomour (III) to be designed with an optional upgrade for a built-in Eros II-style phono stage. But in the interim, this proposed  Stereomour/Seduction mashup may be the closest I can get to my personal Bottlehead Holy Grail...

[Paul Birkeland]

The Stereomour I power transformer more than likely would have adequate high voltage and low voltage current available to power a Seduction style phono stage, but probably not an Eros.  The problem will be that the B+ is about twice as high, so some redesign work will have to be done for that.  The Seduction also has a specially designed power transformer that's super quiet and really well suited for use in a phono preamp, while that's not as critical and wasn't a design focus for the Stereomour power transformer.  The Eros and Reduction have a further iteration of that power transformer design focus and are even quieter.

It's really, really hard to imagine selling an integrated amp with four empty tube socket holes for a phono preamp upgrade that many customers don't want.  It would also be pretty brutal to build an Eros into an integrated like that, then have to buy a new Eros when you want to upgrade to a BeePre and a Kaiju. 

The modular approach also makes debugging so much easier.  If you power a Seduction off your Stereomour power supplies and you turn the amp on and the fuse blows, it could be so many different things compared to just having the fuse blow in the Seduction or in the Stereomour. 

If you absolutely have to do this, I would start with a custom chassis.  If you sent those kits to me and wanted that done, I would take the old Seduction I have here and power it with the Stereomour transformer to check the noise performance before I did anything else! It might be that the layout has to be redesigned with the power transformer in one corner of the chassis and the phono preamp in the other, just to be safe.

-PB