Here's a little project that PB and I have been working on for the past few months. It's the culmination of what we have learned over the past several years designing headphones amps from budget conscious models like Crack to our premium Mainline kit. It is based pretty much upon the same best-we-can-do, no-prisoners sensibility that compelled us to tackle the Tape Project concept. The amp uses Thoriated filament 845 directly heated triodes and neon bar graph indicator tubes, hence the name Neothoriator. I admit I was at the Science Fiction exhibit at EMP on Sunday and was captivated by the Terminator they had on display, which influenced my choice of the name.
The amp is running the 845 tubes at a relatively low and very linear power level, about 4 watts per channel. The driver tube is a very linear 5965 tube, chosen to keep up with the amazing linearity of the 845. We use tightly regulated DC for the 845 filaments. And of course we use all of our usual tricks to get tight punchy bass and extended, smooth highs - Camille Cascode Constant Current Sources, hybrid tube/SS shunt regulation, parallel feed transformer output. This amp will run just about any headphone you can throw at it. We even have a special setting for super efficient IEMs and Grados, and two pairs of binding posts on the back in case you can't resist trying a headphone amp with speakers.
To spice things up a bit we have added 1N-9 neon bar graph tubes, that can be adjusted to help you visualize limits to levels, to help keep you from harming your hearing or the headphone drivers. The attenuator is our special coarse/fine wide range design that, frankly, sounds better than anything else we could buy and will help to accommodate the wildly varying sensitivities of different cans.
The cabinet is custom machined from aluminum and acrylic, with red powder coat and matte black leather accents. Transformers are all by Bottlehead. There are both TRS and 4 pin XLR jacks on the front, and the output can be set for single ended or balanced wiring. There are three sets of inputs on the back panel as well as a tape output.
While the amp will work very well with pretty much any headphone you can come up with, it was conceived with one particular headphone in mind. New headphones come out to shoot for the title of "best" before every trade show, but for me the AKG K1000 ear speaker is a classic concept that has yet to be improved upon. And so I initiated this project with my own K1Ks in mind. We hope to be able to locate a few pairs of these legendary beasts to offer with a Neothoriator order. Price for the amp alone will be $10,000 and $12,500 if and when we find K1000s to package with the amp.
We're finishing up the last few details in the next week or two and I would be very happy to chat with you about having us build a Neothoriator for you.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 10:27:50 AM by fullheadofnothing »
Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.
