A new type of tube guitar amplifier

this is a completely different thing than putting mosfets on something!!!
LOL

Technology

White Papers

ZOTL Technology vs Audio Output Transformers

This paper demonstrates the electrical performance of an amplifier using the ZOTL technology versus the identical amplifier using a high-quality audio output transformer and presents these differences using oscillographs.

Electronic Devices and the Amplification Process

This paper shows how a curve tracer can be used to explore the attributes of the ZOTL technology and contrast it to the shortcomings of the audio output transformer. Also shown is how this tool can be used to optimally design an amplifier.

Patents

5,612,646 Output Transformerless Amplifier Impedance Matching Apparatus

This patent teaches the principles behind the Berning ZOTL technology that can properly match the impedance of vacuum tubes to the impedance of speakers without using audio output transformers. The impedance conversion is done with dc-dc switching converters operating at fixed frequencies well above audio frequencies. The actual voltage and current impedance transformations are done via special high-frequency transformers. This is an RF carrier system that eliminates the frequency-dependent distortions present in audio transformers, and can enable the amplifier to have a wider frequency response and be dc coupled.

4,163,198 Audio Amplifier

This patent details a hybrid tube-FET amplification stage that forms the basis of the Berning TF-10 preamplifier. An important advantage of this amplification stage is the elimination of the parasitic feedback capacitance and thus providing a stage with improved transient response.

3,995,226 Audio Amplifier

This patent describes the screen drive philosophy that has become an important part of many of the Berning power amplifier designs to the present day. The screen drive allows tubes to be operated at much higher efficiencies, much higher power output, and at greatly enhanced reliability. Whereas the patent shows transistors driving tubes, the same principles apply to presently implemented versions of tubes driving tubes. This is also known as the "enhancement" amplifier.
 
wow, it'd have to hit you over the head with itself, wouldn't it?!
LOL


automatic bias

lighter and smaller

no audio output transformer

Any number or combination of octal output tubes

Allows full output tube distortion at any volume level

immediate recovery from overdrive; touch-responsive output tube distortion

drives any load

greatly extended tube lifetimes

world power ready




crap, i wished my boogie could do ANY of these things!!!
:D

The second point is the only thing I'd be interested in.

Other than that I'll stick with my Princeton, Pro Amp Viper, Twin and Champ or any of the other Amps I've been through over the years. As a tired old buffer in the this industry I'm tired of hyped up claims that people have reinvented the wheel only to find that sure it goes round and round but it either falls off every time or just don't go round as fast or smoothly as the old wheels we've used for years. The marketplace will be the test and like Gibson's self tuning guitar recently we shall see how many miles this new wheel has in it.;)
 
crap, i wished my boogie could do ANY of these things!!!
:D

Hey, I wouldn't mind having a whole bunch of those features either. However, I play MY Boogie, not because of the features, but because it sounds fucking awesome.

I'm certainly up to play test the thing, but I think that because guitar amplification has always NOT been full-frequency, I just don't know if an amp designed for full frequency response is really going to produce the sort of sound I'm after. And I don't care about any crazy feature set if I don't like how the amp sounds.
 
yeah, the whole point of this thread is:
there's something actually new, with new patents, coming out.


it'll be cool if it rocks.



you can't diss something you've never heard/played.

it'll be nice to A/B something against all the millions of clones out there.
and the market will decide, if it's worthy or not, i'm sure.

that said, just because VAI and Van Halen have their own designed amps out there, it doesn't make it so anybody else can sound like them!
hehe
 
muttley600

you'd look good carrying around a little amp head that only weighs 5 lbs. with your pinky!
:D
 
muttley600

you'd look good carrying around a little amp head that only weighs 5 lbs. with your pinky!
:D

When it can deliver the sound that my Princeton does I'm there. They'd better work on making lighter speaker magnets as well while they're at it.;)
 
you can't diss something you've never heard/played.

Well, you kind of can.

Imagine a brand-new flashlight design that, instead of using a conventional, inefficient lightbulb, instead uses a special super-efficient transducer that emits light at ultraviolet frequencies. It's brand new technology that's way more efficient than existing designs, is half the weight, has a built in beer opener, and an iPod dock and speakers if you want to rock out while you flashlight!



....except, since it's emitting light at a frequency you can't see, it's useless for running out to the shed after dark.

This sounds like a very intelligent, cutting edge, and innovative approach by a guy who knows an awful lot about audio amplification but almost nothing about guitar amplification. It's an interesting idea, I'd love to check one out, but one of the reasons rock guitars sound the way they do is guitar amps are NOT full frequency. I just don't understand how exactly this is going to work.
 
UGH.
drew, you suck the wind out of the room, dude.

LOL

i bet you're a blast, at the office xmas party.
 
this is a completely different thing than putting mosfets on something!!!
LOL

I did read the patent and study the schematic, brain surgeon, so you can cram your LOL up your poopchute.

Yes, it's completely different, it's using the MOSFETs (you did see the MOSFETs in the schemo, right?) to do an AM radio sort of thing, or a theremin sort of thing if you like. Here's the problem with your "somebody's doing something new with new exciting patents":

That patent isn't new, it's fourteen years old. Filed 1995. Expires in six years. Nobody has licensed it yet for guitar amps to my knowledge. We'll see if anybody feels like copying it for free in six years.

I will bet no, you want to know why? As I said, the power transformer in a tube amp is heavier and more expensive than the output transformer. So the first thing you do if you want to get rid of the big heavy expensive power transformer is you stop using a linear power supply. What do you use instead? A switching power supply, of course. SMPS, just as in this patent, can use much much smaller transformers because they use a high-frequency oscillator to do their dirty work. And thus they achieve much higher efficiency in a much smaller package.

That also means you jettison the completely archaic rectifier tubes. OK, lots of cost and weight saved.

But wait, how come nobody is making a tube amp today with a SMPS? Maybe somebody is, but everybody still thinks the sexiest tube amps are rectifiers, right?

OK, this dude, he wants to eliminate the power AND the output transformers, and replace it with a single SMPS that also drives the output. It's clever, no doubt. Unfortunately, guitars aren't very clever; they are impossibly old-fashioned. So if guitarists haven't wanted the benefits of a SMPS (long out of patent) to eliminate one transformer, why would they suddenly want a SMPS to eliminate both, especially when they really really seem to like their output transformers?

I get that transformers aren't "full range", although the gonzo-size trafos on guitar amps do a credible job, and we like it when the lows saturate anyway (generates low-odd-order distortion on low frequencies, which sounds "fat"). But the tube section of the amplifier is quite full-range, thank you. I mean, a tone stack might throw that away, but most guitarists prefer amps with tone stacks. And of course a woofer isn't full range, but the tweeter is a well understood and looooooooooong out of patent technology. So why doesn't everybody use an acoustic amp (avec tweeter) for their electric guitar? Answer: because electric guitarists don't want frequencies over 8kHz coming out of their cabinets.

I just don't think this guy understands what he is up against. I wrote a white paper on balanced wiring for guitars. There is a funny thread on talkbass where one guy decided to do it to fix a hum problem. A luthier or two and some electronics-type guy insisted it wouldn't work. Nevermind that balanced wiring has been well understood and described for what, 80 years? 100 years? I dunno. But somehow the same technology that works for the entire rest of the world couldn't possibly work for guitars, could it? Until. It. Did. (I hate people that write. like. that! :D :mad:)

OK, so what have we learned? This dude is clever, and yes I think his amp works as advertised. I just don't think anyone will care, based upon this evidence:

- I can build a tube amp with a SMPS providing regulated anode and heater supplies, using a power MOSFET as a current source on an output transformer with another (class A, if you like) MOSFET to buffer the output (with a post-transformer "master" volume that would act more like an power attenuator, but wouldn't need to be high-watt, if you like). That would greatly reduce the size and cost of both the power and output transformers (since the output transformer only has to drive a nominal load), and it would buffer the power tube from the outside world such that whatever load you attach would be fine.

All of that is prior art and can be done royalty-free. So if the basic goals of his patent are to eliminate large transformers and make amplifiers more linear, how come nobody is already using public domain techniques to do that?

Answer: because as soon as you put a transistor anywhere in a tube amp, guitarists will find a reason to hate it, whether rationally or not.

Answer #2: Plug your guitar (without tone controls please) via a 3' or shorter cable into a small high-input impedance FET (or even tube, if you prefer) DI box, and plug that into a good linear mic amp design, into a nice linear power amp design, into nice, flat, full-range, highly accurate studio monitors. Is that the sound you want? I actually kinda dig that sound, but most guitarists don't.
 
laughing out loud at you, mshilarious. :D
man, you seem like you've got some kind of axe to grind.
it's kinda like watching a psychiactric exam, on screen.



That patent isn't new, it's fourteen years old.


wrong.

Patent 5,612,646 Output Transformerless Amplifier Impedance Matching Apparatus
MARCH 18, 1997

but point taken. it's not brand spanken' new.



it's using the MOSFETs (you did see the MOSFETs in the schemo, right?) to do an AM radio sort of thing

wrong again.

no mosfets in the AUDIO signal.

"GAGA-50 uses only vacuum tubes for 100% of its audio power amplification; no transistors, MOSFETs or any other kind of silicon or solid-state based device is used whatsoever for power amplification of the audio signal."

and this, on the power side:

"ZOTL Technology, used in GAGA-50 to provide impedance conversion between output tubes and speaker, does not amplify audio power in any way. Just as audio output transformers provides no audio power amplification, so too ZOTL Technology provides no audio power amplification.

ZOTL Technology emulates an ideal transformer, one that has no limit at the low frequency (i.e., it will operate all the way down to DC, zero Hertz) and that also has a greatly extended high-end, extending up well beyond audio frequencies with much less parasitic capacitance than traditional audio output transformers."



I just don't think this guy understands what he is up against.

ok, let's see your patent on something.
LOL again.....
 
wrong.

Patent 5,612,646 Output Transformerless Amplifier Impedance Matching Apparatus
MARCH 18, 1997

but point taken. it's not brand spanken' new.

:confused:

Um, ok, so it's closer to 13 than 14. How exactly does that prove anything? OMGWTFBBQPWN@GE!!!!11!!cos(0)!!!1

Mshilarious is right, man. I'm really not sure why you're defending this idea as aggressively as you are, but non-full-frequency guitar amps are part of what is generally considered to constitute "good guitar tone." Even if there WAS an advantage to going full frequency, this guy is losing it because 1.) guitar pickups are not broad spectrum, and 2.) guitar speaker cabinets are not full frequency.

I'll be happy (in fact, quite curious) to play test one if I ever get the opportunity, and some of the features are quite cool. But this really looks like a guitar amp by a guy who knows a ton about high end audio and absolutely nothing about electric guitar, and doesn't realize how different a guitar amp is from a stereo amplifier.
 
biggest thing I see is that output transformers are a critical part of guitar amp sound.
If you read interviews with amp designers, they always talk about choosing the trannies carefully ...... some of the sound that guitarists covet comes from how the trannies saturate.

I'm not gonna diss it without trying one but it looks like a High-fidelity design which may sound very good for stereo use but I'm not so sure about guitar usage.


And for what it's worth, I had a stereo amp that was output transformerless back around 1970 or so. It sounded quite good as I remember but it was definitely a high fidelity stereo amp.
Would have been useless for guitar.
 
yep, the first thing i'd do if i had one in house, would be to stand it up against the good ole boogie, and a/b it that way.

i sure hope the manufacturer bothers to do the same kind of test before he puts it out to market.
cuz that's what every other firebreathing guitarist is gonna do!!



yep, the specs are not what's gonna sell this thing.

it's the sound

and, the feel.






but, i'm no luddite.
 
but, i'm no luddite.
Hell, me either.

I had high hopes for modelers and while I still think it's technically feasible to do what is claimed, the reality always falls short. Probably because the price point is a critical consideration.

Does it matter? Depends. There is a lot of TV music that I hear - jingles and TV show intros and interludes - that sound like some kind of modeling rig is being used for the guitar work and guess what? Someone was able to record it and sell it.

It will be the same for this rig, even if it doesn't sound like a "real" tube amp. Except there are going to be a shitload fewer of them around because of the cost, and we may never hear one having been recorded because all of them will be purchased by living room rock stars.
 
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