Do you hear differences in OPT metals?

[dcoyle]

I recently made a SE EL84 with an M6 opt and it seemed to have a bit more detail going through than other amps I have built with the same configuration. Of course this is totally subjective-- to wonder if the difference is due to the metal when there are so many things that are not identical, amp to amp.

I have never been able to A/B the effects of different metals in output transformers. Assume operation below magnetic saturation, has any one ever subbed a, say, Hammond grade opt for a similar one made of M6 or ..., in a situation where the differing metals were the main variable?

Anyone had any experience contrasting the sounds of OPT metals? If I want more "inner detail" do I want laminations of more exotic metals or will larger transformers of less expensive alloys sound the same? Let's ignore the changes due to a larger area coil for less permeable metals, for the sake of clarity.

Thanks

Dan

[J M Fahey]

Easy to check: wind 2 exact same transformers in different metals, trace them, compare curves.
Personally I guess there may be very small differences, below the threshold of audition.

[Enzo]

You said it yourself, so many other things not the same. I suspect that any minor transformer differences would be far less noticeable than those not same things.


In the Marshall Story book, Ken Bran, one of Marshall's early designers, told of having some Fender transformers, so he installed them in one of his Marshall amps, just to see. He said it still sounded like a Marshall.

[potatofarmer]

I've been digging into OT construction lately (still not crazy/stupid enough to try it) but from what I've been able to glean there are so many balances and trade-offs in OT design that only knowing one ingredient doesn't tell you anything about how that OT's going to perform - the finished spec's of the transformer are all you should concern yourself with. They're not going to tell you what the interleaving pattern is, and do you really want to do math anyway? So hopefully they provide a frequency response at a stated power level, primary and secondary impedances, and weight.

An expert chef might use daily-squeezed cold-pressed organic fair-trade free-range ultra-mega-virgin olive oil hand-processed by a blind left-handed Scandinavian teenager who sobs quietly into each batch, but if you take a sample of that oil and mix it in with a jar of Ragu it's just going to taste like Ragu. Possibly because the expert chef was exaggerating about the impact the teenager has on the whole process.

[dcoyle]

Hey potatofarmer, Yeah, well, as someone who understands cis molecules, you should realize the left handedness of the chef was immaterial.

Thanks for your thoughts, all.

Dan

[Enzo]

Oh my. As an official old fart, I lived through the 1960s, and while I do not condone breaking the laws of the land, let us just say I was aware of the goings on in the underworld of drug use. Every dope had its story. One was Nepalese Temple hashish - or one of various other variations - the cannabis was grown in special fields and tended to make high resin content. They then ran naked virgin girls through the fields, and the resin stuck to their skin. Then they scraped the resin off their young, supple bodies and converted it into blocks of hashish. At least that was the story. I don't know if any of the virgins were Scandinavian though.

[J M Fahey]

Funny thing is, the story has a grain of truth, although not drug related.

Should recheck the facts, but just from faded memories, saffron is the World's most expensive spice by weight ,more expensive than gold, it's a tiny inner piece of a certain flower and you need, say, 7000 flowers to get a teaspoon, or 200000 flowers for a pound ... "fresh" ..... which then becomes less than half a pound when dried.
And the plant by itself can't reproduce, it's "self-incompatible" and male sterile; it undergoes aberrant meiosis and is hence incapable of independent sexual reproduction so women (dressed) walk criscrossing the fields and their clothes catch its dust and cross fertilize the plants

of course valuable dust which sticks to clothes is not wasted.

And then crop can be collected just one day a year, because in the morning the flower opens and dies that night.

[Chuck H]

Funny thing is, the story has a grain of truth, although not drug related.

Should recheck the facts, but just from faded memories, saffron is the World's most expensive spice by weight ,more expensive than gold, it's a tiny inner piece of a certain flower and you need, say, 7000 flowers to get a teaspoon, or 200000 flowers for a pound ... "fresh" ..... which then becomes less than half a pound when dried.
And the plant by itself can't reproduce, it's "self-incompatible" and male sterile; it undergoes aberrant meiosis and is hence incapable of independent sexual reproduction so women (dressed) walk criscrossing the fields and their clothes catch its dust and cross fertilize the plants

of course valuable dust which sticks to clothes is not wasted.

And then crop can be collected just one day a year, because in the morning the flower opens and dies that night.

Probably still exaggerated a little But certainly more fun that way. Saffron is the reproductive parts (the fine hairs on the flowers center) of the Crocus sativus flower. Which is indeed self incompatible and male sterile so it's propagated by cutting and cloning rather than by pollination. This method also allows for a field of entirely female flowers with their desirable stigmas. Though I don't know if this is how it was always done. Certainly there must have been a non sterile predecessor in the breeding process to arrive at this flower in the first place since humans weren't splicing genes in 2000BC. All GMO efforts were a matter of cross breeding and time. In this light it seems entirely likely that there was once a "saffron" Crocus that was NOT male sterile and pollinated manually for efficiency and then only the female stigma threads were collected at harvest. I don't imagine the pollen dust was useful for much once the cross pollination was accomplished though. But speculation on this is out of my depth.