Installing Tube Crowns/Haloes on any tube amplifier, preamp, phono stage, or CD output tube stage will yield major increases in musical warmth, transparency and detail, accompanied by much deeper, less boomy bass and more extended less edgy treble. The Crowns also slightly improve tube cooling, thereby increasing tube life.
The Tube Crowns and Haloes replace our very successful earlier tube vibration control product, the Tube Anchor. The new designs are far easier to install and yield even better sound than the much-praised old Anchors. The two major design advances incorporated in the Tube Crown and Halos are:
a) three point contact to more cleanly drain vibration out of the tube.
b) much better mass optimization to match each tube family.
Tube Crowns are the end product of twelve years of listening experiments to improve the sound of tubes through vibration control. These experiments have led to the following clear conclusions—and it is these findings that underlie the final design of Tube Crowns and Tube Haloes:
• Tubes significantly distort music signals due to both external (room and floor) vibrations and internal vibrations generated by electrical currents flowing through the tube itself and through nearby on-chassis components (capacitors, transformers, etc.)—even tubes that are not audibly micro phonic.
• The internally-generated vibrations of tubes cause much more sonic degradation than any room and floor vibrations. Tubes are more subject to vibration-caused degradation than any other circuit component.
• Coupling the tube to a material that acts as a good mass sink for vibrational energy can make major improvements in sound (but the wrong material, like any soft damping material, actually degrades sound).
• Rigid point contact between the sink and the tube yields more efficient and much more reflection-free transfer of vibrational energy than area contact. In other words, point contact yields far better sound quality. Worst of all is coupling the sink to the tube via springs or soft coupling materials like rubber O-rings.
• Brass is a significantly better sounding sink material for tube vibrations than lead, aluminum, plastic or any other high internal damping material.
• The brass sink must have substantial mass to achieve major sonic improvements but more mass is not automatically better. There is an optimum mass for each major family of tubes, which can only be determined by varying the mass and listening. We have, in fact, tuned the mass of each size range of our Crowns to that optimum.
• The good effect of our Tube Crowns and Haloes is nearly doubled if they are grounded. The quality of the grounding wire used is very audible.
• Tube cooling is enhanced by the Tube Crown, due to a) the increased airflow created by the chimney effect of the Crowns; b) the nearly perfect infrared heat absorption of the internal carbon black coating; and c) the high thermal conductivity of the brass (relative to glass) which leads to better heat transfer to the air rising inside and outside the Crowns.
