Looking at getting the Kaiju to run my near field speaker set up on ~87db speakers. My desk is currently set up in one corner of the room. To give a ruff measurements: The fronts of the speakers would be about 6' away from a wall. The backs would be about 30' from a wall. Left side about 5' and right side about 25'. Also the ceiling is 9' high above the desk then take a sharp incline to 14'. Basically I'm wondering if, in my very unique room situation, the kaiju would be enough for near field use. I am currently using a 75watt SMSL amp and it gets plenty loud. I have it set at about half volume then use my pre-amp to fine control the volume.
Near field use on 87db speakers in a masive room.
- Thread starter currly30
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For desktop use, the Kaiju would definitely be plenty of power. We have had many customers in the past use our 2W SEX amp with 87dB desktop speakers for this use. If your speakers are 8 ohms, you can get out your multimeter and set it to AC volts, then open up a tone generator app and play a 60Hz tone through your speakers until you see 8V on your meter. That would represent 8W and the Kaiju still has some dynamic headroom beyond that.
The Kaiju is not at all optimized for 2A3 tubes and you would have to replace the power transformer and redesign the circuit to make that work, at which point you'd end up pretty close to a Stereomour.
The Kaiju is not at all optimized for 2A3 tubes and you would have to replace the power transformer and redesign the circuit to make that work, at which point you'd end up pretty close to a Stereomour.
Thermioniclife
Member
An S3X at 2w sounds fine in nearfield with Paradigm Atoms and Overnight sensations in my Evil laboratory.
Quick follow up question on testing what 8 watts sounds like.
If I run a 60Hz tone through my speakers and get the Volt meter to read 8V. If I stop the tone and switch to regular music will that represent how loud music will sound coming out of the Kaiju?
When I switched to music from the tone the volt meter dropped to 1V-2V when the music was playing.
If I run a 60Hz tone through my speakers and get the Volt meter to read 8V. If I stop the tone and switch to regular music will that represent how loud music will sound coming out of the Kaiju?
When I switched to music from the tone the volt meter dropped to 1V-2V when the music was playing.
That kind of depends on the settings on the device you're on and the music itself, so that's not a great comparison.
One more question.
I also found the Elekit TU-8900/8600 while looking for a Kit 300B. It seems to be similar to the Kaiju but I haven't been able to find any comparisons between the 2. Does anyone happen to know the differences between them?
Since I own the Mainline the headphone amp on the Elekit would be pretty useless.
I also found the Elekit TU-8900/8600 while looking for a Kit 300B. It seems to be similar to the Kaiju but I haven't been able to find any comparisons between the 2. Does anyone happen to know the differences between them?
Since I own the Mainline the headphone amp on the Elekit would be pretty useless.
That's a tough question to answer since it's a competitor's product, but I'll try to do my best to give some objective differences from my own perspective.
The Elekit in a way is more like what we used to sell back in the day. The kit is offered with some budget iron with lots of hints dropped that you should really go for the Lundahl upgrade if at all possible. We did this with our SEX monoblocks and Paramour monoblocks and we worked with Magnequest to create better iron for those pieces. There are some missing dimensions to the specs on those stock Elekit amps that I would imagine are rather drastically improved with the Lundahl bits.
The schematic for the 8600 is floating around and it has a vastly more complicated power supply than the Kaiju and active biasing circuitry, but the 300B driver is rather simple and multiple stages. I would expect less 120Hz noise making it from the power supply to the speaker terminals. The DC filament supply on this amp is a bridge rectifier and a cap.
The Kaiju has an incredibly simple power supply, very simple 300B biasing, but a more complicated driver stage, which is just a single triode driving the 300B. The increase in 120Hz noise that you might expect to see at the speaker terminals will be somewhat mitigated by the parallel feed output stage. The (available) DC filament supply is regulated and keeps Jac at EML happy.
I believe the 8600 with the Lundahl transformers will make more than 8W (maybe 11?), but it also runs pretty high plate voltage. R114/214 on the 8600 are twice the allowable value on the Western Electric published datasheet, and I have experienced this causing problems with Russian 300Bs in a different amplifier in the past, but YMMV and this is something I have run into in many 300B amps. With the 12AX7 input stage, the schematic shows either a 50K or 100K volume pot, and I would strongly advise against running a 100K pot into a 12AX7.
The Kaiju will make less power and requires a bias adjustment to the driver stage, so I would say it's less user friendly. I think the big advantage to the Kaiju comes if you happen to blow up one of the PC boards, as everything is modular and we can just send out replacement parts pretty easily. I've seen something like this happen from the wrong 9 pin tube being put into the amp, and a repair like that can be done pretty easily by the builder.
The Elekit in a way is more like what we used to sell back in the day. The kit is offered with some budget iron with lots of hints dropped that you should really go for the Lundahl upgrade if at all possible. We did this with our SEX monoblocks and Paramour monoblocks and we worked with Magnequest to create better iron for those pieces. There are some missing dimensions to the specs on those stock Elekit amps that I would imagine are rather drastically improved with the Lundahl bits.
The schematic for the 8600 is floating around and it has a vastly more complicated power supply than the Kaiju and active biasing circuitry, but the 300B driver is rather simple and multiple stages. I would expect less 120Hz noise making it from the power supply to the speaker terminals. The DC filament supply on this amp is a bridge rectifier and a cap.
The Kaiju has an incredibly simple power supply, very simple 300B biasing, but a more complicated driver stage, which is just a single triode driving the 300B. The increase in 120Hz noise that you might expect to see at the speaker terminals will be somewhat mitigated by the parallel feed output stage. The (available) DC filament supply is regulated and keeps Jac at EML happy.
I believe the 8600 with the Lundahl transformers will make more than 8W (maybe 11?), but it also runs pretty high plate voltage. R114/214 on the 8600 are twice the allowable value on the Western Electric published datasheet, and I have experienced this causing problems with Russian 300Bs in a different amplifier in the past, but YMMV and this is something I have run into in many 300B amps. With the 12AX7 input stage, the schematic shows either a 50K or 100K volume pot, and I would strongly advise against running a 100K pot into a 12AX7.
The Kaiju will make less power and requires a bias adjustment to the driver stage, so I would say it's less user friendly. I think the big advantage to the Kaiju comes if you happen to blow up one of the PC boards, as everything is modular and we can just send out replacement parts pretty easily. I've seen something like this happen from the wrong 9 pin tube being put into the amp, and a repair like that can be done pretty easily by the builder.
Paul Joppa
Moderator
Music signals have peak voltages that can be 5 times the average, on well-recorded dynamic music. (Much pop music is severely compressed and the peak-to average ratio can be as low as 1.25 ). This is called "headroom." It complicates loudness prediction...
...and the Kaiju has some dynamic headroom above the 8W as well, particularly for short transients.
PJ and I can pretty much nuke any yes/no question asked on this forum
PJ and I can pretty much nuke any yes/no question asked on this forum
PB has done a pretty good job of avoiding subjective comparisons with a competitive product, which has been our policy for the past 30 years. I'll just point out that the 11 watts output he's estimating for the Elekit vs. the 8 or 9 watts for a Kaiju means nearly jack when it comes to audible differences in power output. I'll also say that I feel very lucky having PJ around to design our iron. There are some very good winders out there and we went through most of the existing (and some no longer existing) winders over the years. We found that we could get closest to what we wanted - reasonable cost and very high performance - by PJ designing our own.
Thank you. That actually did answers quite a bit about the differences in parts.
I figures the Kaiju had higher quality transformers. I haven't read much on the quality of Lundahl transformers. I just know they are better than the cheap stock ones on the Elekit. I would get the DC filament on the Kaiju which, if I understood right, bring the noise level down to being on par with the Elekits more complex power supply.
Tube rolling and customizing is quite important to me and based on what you are saying the Kaiju is more accessible for modification. Also being able to use any 300B on the Kaiju is a huge plus.
11W vs 8W is maybe 10% more in volume difference. So really the power is negligible.
I didn't even think about how difficult repairs would be on the Elekit. Since it is all one board so if something goes wrong you would have to replace it all.
I figures the Kaiju had higher quality transformers. I haven't read much on the quality of Lundahl transformers. I just know they are better than the cheap stock ones on the Elekit. I would get the DC filament on the Kaiju which, if I understood right, bring the noise level down to being on par with the Elekits more complex power supply.
Tube rolling and customizing is quite important to me and based on what you are saying the Kaiju is more accessible for modification. Also being able to use any 300B on the Kaiju is a huge plus.
11W vs 8W is maybe 10% more in volume difference. So really the power is negligible.
I didn't even think about how difficult repairs would be on the Elekit. Since it is all one board so if something goes wrong you would have to replace it all.
8W to 11W is 1.4dB, but both amps are going to clip pretty softly and have reasonable headroom.
I can’t speak for other people, but speaking for myself, I hate soldering and desoldering PC boards. The Elekit is one big PC board and my personal experience is that it’s really easy to mistakenly create solder bridges on PC boards. It’s also easier to create cold solder joints unless you’re experienced soldering PC boards. Desoldering PC boards is also a major PITA (although finally discovering solder suckers made it much easier). One of the many reasons I love Bottlehead kits is that they are largely NOT built on PC boards and are therefore much easier to solder, desolder, troubleshoot and modify.
Just my 2 cents and YMMV.
Just my 2 cents and YMMV.
Since I am going to be using the Amp in a near field situation. Would the Stereomour II be a better amp to look at getting? I have read the 2a3 is a more musical sounding tube than the 300B. How does the sound differ between the Kaiju and the Stereomour II? Or would I need the extra power of the Kaiju for my speakers? If I understand correctly the Kaiju should net me an extra ~4db of sound.
