Saturday, April 4, 2009

Darkvoice 336SE Tube Headphone Amplifier.

The Darkvoice 336SE Tube Headphone Amplifier uses two great sounding tubes - the 6SN7 and the 6AS7. The 6AS7 must be the current emperor for tube headphone amplifiers. Of course the 336SE being a product of Chinese origin comes stocked with Chinese equivalents, these may be good tubes but in all honesty they do not do any great justice for the amplifier. Naturally I have tube rolled my 336SE with an RCA 6SN7GTB and a GE 6AS7G Coke bottle tube which are a great sounding duet. Of course there are many other rolling combinations and it all boils down to personal taste.

Darkvoice 336SE is a product of Orphean Sound Audio-Video Lab of Chengdu, China. Chengdu is not a place you would immediately think about producing such products. Visit them at "Darkvoice"


I am still burning in my tubes but the sweet tube sound of these two tubes is breathtaking. I will write up some more on the sonic attributes of this lovely headphone amplifier in the days to come, but there is already a growing fan list with many threads on the 336SE on Head-fi and a simple search would reveal many threads.

For now I will leave you with a teaser of some photos of my 336SE (These were taken earlier with the stock Chinese tubes, further photos will be posted of the new tubes):


Rolled tubes: Photo 1: Early vintage BLACK-PLATES-SILVER-LETTERING General Electric fat-glass 6AS7G "coke-bottle" audio tube. Base code "8-17, 188-5":


Photo 2: New Old Stock RCA 6SN7GTB vacuum tube (1960's):



The very brief specs. provided by the manufaturer are:

Darkvoice336se
Drive Impedance Range:32-600 ohms
Frequency Response:10Hz-30kHz +/-1dB
S/N:98dB
Power Output:1Watt


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