The Reservoir Dogs of Tube Amplification
(Goran, Sasa, Milorad and Andrea…Transformer winders not pictured are Bojan Arsić , Zoran Cvijanović, Aleksandar Tomić…some bad winding dudes)
A decade ago I began a conversation with a client. This wasn’t one of those, ‘Hi, how are you? Would you care to buy a highly experimental non-existent audio system that we feel will fully engage those aspects of your love of music that have been heretofore unrealized by recorded media?’ Rather, it began like most audio conversations, around something seemingly innocuous: A cartridge here, a cable there, a turntable down the line. What manifested over 1,100 emails was an understanding. He was the most technically proficient client I’d encountered, with actual on-the-ground experience, and he understood that I understood from whence he came. If we were big game hunting, it would require out of the box thinking.
Having owned literally every top offering from each amplification sector, and still being left wanting, we began to explore the ethereal atmosphere. Those rare aspects that might lift whatever remained of a veil between him and his favorite artists. For his part, it was imperative that the music be served...nothing was off of the table. He needed power. He needed intimacy and immediacy. He needed a single giant output tube. The GM70 wouldn’t quite get you there. Despite its beauty and huevos, we needed more of the latter. Similarly, the 845 and 211 would not complete the mission in a single ended configuration and the idea of going parallel single ended was a compromise that made no sense this far up the mountain. I had begun collecting Eimac Tubes around 1995 ; 450TL’s, 250TL’s, 304TL’s and 75TL’s before they became more or less extinct. I also had GM100’s but they made better lamps than output tubes. As the conversation progressed, It became clear where our yellow brick road was leading by about email #850.
It was decided that we would embark on a mission : An all tube preamp with a voltage input and a current output,(never done before that I know of) and single ended tube mono blocks that put out 130+ class a1 watts per channel with 2600+ volts on the rails. Immediacy, power, space…pure music. It took over 2 years but was well worth the wait. I felt a little like Werner Herzog in Fitzcarraldo, pushing towards perfection whilst bordering disaster. (no one was killed during the making of these electronics) Of course, I was just the talking head, far from having my hands playing near voltages that could snatch the life right out of me or whomever could be found to undertake them. There were only a few people in the world to contact that could construct an amplifier that possessed lethal voltages and required very specialized transformers to reach their potential. Trafomatic Audio (Serbian for ‘transfomers’) was my first and last stop, Sasa Cokic being the primary engineer, or as Matej Isak has referred to him, the Balkan Kondo-san. He had done many one-off amplifiers several of which demonstrated the necessary skill set to attack such an undertaking. Here we see the 75TL’s in an early PSE design.
The Nona below. A precursor to the current phono circuit.
There were several iterations and circuits that were shopped into being…makers with giant electricity deflecting gloves. Until finally the Drina came to life. A coffee table sized mono block with extensive protection circuits and easily the best sound any of us had heard. The winding for the output transformers is proprietary and will not be disclosed.
The Tara 2, now the Tara 30a, accomplished the voltage/current circuit that Sasa had dreamt of for the preamplifier, with each output tube having its own nano-crystal cored output transformer. The pairing are named for Balkan rivers. Sasa is an avid fisherman and lover of the outdoors. The majestic rivers seemed appropriate to name Trafomatic's very top offerings. The Tara River flows south to north cutting across the Tara River Canyon, (the second largest canyon in the world), after which it joins the Piva River to form the mightly Drina. So their is a natural, clear and unrestrained current from the Tara through the Drina.
Last stop on the train to perfection was a vinyl archivist’s dream. The Collins Phono Stage, built around the groundbreaking work of Arthur A. Collins.
The Elysium was conceived as a less powerful, (but still quite powerful) version of the Drina, sporting the 250TL instead of the 450TL.
The result is the most ‘you are there’ set of electronics we’ve heard. This trio of mad innovation did trickle down to more attainable fruits like the Pandora and Glenn Monoblocks, the Luna Phonostage, the Lara Linestage, the Rhapsody Integrated, the Stealth Integrated and the Primavera Headphone Amplifier.
(Goran, Sasa, Milorad and Andrea…Transformer winders not pictured are Bojan Arsić , Zoran Cvijanović, Aleksandar Tomić…some bad winding dudes)
A decade ago I began a conversation with a client. This wasn’t one of those, ‘Hi, how are you? Would you care to buy a highly experimental non-existent audio system that we feel will fully engage those aspects of your love of music that have been heretofore unrealized by recorded media?’ Rather, it began like most audio conversations, around something seemingly innocuous: A cartridge here, a cable there, a turntable down the line. What manifested over 1,100 emails was an understanding. He was the most technically proficient client I’d encountered, with actual on-the-ground experience, and he understood that I understood from whence he came. If we were big game hunting, it would require out of the box thinking.
Having owned literally every top offering from each amplification sector, and still being left wanting, we began to explore the ethereal atmosphere. Those rare aspects that might lift whatever remained of a veil between him and his favorite artists. For his part, it was imperative that the music be served...nothing was off of the table. He needed power. He needed intimacy and immediacy. He needed a single giant output tube. The GM70 wouldn’t quite get you there. Despite its beauty and huevos, we needed more of the latter. Similarly, the 845 and 211 would not complete the mission in a single ended configuration and the idea of going parallel single ended was a compromise that made no sense this far up the mountain. I had begun collecting Eimac Tubes around 1995 ; 450TL’s, 250TL’s, 304TL’s and 75TL’s before they became more or less extinct. I also had GM100’s but they made better lamps than output tubes. As the conversation progressed, It became clear where our yellow brick road was leading by about email #850.
It was decided that we would embark on a mission : An all tube preamp with a voltage input and a current output,(never done before that I know of) and single ended tube mono blocks that put out 130+ class a1 watts per channel with 2600+ volts on the rails. Immediacy, power, space…pure music. It took over 2 years but was well worth the wait. I felt a little like Werner Herzog in Fitzcarraldo, pushing towards perfection whilst bordering disaster. (no one was killed during the making of these electronics) Of course, I was just the talking head, far from having my hands playing near voltages that could snatch the life right out of me or whomever could be found to undertake them. There were only a few people in the world to contact that could construct an amplifier that possessed lethal voltages and required very specialized transformers to reach their potential. Trafomatic Audio (Serbian for ‘transfomers’) was my first and last stop, Sasa Cokic being the primary engineer, or as Matej Isak has referred to him, the Balkan Kondo-san. He had done many one-off amplifiers several of which demonstrated the necessary skill set to attack such an undertaking. Here we see the 75TL’s in an early PSE design.
The Nona below. A precursor to the current phono circuit.
There were several iterations and circuits that were shopped into being…makers with giant electricity deflecting gloves. Until finally the Drina came to life. A coffee table sized mono block with extensive protection circuits and easily the best sound any of us had heard. The winding for the output transformers is proprietary and will not be disclosed.
The Tara 2, now the Tara 30a, accomplished the voltage/current circuit that Sasa had dreamt of for the preamplifier, with each output tube having its own nano-crystal cored output transformer. The pairing are named for Balkan rivers. Sasa is an avid fisherman and lover of the outdoors. The majestic rivers seemed appropriate to name Trafomatic's very top offerings. The Tara River flows south to north cutting across the Tara River Canyon, (the second largest canyon in the world), after which it joins the Piva River to form the mightly Drina. So their is a natural, clear and unrestrained current from the Tara through the Drina.
Last stop on the train to perfection was a vinyl archivist’s dream. The Collins Phono Stage, built around the groundbreaking work of Arthur A. Collins.
The Elysium was conceived as a less powerful, (but still quite powerful) version of the Drina, sporting the 250TL instead of the 450TL.
The result is the most ‘you are there’ set of electronics we’ve heard. This trio of mad innovation did trickle down to more attainable fruits like the Pandora and Glenn Monoblocks, the Luna Phonostage, the Lara Linestage, the Rhapsody Integrated, the Stealth Integrated and the Primavera Headphone Amplifier.
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