Just to see, I took a tape measure to mine and the measurements in the manual seem pretty accurate:
240mm(~9.4inches) x 330mm (~13 inches) x 175mm (~6.8 inches) (W x D x H)
Not sure how large the Burson or the Pendant are in comparison, but yeah, I don’t think of this as a small amp. Also, this might be obvious, but you’re not going to be stacking anything on top of the Allnic, so no space savings in that direction either. The Allnic /does/ rest on some feet that are inset from the actual footprint of the amp, so going in the other direction, you actually can stack the Allnic on top of something slightly smaller than it. I’ve been able to stack the Allnic on top of my Exogal, the top of which is 7.45" x 11.5".
I don’t own a VC, but for what it’s worth, my Eikon sounds wonderful off of the high-impedance output. (EDIT: I recommend using the low-impedance these days.) I mostly use my Eikons with Auteur pads, but yeah, there was a really nice improvement in bass impact and a small boost in overall detail and stage on the Allnic for me.
I think I remember a slight burning smell for maybe a day or two, but yeah, I definitely don’t have any sort of burning smell on a regular basis. Also, I tried adjusting the volume a couple different ways and I couldn’t get my Allnic to make any pops or clicks, though mine was purchased used, so maybe my volume pot’s just been broken in a bit more.
I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be safe to use IEMs, the only thing is that I usually get some noise floor with IEMs on tubes (most of my IEMs are 16ohm impedance or less and high sensitivity).
Depends how it fails, most tubes just fail, usually the filament burns out (like a lightbulb).
Either it just doesn’t work one day when you power it on, or the vacuum is lost, and you get a brief flash followed by nothing.
I think those photo’s are just a characteristic of those particular tubes, and how they were photographed.
Fundamentally tubes are REALLY simple devices, you have a Cathode, an Anode and one or more “grids” which retard the flow of electrons from the cathode to the anode. For there to be a supply of electrons, you have to heat the Cathode, in a DHT the cathode is the heater, in any other tube there is a heater filament around the cathode.
When you turn a tube on the heater gets hot and it can burn out like a light bulb, the heater is under the most stress when you power it on, so that is when it will fail. The other primary form of failure is the vacuum seal between the glass envelope and base fails. This happens because as the tube heats up they expand at different rates eventually leading to failure.
Tubes can theoretically wear out without either of the above happening, the inverse resistance of a tube between it’s anode and cathode is referred to its “transconductance”, over the first 150-200 hours of a tubes life this will actually increase (this is tube burn in), it will them stabilize and very gradually decrease over the normal life of the tube. In practice you will almost always see one of the other two failures first.
Since we’re talking about tubes, a small follow-up on this note: Woo Audio sells NOS matched pairs of 6EM7s for $240, but you need to make sure to add “need 6EM7 tubes” in the special instructions during checkout so they know not to send you 6DN7s.
You getting a pair? Would be interested in how it could differ from stock if you do.
Just saw that it might produce too much noise for high efficiency hps (probably isn’t ideal for me).
Yup, it was the power cable. lol
Don’t hear the peak anymore.
Although I think I tilted it to more on the sweeter side than I would like.
Will give it a few days…
Oh, and also when I shut the amp down w/ hps still connected I hear this unusual “whirring” sound through the hps. I’m assuming it’s just the tubes cooling itself down like you mentioned earlier @Polygonhell?
There are some tube amps, at least in the guitar world, that have “softer” startups or standbys so you dont need to hit the heaters over and over if youre taking a 15 minute break.
There are some other physical damage anomalies with tubes. I had some damaged in shipping and it was where you could see a piece of glass loose in the tube but nothing on the outside cracked. It still worked, well, it worked but got hotter and hotter and brighter and brighter the longer it was on. I never kept it on as i feared amp damage but it natural overdrove the amp which was kinda cool.
I kind of held off in posting this because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t hearing things. But I tried the Allnic with my ie900 and hot damn did these scale! I’m not too invested w/ iems (yet) but damn I was pretty surprised w/ the improvements.
Bass hits even harder but is controlled w/ improved technicalities and grip. The dip in the upper-mids got elevated quite nicely bringing it to an even response. Highs are extended while gaining improvements in resolution. Since the Allnic is neutral overall it didn’t smooth over the treble hotness that occasionally pops up but that’s the only knock (and a little bit of noise). The ie900’s stage is originally a bit off but now it’s pretty much fixed. Timbre and detail improved as well quite a bit. Just improvements all across the board. What a pairing!
More thoughts to come ofc but I just wanted to get this off my chest. I was genuinely caught off guard. lol
So I did end up buying the Woo Audio tubes (they sent me RCA-branded tubes), but I haven’t tried them yet. If I do, I’ll make sure to report back! For comparison, the ones that came pre-installed in mine are Zenith-branded.
Just wanted to chime in that this experience matches mine. The power cord that came with mine didn’t seem like it was /that/ bad, but the amp responded really well when I swapped out the power cable for an AudioQuest Monsoon. Swapping the cable tilted it sweeter for me as well, but I personally like that bit of sweetness. (And just in general, I continue to really like the sound of this amp.)
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Something else to mention, if I don’t play any music from the high-impedance output, I hear some low noise floor, but I can’t actually hear that floor when music is playing, even during quiet parts of songs, so yeah, not sure what’s up there. Though the high-output definitely has more gain than the low-output, so higher noise in general would make sense in that regard.
I don’t have any planars on hand, but if you do, I’d love to know how they perform between the two different impedance outs! I have a suspicion that the high-impedance might actually be better?
Awesome! If you’re able to see if those RCA tubes end up being noisy for your Clears I’d appreciate it. I also agree the stock ones (same zenith) are great but it doesn’t hurt to have spares.
Same here with the noise floor but I think that’s to be expected. In addition to the higher noise floor though, I hear a hum on mine (mostly on the left channel) when using hi-imp on both the utopia and vc. Don’t know if that’s normal or not but I find it odd because vc is rated @ 300ohms so I would assume there shouldn’t be any noise floor/hum. Because of this I mostly run it off the lo-imp. Do you get noise/hum with your eikon?
Would love to but I have none that I regularly use. I have a sundara (which I dislike) and an OG mrspeakers aeon closed but I don’t think those will scale accordingly with this amp. But if you’re curious I’ll try it out no problem. M0N did mention the 5000 was good with planars so the 3000 might be competent as well.
Just to let you know, I already sold my Clears (both of them!) to @MacDLaw, but my Gjallarhorns should be good enough to fill the role of low-impedance, high-sensitivity headphones for testing this kind of thing.
Yeah, same, I get a hum (though mostly on the right side for me) on the high-impedance out with my Eikon. I don’t know how normal it is either, but as I mentioned, I only really notice it when there’s no music playing, so I still run my Eikon out of the high-out when I’m listening to music.
Hey @M0N do you think the 5000 will pair well with the utopia/spring as well?
I’ve been offered a trade-up, which I probably won’t go through (but just wanted to satisfy my curiosity).
I’d imagine at this point the spring would be the bottleneck to the system…
I actually personally wouldn’t do that, the utopia actually performs better on the 3000 from my experience. The 5000 would definitely be an upgrade if you were rocking some of the planar or lower impedance dynamic, but honestly for the headphones you have sticking with the 3000 makes more sense imo. If you wanted to move up, I’d likely move to something else besides allnic at least with a utopia
I would say the spring would likely be the next bottleneck, right now your system is actually pretty balanced, next thing to upgrade could be either the DAC or amp depending on how you wanted to do that