23/3/2019 The Valve Wizard

The Valve Wizard

Menu Spring Reverb Drivers

Home Information on driving spring reverb using valves (tubes) seems to
be rather sparse, so the following is presented as a guide to valve amp
designers. This article considers only the driver stage, and not the reverb
recovery stage (which is usually a simple triode gain stage, unfortunately).
More information on reverb tanks is also available at Rod Elliot's site.

How Spring Reverb works, in brief:

The input transducer of a
reverb tank is a coil of wire
wound around an iron core.
The spring (which has a
magnetic pole on the end)
passes through an aperture
in the transducer core. When
a current is passed through
the coil the changing magnetic field exerts a tiny twisting force on the pole,
which twists the spring too, of course. The spring vibrations are then
picked up in the opposite manner at the other end of the tank.
The most important thing to note here is that it is current which drives the
tank.

How much current is required?

For the richest reverb sound, and for the lowest noise, the input
transducer should be driven hard- almost to the point of saturation.
Accutronics quote the saturation current of their cores as 3.5Amps per turn
(rms), in other words; if there was only one turn of wire around the core we
would need to drive it with 3.5Arms before saturation would occur
(assuming sine-wave excitation). Other manufacturers' tanks are probably
very similar. As more turns are added, the coupling of the EM field
increases and the required current is reduced, so if there were 100 turns
we would need only 3.5 / 100 = 0.035A. Accutronics quote this figure as
the Nominal Drive Current, which is the amount of rms current required for
full drive. Overdriving it will cause heavy distortion and is generally
undesirable.
Interestingly, Rod Elliot has noted that the coils can be driven up to 10
times harder than the Nominal Drive Current, without saturating, but that
the signal recovered at the other end of the tank is hardly increased by
doing so, so there is not much point doing it.

The voltage required to achieve the Nominal Drive Current can be

found from Ohm's law:
V = IZ
Where Z is the impedance of the coil, which is normally quoted at 1kHz.

For example, if a type A tank is rated as 8 ohms at 1kHz and has 124
turns;
I(nominal) = Amps per turn / number of turns.
I(nominal) = 3.5 / 124
= 28mA

So the required drive voltage is;

V = 0.028 * 8
= 0.2V
This implies that the power dissipated in the coil is 6mW. In fact, power
dissipated in the coil is minimal because it is inductive, so voltage and
current are 90 degrees out of phase, but this poor power factor also
means that the 'apparent power' that must actually be supplied is more like
a few hundred milliwatts at 1kHz. (The DC resistance of the coil is
negligible, except at very low frequencies which we don't need- anything
below about 200Hz is too muddy to be of use.)

Unfortunately, the input coil is an inductor so its impedance rises

linearly with frequency. The coil's impedance will double with a doubling of
frequency, so at 2kHz we would need twice the drive voltage to obtain the
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same drive current (and therefore twice the power). At 500Hz we would
need only half the drive voltage (half the power).
Therefore, if we were to apply a constant audio voltage signal to the coil,
we would find that current through the coil would be less at high
frequencies than at low frequencies, so the reverb sound would end up
being 'bass heavy' and would sound very dull indeed! Ideally then, the coil
should be driven by a constant audio current signal, so that all frequencies
are delivered into the springs at equal amplitude. Unfortunately valves are
not well suited to this, but there are solutions.

The 'traditional' driver is simply a small, conventional power stage. A

small input coupling capacitor filters out frequencies below about 200 -
300Hz, and the reverb coil is driven so hard that even higher frequencies
are forced into it, one way or the other. This 'works', but is a considerable
waste of power- and it is not unknown for the coils to burn out under such
abuse (remember, we are unlikely to ever need more than 1W, but such
drivers can usually deliver several watts!). No doubt this 'brute force'
approach also compensates for the conventional, rather low-gain recovery
stage.

This out-of-date
method can be improved
slightly by using a smaller
coupling cap, so that the
drive voltage to the power
valve doubles with every
octave, thereby
compensating for the
increasing impedance of
the coil.
Obviously the headroom
of the stage should be
sufficient to accommodate
the larger high frequency
amplitudes, and the more
headroom the better- a
distorted reverb sound is
rarely a good thing.
Choosing the roll-off point
for the input filter
depends somewhat on taste. For good reverb sounds there is no particular
need for strong frequency content above 1kHz as these can sound too
'tinny' or shrill. If we set the roll-off at 1kHz then, the frequency response of
the reverb driver will end up being flat up to 1kHz, then attenuated at
higher frequencies, which is fine. Normal rules apply for the design of the
power stage, and normally an 8 or 10 ohm tank would be used, to suit a
conventional output transformer, but any tank would do, provided the
impedance ratio of the OT is suitable.
A simple circuit is shown [right], and is similar to many old designs. There is
no screen bypass capacitor since excessive output power is not required.
The input signal required for 1W output is about 4.5Vp-p at 1kHz, so the
signal from the previous stage will probably need attenuating somewhat! At
the roll-off frequency it is already attenuated by ^/2, so the potential divider
in the schematic has been chosen to suit a 100Vp-p guitar signal from the
previous stage. Other designs using different power valves will have
different requirements of course. The lower resistor in the input divider
could be made a potentiometer, but the reverb 'depth' control is normally
placed on the recovery side of the tank, since this keeps the quality of the
reverb good even at low levels (because the tank is always fully driven).

Although the previous circuit produces reasonable results, it is not

without its shortcomings. It was assumed that the coil presented an 8 ohm
load (or whatever) more or less all the time, like a loudspeaker.
Unfortunately it doesn't, as discussed, so at frequencies above and below
1kHz the reflected impedance to the valve will be higher and lower
respectively, resulting in reduced power output. So the actual frequency
response at the coil will be a gentle rise up to 1kHz, then a slightly steeper
drop at higher frequencies. This is perfectly good for many users, but for a
flatter response there is an obvious modification; use a triode. Triodes are
much more forgiving of variations in load impedance. Although they deliver
maximum power into an impedance equal to one to two times their internal
anode resistance, a doubling or halving of this does not result in as much
power loss as with a pentode / tetrode. Of course, triodes are much less
power efficient (less than 25% in class A versus almost 50% in pentodes),
but we don't actually need much power anyway.
The schematic [right] shows the EL84 in triode mode. The input sensitivity
is now about 5Vp-p, distortion is mainly glorious 2nd harmonic and the final
frequency response is closer to the desired one. Using an EL84 to deliver
a few hundred milliwatts is quite a significant waste of power. An ECC81
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(12AT7) or ECC82
(12AU7) would be much
more efficient (and small),
and many amps have
used them.
Some budget amps even
use a single ECC83
(12AX7) (which is capable
of delivering about
200mW into a 100k load
impedance), but it has a
reputation for producing a
weak sound. This is due
both to its limited output
power, a weak recovery
stage and the fact that a
50k to 100k output
transformer needs a very
high primary inductance
in order to produce low
frequencies well (like 50 Henrys!), so manufacturers usually end up using
a lower primary impedance, which really results in even less power. In
theory, a high impedance, low inductance OT could work in our favour
since it will automatically provide the necessary first-order, high-pass filter,
but finding the right operating conditions to achieve it is probably more
trouble than it's worth.

Cheap current source drivers:

Low impedance reverb
tanks seem to be
persisting in valve amp
design, which makes
little sense since
valves are not well
suited to driving low
impedance loads. By
taking advantage of
high-impedance tanks
(usually intended for
op-amp drivers) we
can build much simpler
valve drivers. A
constant-current
source can be
approximated by using a voltage source and placing a large resistance in
series with the coil. Provided the resistance is large compared to the coil's
impedance (ten times, say), the coil's varying impedance will make almost
no difference to the current flowing through the resistor and coil over a
wide bandwidth. The circuit [right] illustrates how this might work.

A paralleled pair of ECC82s has an internal anode resistance of about 5k,

so for maximum power the load should be about 10k. In this case the load
is formed by the parallel combination of Ra and Rl, which are both 22k,
making 11k in total (ignoring the coil which is negligible and the output
coupling capacitor which is large). Taking a bias point of roughly -6V, the
AC loadline [below] indicates that at full 12Vp-p input we obtain about
12mAp-p swing (shared between the two load resistors) making 6mA p-p or
2.1mArms through R2 which is about perfect for an Accutronics type F tank
(1.4 to 1.9k)!

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Obviously the drawback of this method is that we must use both
triodes to obtain sufficient power since no OT is used. A larger triode like
an ECC99 or even a triode-strapped pentode might be used on its own.
Since the stage now functions like a current source, all the frequency
shaping can be done at the input. In this case, C1 and C2 attenuate
frequencies below about 300Hz and above 2.6kHz respectively. R1 simply
allows the coupling capacitor to discharge if the tank is disconnected.

For driving medium impedance

tanks (100 to 300 ohms, say) a more 'up-
to-date' solution would be to use an
SRPP. An SRPP can deliver significant
current into relatively heavy fixed loads. A
total load of about 2.2k large enough to
constitute a constant current source, but
low enough to allow the valves to dump
plenty of current into it. The optimum
value for both cathode resistors is:
Rk = (ra + 2Rl) / mu
Using an ECC82 yields:
Rk = (10000 + 4400) / 19
= 758 ohms,
820 ohms being a close standard from
the E12 range.

The quiescent current is given by:

Iq = HT / 2(ra + muRk)
Iq = 300 / 2(10000 + 19*820)
5.9mA
And since the SRPP can only operate in
Class A, the peak current delivered into
the load is 2Iq per triode, making
23.5mAp-p in total, or about 8.4mArms-
more than enough for a medium
impedance tank. The maximum input signal before clipping is simply 2Iq *
Rk, which is a bit less than 10Vp-p. The necessary filtering can be done at
the input, and the input level can be limited to give the right nominal
current for the actual tank being used.
In this circuit the heater voltage will also need elevating by more than 30V.

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