Tube Buffer

[hagcel]

So as I at the workbench the other night and I threw in my new Remember That Night blu-ray. I intended to just have it on as background music but I couldn't help but get sucked in. Gilmours tone was out of this world. By far the best I have ever heard him sound so I did some reading on gilmourish.com and came across this interview with Pete Cornish about his all tube pedal board.

http://home.comcast.net/~jroscoe/CornishQnA.html

So I'd love to build a tube buffer. Anyone know how to do it?

This is what stood out to me from the interview:

"when you plug your passive guitar directly into your tube amp it sounds great, doesn't it? Having a unity gain tube buffer as the input to my All Tube System allows the guitar to react exactly as if it were connected directly to the tube amp input (without the loading effects of long cables/effects pedals etc.). The effects outputs are connected to other unity gain tube buffers so that each effect "thinks" it is connected directly to the amp input allowing each effect to deliver it's full signal without the loading effects of long cables, other effects etc."

So is he saying every pedal is connected to a tube buffer?

I'm dying to replace my solid state buffer with a tube buffer now. Anyone have a schematic or layout for a tube buffer?

[stecykmi]

it seems that cornish uses a buffer stage after every effect. that would explain why 14 tubes (!!) are used in the system.

i would say that if you went through the trouble of building such a device, you would probably find the results fairly lackluster and the same functionality could be accomplished much cheaper and easily with semiconductors. you could likely build the entire circuit with semiconductors for less money than you would pay for the power supply alone with a tube implementation.

that said, the circuit would be very similar to an effects loop from a tube amp. a google search should yield plenty of results.

[oldhousescott]

Yeah, check out Merlin's Valve Wizard site. Look at the Cathode Follower circuits, and the Cathodyne PI circuit. Any of those would work for what you want. Doug Hoffman has a PC mount toroidal transformer that takes a 12vac input for a B+ of about 250vdc. Schematics for the power supply using that transformer are on his site as well.