Thomas Mayer Tube Amps

Thomas Mayer is designer and manufacturer of high end audio amplifiers. All his designs are available completely assembled or as kits. Don’t get me wrong. By high end I don’t mean fancy cable and terminal jacks. Thomas has a background in industrial electronics. He knows his stuff! Visit his website vinylsavor.blogspot.com. You’ll find tons of valuable information there. Thomas uses customized transformer covers. He gets them varnished with different colors from standard black to exclusive metallic finishes.

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This is a beautiful line stage. It uses directly heated triodes and can be configured for 801A (will also work with 10Y) or 26. Adjustment for the two different tube types is done by the simple through of a switch. It uses an external tube rectified power supply in the same style. Filament supplies are separate for each tube, employing two filament chokes per tube in passive LCL configuration.

Here are some photos of a 211 monoblock. These 211 tubes give off a lot of heat! They are running at about 75W plate dissipation. In addition their filaments consume another 32W each! This is a scaled down amplifier of a big 4 chassis version.

This guy is a 45/2A3 power amp. B+ is smoothed via a choke input filter with two LC sections. Filament supplies are LCL filtered. The first LC section is placed in the PSU, so 2 filament chokes, one for each channel. Each filament choke is followed by 40.000uF smoothing capacitance.

Images 1 and 3 show a parallel single ended amp that can deliver 30 watts. It can drive speakers even to an incredibly low impedance of 1 ohm. Thomas chose four 6HS5 tubes that are hardly used for audio amplifiers. The customized transformer covers look beautiful in metallic white and graphite.

The beautiful Octal Preamp! The Mk2 uses a 6AH4 tube. The phono section is completely reworked, going to LC coupling rather than RC coupling. Quite a radical change, with lot’s of Lundahl iron! Thomas picked the 6SC7 instead of the 6SL7 and used separate chokes in the B+ lines for the two phonosections. They can be replaced with some resistors. The first choke should be kept for a low ripple B+ and decoupling per channel.