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Tube Sockets, Part 5. Socket Dampers
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These silicon dampers are highly flexible, you can bend them 90 degrees easily. These are old stock, and I think they were originally very expensive. They were used to damp chassis vibrations inside optical equipment. In tube world probably the best use is for keeping away the mains transformer vibrations from the tubes, and reduce tube chassis microphonics.
Order Number for one piece: 320-128-89
Note: the damping can be made softer or harder, by screwing in the screw from 3mm to 6mm. Since the tube socket is not heavy, 3mm is the recommended value. Most amazing is the strength of the rubber, and yet it is still so flexible. These are technically very nice made items, and four of them together cost not more than an average tube socket. The 3mm threaded part you see attached on them, is used to mount them on the base plate or on the socket. Then the thread hole you see, attaches then to the chassis. The method to adjust their stiffness, is by selecting the right length of the screw. Or adjust with mounting rings underneath. Like this you can firmly attach them, and yet adjust them as well.
Dimensions:
Thread on both ends: M3 (=3mm diameter)
Screw Length: 6mm
Rubber Part: 8mm long, Diameter 8mm
For watching this video, you may need to add the Apple Quicktime viewer in your browser.
In this video I have mounted the tube socket not the right way! This funny mounting method was only done to make the demonstration possible. The right way to mount the silicon dampers is shown in the other pictures here.
(If someone can help me to embed this mp4 file into this page, without the need to have Apple Quicktime installed, please let me know! I think this should be possible)
BELOW ARE PICTURED THE YAMAMOTO AIR VENTILATION ADAPTERS. PLEASE NOTE, WE HAVE STOPPED SELLING YAMAMOTO PRODUCTS in GENERAL. It was not our own choice, but we could not accept a drastic price increase from one day to the other. So we took this opportunity to design a compatible product.
To be not in direct competition, we improved the product. The EMISSIONLABS Air ventilation adapters. They have the same dimensions, but are more precisely fitted to various socket flange diameter on the market. Most sockets have 38mm screw distance, from hole center to center. The Yamamoto sockets are 30mm. However, it appears other manufacturers have a 30mm flange. or 27 or 32mm. So we have the adapters for this, with each socket diameter.
In addition we have added the OPTION to insert two LEDs, red+green. The circuit for this is integrated on the back side of the air ventilation adapter itself. The LEDS are optional to use. If you do not want to use those, just leave them away, and the LED holes become just normal ventilation holes.
If the LEDs are used however, the green LED indicates normal tube current, the red LED burns only when there is too much current. The level at which the red turns on, is programmed by just one resistor, which is connected from your bias resistor, to the EE80 board. While below this level the green LED burn. The circuit is the same as from our simple LED-meter of our tube burn in unit. Just we reduced it to only two LEDs. It works amazingly accurate.
The LED circuit can be used for the power supply rectifier, as well as for any auto bias circuit of bias voltage above 9V, and tube current from 9...200mA.
For power supply monitoring, we see sometimes cases, where the outout tubes are worn out, and pull not enough current. In that case, often the power supply voltage will raise considerable. In a way, this compensates for the weak tubes, but this is no good solution of course. If this happens, the red LED of the rectifier tube would light up, and you can see something is wrong. Also here, this requires only one resistor, connected from the DC power supply to the EE80 board. Since there is large voltage drop across this series resistor, this even keeps the power suplpy voltage away from the EE80 board.
Below is the old page we had for YAMAMOTO.
We will remove it later.
When ordering the Yamamoto Air Vent Adapter (the black piece above - Order Number: 320-074-76) there is a high quality, universal screw set included with it. With these you can mount the socket and the dampers as pictured here, while you have left four chassis screws and four distance holders, that you can use as you need.
Like this you can increase the distance to the chassis even further. It can sometimes be nice when you want the tube socket to disappear a little deeper inside the chassis. These metal distance holders we do not supply, but they are normal standard parts of any hardware shop.
This picture shows their amazing flexibility. These aluminium distance holder as you see here, are not supplied with it. However, with the Yamamoto Air Vent Adapter (see the above pictures) there is a set of hardware included which serves most of the purposes. To get optimized result, the Yamamoto Air Vent adapter (also called base plates) are much recommended.