Analog Gear News

DS Audio has just announced the U.S. availability of the company’s TB-100 tube phono equalizer — and the first Stateside showing of the EQ production model will be at this weekend’s upcoming Florida International Audio Expo (a.k.a. FLAX) in Tampa, Florida, which is being held from February 21-23, 2025. (More on how, and what with, this new phono EQ will be shown at FLAX appears a bit later in this story.)

The TB-100 sports a machined aluminum chassis and a dual mono design for what the company deems to be “excellent channel separation and stereo imaging” from their third-gen dual mono optical cartridge design.

Other features of the TB-100 include four selectable bass curves with turnover at 50Hz or 30Hz, subsonic filter at 20Hz, and 6dB per octave. The EQ uses “carefully selected” quad-matched 12AU7 (ECC82) tubes, which the company says provide “the lowest gain and lowest intrinsic distortion in the 12-volt family of popular small signal preamp tubes.” DS Audio further points out that high output of optical cartridges requires less than 20dB of gain for the amplification circuit.

DS Audio also tells us these tubes were “chosen for clarity and flat frequency response.” Custom built in-house test equipment emulated the gain stage of the TB-100 and the input signal under operation. They measured each individual tube and selected them by their measured output level. The quad-matched sets were then created by selecting four 12AU7 tubes that met ≤1% deviation — one tube for voltage amplification per channel, and a second tube for output buffering per channel. The TB-100 also boasts cascaded anode followers for simple gain stage, and low-impedance cathode followers for each output.

The TB-100’s bilateral symmetry twin-mono amplifier section offers completely independent grounds and power transformers and current to voltage conversion for the audio signal from photodiodes, with simultaneous left and right phase alignment. The TB-100 is said to offer a flat frequency response with less than –1dB deviation from 10Hz to 70kHz.

The unit’s dedicated low-noise regulated power supply (seen below) is used for LED power and the photo detectors navigate negative bias voltage, while separate power circuits and transformers are dedicated for each photo detector to “ensure greater voltage stability” to the optical cartridge.

Finally, the SRP for the DS Audio TB-100 tube phono EQ is $20,000.

As alluded to at the top of this story, the TB-100 will be a key element in the quite high-end-leaning system presented by Oneiros Audio at the Florida International Audio Expo in Room 435 at the Sheraton Tampa Brandon in Tampa, Florida. As noted earlier, the FLAX show takes place February 21-23, 2025.

Here’s the gear that will comprise that Oneiros Audio room setup. A VPl Avenger Statement turntable fitted with a Fatboy tonearm ($50,000) is the system playback hub, and it is further equipped with a wide array of DS Audio gear including the DS Audio Grand Master optical phono cartridge ($15,000), the aforementioned $20K DS Audio TB-100 tube phono EQ, DS Audio Grand Master PH-001 phono cable ($2,500), DS Audio Ion-100 ionizer ($1,800), DS Audio Grand Master ES-001 eccentricity device ($6,000), and DS Audio ST-50 stylus cleaner ($80).

The remainder of the Room 435 demo system will consist of Oneiros loudspeakers ($650,000/pr) — which are also making their own, much-anticipated U.S. show debut at FLAX — in addition to Audio Research Reference 6SE line stage preamp ($22,500), Audio Research Reference 330M mono block amps ($90,000/pr), VPl Vanquish rack ($60,000), AudioQuest Mythical Creatures Dragon cabling ($152,150).

Naturally, AP staffers will be on hand at FLAX all this weekend, so we’ll be reporting back on our experiences there listening to this and other high-caliber systems at the big show.

For more about DS Audio, go here.
To find an authorized DS Audio retailer, go here.