El84 Tube Amplifier Views

General Goods

The EL84 (European designation - known as the 6BQ5 in North America) is a vacuum tube (a.k.a. valve) of the power pentode type. It has a 9 pin Noval base and is found mainly in the final output stages of amplification circuits, most commonly now in guitar amplifiers, but originally in radios and many other devices of the pre-transistor era.

It was developed to eliminate the need for a driver tube in radios, and has rather more gain than is usual in a power pentode, producing full output from a relatively small drive signal. This eliminated the need for a preamplifier triode in radios, making them cheaper to produce. As the EL84 itself is a 9 pin Noval, it was also cheap to produce and manufacturers were quick to adopt it in general use, and they are found in many old European valve radios.

In common with all 'E' prefix tubes, using the Mullard-Philips tube designation, it has a heater voltage of 6.3V. It is capable, when used at its plate rating of 300 volts maximum, of producing 17 watts output in Class AB1 in push-pull configuration. Many guitar amplifiers routinely run EL84 tubes in excess of 400VDC, with the Traynor Guitarmate reportedly putting out 25w RMS with 2 EL84's in a push pull configuration and a B+ between 400-420VDC.

Developed by Philips in 1953 for use in the British Mullard 5-10 amplifier, the EL84 came to prominence when used in Watkins (and later the Vox) amplifiers preferred by many British invasion bands of the 1960s. When overdriven, the EL84 power tubes in these amplifiers produce a distinctive chiming, articulate, treble-heavy sound when compared to 6L6 tubes more commonly used in American amplifiers of the era such as those from Fender.