Hi, previous lurker, first time poster. I'm creating an amp based Suncalc's beautiful 6V6 1.0 design, and I had some questions about AC response, component selection / safety.
6V6 Clipping: If I turn the pot / volume too high, the 6V6 clips. I see two ways to mitigate this.
(1) I can increase my cathode voltage via the series R so that the grid can hit higher amplitues without clipping. However, that has downside of taking my 6V6 out of the datasheet specified -12.5V bias range.
(2) Alternatively, I could obviously reduce input voltage. For this design, that means reducing amplitude via the potentiometer. So either limiting myself to 20 or 30% of the pot's full scale range (cutting into my volume control), or a new smaller pot to reduce load for the 6SN7 triodes to reduce it's gane.
Based on this, I am planning to get a new Pot to reduce 6SN7 gain and reduce amplitude input to the 6V6. However, I wanted to see if there are other design methods I'm missing to keep my amplifiers in linear region and happy. Are there perhaps any tricks with the ultra-linear screen grid tap, or the 6SN7 biases that I am missing?

Low Frequency Response: In the second revision of his design, Suncal shows some really nice low frequency response (
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5736&start=20). Again, I'm sure his real world measurements are far from sims, but my design doesn't get anything even close to that. I'm seeing pretty poor gain up to 200 Hz. This is using spice models from DuncanAmps (
http://www.duncanamps.com/spicemodels.html), which could definitely be a source of error, but being new, I am more inclined to think the error is with my design. Can anyone point me to a resource, or suggest some tips, to improve my low frequency gain?

Component Selection: Lastly, based on experience, if anyone has suggestions on how I could improve my component selection please let me know. I chose tubes based off thetubestore reviews, chokes/transformers from this thread, and passives by attempting to way overrate everything.
Here's my design. All components are purchased and on my workbench, but I have not yet powered on. Due to high voltages, I want to understand everything a little bit more fully before I start working through gofar99's Power On guide (
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3676).
