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In Reply to: RE: The Crown IC150 & D150 posted by E-Stat on March 29, 2016 at 07:00:33
Okay, I guess I was wrong about the time frame. I bought my Citation 11 and 12 at the Bitburg Air Base Audio Club in either 1976 or 1977. I guess I played them for a few years until moving to Albuquerque, NM in 1980 when I bought the Hafler kits. However, the Citation 11 and 12 were nothing like previous Citation components. They used high negative feedback and had very low distortion on repetitive waveforms like square waves and sine waves. On music, they didn't sound very good at all, but being the technical guy that I am, I was impressed with their square wave performance. Let this be a lesson: Whenever a salesman uses test tones in his sales pitch, beware! ;-)
Best regards,
John Elison
Follow Ups:
Honestly, in the early 70s at the dawn of SS designs, nothing sounded as good as the best tube units. The other prominent SS player at the time, the McIntosh C-28, was a toad.
From my perspective, it was John Curl who changed the rules for what SS could do. I had two friends who bought the JC-2 when it was introduced - a truly exceptional product. Arguably, Bongiorno's Thaedra that followed was pretty good, too. JWC had both of those in his system for comparison circa '76 or so. I still preferred both the sound and the aesthetics of the JC-2. :)
Whenever a salesman uses test tones in his sales pitch, beware!
Which is essentially all we get today with THD and distortion spectrum graphs using a 50 hz sine wave. Similarly, switching amps excel using that criteria.
> > > Honestly, in the early 70s at the dawn of SS designs, nothing sounded as good as the best tube units < < < <
I still think it's true, especially for preamps. Wish I had gotten into tubes long before I did. Oh well. I'm fine now.
While I was using the Cit 11/D-150, the dealer allowed me to borrow the SP-3a over a weekend to hear in my system. I still recall one piece of music that illustrated a key difference - Do It Again by Steely Dan.
The shakers and cymbal strikes that open the piece sounded real with the Audio Research preamp.
I STILL lust after a fine example of the SP-3A (anybody want to swap for an SP-6C?).
Si vis pacem, para bellum
My first ARC preamp was an SP-6C that was quickly updated to an SP-6C-1 following the failure of a component. While the SP-3 was phenomenal in its day, I find that the SP-6 series was clearly superior with its stiffer power supply and improved coupling caps.
Perhaps you just need to have yours brought to current specs.
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