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SET Asylum Single Ended Triodes (SETs), the ultimate tube lovers dream. |
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SET Asylum Single Ended Triodes (SETs), the ultimate tube lovers dream. |
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In Reply to: What part of his opinion is great ? posted by Interstage Tranny on July 13, 2012 at 10:09:57:
Your sense of humor and common sense is refreshing-- and fun!
One thing you might understand-- in my own case-- I've been in audio for a long, long time.
During that time, I've always had access to the best audio amps, preamps, wiring and speakers-- for at least the last 50 years.
I was into Ham Radio, built all my own equipment, ran commercial broadcast stations, designed , serviced, and built movie theatres across half the USA, and worked in L.A. recording venues..
In the early days, the first thing one did to an amp was disable the NFB. Next thing-- in those days-- was better signal handling caps. That included speaker crossovers which normally used Band-Aid packages for caps in passive crossovers. One could get monster improvements in the ALTEC theatre speakers-- for example-- by calling up Rel-Cap, (right in town!) and getting some film caps that were actually designed for speakers.
We had all kinds of amps to play with, and had the money to buy more.
It quickly became obvious that "pro" amps and "Hi-Fi" amps were usually sort of opposites. All were Push-Pull (except for the W.E. Model 91)-- some worked and some didn't. They all had to have major work to sound OK.
In the 60's, finally-- parts that were fairly good had become available to the population-- not just to "pro" users. Many people took available amps as far as they could go-- examples were Dynaco, Citation, McIntosh, Marantz, ALTEC (tube), and a whole pile of Scott, Fisher, and whatever else you want to remember.
NONE of those amps EVER performed well enough to convince a listener-- on any speaker-- no matter how good-- no matter how well modified the amp was-- not one could convince me, or others that we were listening to anything other than equipment that was struggling.
The culprit was amp power supplies-- designed to reduce hum-- and for nothing else useful at all. Those things guaranteed current starvation of all driving
elements, and even screwed-up operation of the output stages-- to some extent. Regardless of power rating, ALL of those amps had NO POWER.
That wasn't all! They also screwed-up Rhythm, Pace, and Timing-- big time.
Today, a few people still try to fix-up this stuff. The results are often far better than the originals, but they still fall very short of actually reproducing music.
A few of us got busy and studied all aspects of amp design, and we first threw-out everything that was not needed. The result was two-stage direct coupling without NFB. The next thing was to assure adequate current availability to the driver stage-- regardless of operating condition.
The next thing was to stop "snubbing" voltage-driven dynamics-- a practice that was robbing music of its "wow" and "fun-factor".. We soon learned to make circuits VERY High-Impedance, put minimal loading on them, but provide them with LOW Impedance POWER.
The rest was implementation-- good chassis design, floating parts in 3-dimensions, using really heavy, sonically excellent conductors, using the best parts, floating iron parts on brass. Using parts of the chassis as isolation platforms. Not much was overlooked!
Today, the results are spectacularly good at reproducing what's been recorded by the best Studios.
That was what we were after the whole time.
---Dennis---
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Follow Ups
- RE: What part of his opinion is great ? - tube wrangler 14:42:10 07/13/12 (2)
- And the result was...... - andy evans 15:05:33 07/13/12 (1)
- RE: And the result was...... - tube wrangler 20:03:48 07/13/12 (0)
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