Boarding the Fostex band wagon, and some vintage single-ended tetrodes.

Vintage Asylum

Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time.

128.231.88.2

Happy Holidays all,
First, I want to thank everyone here who helped push me through the turnstyle of the the Fostex band wagon. After fooling artound with several vintage full range drivers over the past year, I bought a pair of FE-167E's the other day and installed them in an existing cabinet. I have to say I have bee very impressed by the results. These speakers are very dynamic and articulate with very nice midrange and highs (surprisingly nice, actually). The bass is basically what I modelled for my cabinets, not extremely deep, but very well presented. The speakers are a little over damped in my cabinets, but placing them near the walls improved low end response quite a bit. They are still breaking in (only 20 hours so far), but I am very happy with so far.
The motivation for the speakers was rather complex, but I was very eager to have some "high efficeincy" speakers without crossovers to run with some of my lowered power tube amps. Indeed, the final straw fell recently when I found a second RCA BA13A to match with one that I found a year or so back. These guys were made in the mid 1940's and were designed as line amps for use in a studio environment. Like similiar WE amps they were also capable of "emergency monitor amplifier service" and put out 2 watts into 8 ohms without distortion. Given the low output power, I really needed efficient speakers to run them properly.
The RCA amps are really a pentode lovers dream, using 2x6J7 as drivers and a 6L6 output. There is a good deal of feedback with local loops at every stage and a global loop taken off a special output transformer winding. All the iron is made by UTC. I was a little sceptical about all the pentodes and feedback as I tend to be a triode guy (and a hard to please one at that), but curiosity got the best of me. I went ahead and completely rebuilt the stock circuits and got all spot on spec. Long story short, these amps are really quite stunning. Their sound is similiar in some ways to my single-ended 300B amps, yet very unique.
I have run across similiar WE and Langevin single ended amps over the past few years, but I never found any pairs, and not rationalize keeping these very pricey amps. Anyway, I have been watching the RCA amps on epay, and have seen some pairs go for around $500 but another really decked out pair with fancy tubes at around $1500. If that is your price range, and you are looking for some vintage single ended amps, these may be your ticket.
Take care,
Rodney

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Michael Percy Audio

Topic - Boarding the Fostex band wagon, and some vintage single-ended tetrodes. - rodney 09:40:33 12/29/03 (4)

Congrats on the Fostex and welcome - airtime 14:56:26 12/29/03 (3)

well... - rodney 15:28:54 12/29/03 (2)

I've been looking at the SET's - airtime 17:23:33 12/29/03 (1)

Hey Charles - rodney 10:37:25 12/30/03 (0)

You can not post to an archived thread.