In Reply to: how many of you have mixed tube preamps & SS amps? posted by EL Cheapo on June 13, 2002 at 16:09:31:
My dad had an old Fisher 400 which I got when he “upgraded†to a Heathkit receiver. The Heathkit sounded so bad I looked into the circuits and found out that the phono amp stage had compression. This reduces the current through the transistor to keep thermal runaway from burning up the transistor. I replaced it with a better sounding one. The effect was as if the automatic gain control was switched on. The bad sound gave fullness to the music and gave what I was calling the “Hi Fi†sound. I upgraded to a Fisher 500C later. As people bought new equipment that had great reviews, I would challenge them to a dual with my Fisher. In the early 80’s a friend had a Proton D940 that we went head to head with. Instead of using a record we used his CD player. I thought it was good enough to show the difference. The Proton sounded as good to me as the Fisher, so I bought one and put my Fisher in the closet.Last month, I bought a new Proton 2631 preamp and 2580 amp and found out how bad the DAC in my Sony carrousel CD player was. This makes me think I may have made a mistake in my switching to the Proton. The CD player that I was using in the A to B testing probably wasn’t good enough to make the test fair. I still have the Fisher, but it need to be rebuilt.
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Follow Ups
- My Fisher 500C story - F Robert Simms 08:09:26 06/14/02 (0)