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RE: Futterman versus whatever

Posted by Lew (A) on December 21, 2010 at 08:17:44

In Reply to: RE: Futterman versus whatever posted by decca4 on December 21, 2010 at 07:33:47:

I assume that English is your native language. Please then read again what I wrote above, and then I invite you to do an archival search of this website using the key "Futterman". I hope after you do that you will see that you are trying to create a straw man; Futterman amps have not been dissed on this site, except for an occasional remark about reliability. On that score, I too defended the original Futterman design. I NEVER had an operational problem with a real Futterman amp or with the Prodigy, which by the way was a REAL orthodox Futterman amp built to a higher level of quality than the H3aa, albeit the printed circuit boards they used might have been inferior to the point to point wiring used in the H3aa. By the way, although the NYAL, Fourier, KSS, and Counterpoint OTLs (all basically Futterman types) did have reliability issues, the problems were usually due to the way in which the topology of the respective amplifiers departed from the original Futterman circuit, most often in an attempt to do away with the output coupling caps. I have repeated this sentiment many times here.

When I bought H3aa's, they were fresh, new amplifiers. In fact, I have vivid memories of picking up my second pair of H3aa's in 1979, direct from Julius at his small factory on 72nd St off Broadway in NYC. The varnish on the transformers had hardly dried. Julius was a charming and classy gentleman of the old school. But as you say, and as I have said, the true potential of those amps was probably never realized due to the limitations of the parts available to Julius and to the fact that he probably would have been amused by the current obsession with types of wire, capacitors, resistors, tube sockets, RCA connectors, speaker outputs, etc, etc. That stuff just was not a part of home audio back then, and for a brand new pair of H3aa monoblocks, I probably paid about the same in 1979 as what you might pay now for a pair of Vcaps. The 18ga AC cords on my Futtermans were no different from that used on my table lamp. The Prodigy effort was closer to incorporating the modern ideas about parts quality, for better or worse. I'd love to hear an SEPP OTL built by Jim Dowdy using modern parts from the get-go.

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