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Not Making It On Your Own

Dear Stephen,

If you read the Audio Hell article on our web site you will see that we actually describe what we strive for in our search for the best sound, it is our mission statement if you like, to me this is not a matter of personal taste, your choice of music is, not the way it should come off the software.

It is therefore one thing to be tuning a design or circuit, but unless one has a philosophical framework with which to judge whether one is moving forward or not, it is more likely that one would move around in a circle, but regardless of that, what I am taking about is far more fundamental that superficially "tweaking" a circuit (any circuit) to suit whatever system it happens to be used in.

To expand the envelope one needs fundamental research and the one thing about fundamental research is that it takes time and therefore money and even the most dedicated hobbyist no matter how long he/she has been playing with this hobby is unlikely to have the time, let alone the money to come anywhere near being able to investigate for example say; permeable materials, let me give you some background to this one subject.

Take the design of an ideal moving coil or input transformer for example, the standard type 18Lams while good are not ideal if one is seeking the lowest possible loss, best bandwidth and therefore best magnetic coupling between core and windings, so you design a core shape which has a different shape to achieve this, but to make it you need to buy 50 kilograms of 0.1 mm thick 84% nickel material and pay £ 10,000.00 or so for a tool to stamp it into laminations of the shape required (off course AFTER you have had some lamination samples made by laser cutting to make sure the core shape actually does what the maths tell you), the lams are then heat treated to whatever process give the material the best and most linear low level behaviour (this itself may require several attempts to be certain the potential of the material is optimised), meantime you thave bought 10 kilograms (this is the minimum quantity most metal processors will deal with) of 4 - 6 different gauges of polyurethane coated silver wire, so you can make full function prototypes to test for sound, only then can you wind a couple of transformers.

Now multiply this scenario a few times, to make for example the basis for the new GAKU-ON amplifiers, whose fully transformer coupled ultra simple circuit requires 3 different transformers (input with step up, driver and output) all of which have to be matched to each other to ensure matching behaviour, which requires us to make as many as 20 of each transformer to make one pair of amplifiers.

Are you seriously telling me that this is within reach of any DIY'er??

Your expression "similar ground work" would apply here, because THERE is NO similarity between changing a few parts in a simple circuit and what I am talking about here, is there?

Now take the above, expand the concept and apply it to making capacitors for example, and you can add further layers of work and cost.

So whilst you are quite right to state that there is no such thing as a perfect device (although some tubes do come close), and that some simple circuits may not sound as good as others, what governs seeking absolutes resides on a different level.

Like I said in my response to 01A, there are great things that can be done by building and modifying your system yourself and in many cases what you can make is both better and cheaper than many offerings available in finished form, I wholly support this notion, which is why I make all but our very most specialised parts available to anyone who want to pay for them, but one needs to understand that there are realms which cannot be reached this way.

Since you are in the UK, drop by anytime you are near Hove.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup




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