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RE: Nakamichi PA5 and PA7, opinions

67.189.22.145

Posted by solid-state McNut on February 5, 2008 at 02:03:27

In Reply to: RE: Nakamichi PA5 and PA7, opinions posted by Crazy Dave on February 4, 2008 at 14:00:53:

Dave -

As far as "thin and crispy" vs. "dull and lifeless," it's all subjective. The speaker placement the room, and the recording have even more influence than the equipment as, far as I can tell -- when driven below the clipping level -- and cables can make a big difference, too.

I don't mean in my histrionic way to be unfair to Perreaux. I think all of the early amps with high-power MOSFET output stages suffered similarly (such as the Hafler DH200) -- fast, hot, detailed, edgy, and easy to blow. It took a demanding speaker load and a heavy hand on the jolume, but people could and did crispy-critter those early MOSFET units. It's just that the New Zealand gold standard was quite dear, and not all that stable, as it were.

While frothing uncontrollably, I should give honorable mention to the Sony VFET receivers at the end of the 70's. They were great sounding, beefy, and not too easy to blow up (but hard to fix - the transistors were discontinued almost as fast as were the custom tubes for the Luxman monoblocks). The big Marantz receivers of the day were blockbusters, too.

Still, short of a contemporaneous Mac, hardly a receiver ever made could stand up to the Tandbergs. I really loved the upper models, such as the TR-4075 and the later TR-2080. They had a big, warm, smooth sound that few combination units have ever equaled - or even very many separates, for that matter. They were even better than the late Nakamichi receivers by far. Their FM tuners were absolutely top-class, the same awesome one in even the lowest models. Unlike most stereo multiplex tuners, they sounded wonderful, and had superb RF performance.

I like Mac and Denon tuners, too. The MR78 takes the cake. The highly-esteemed Onkyo TX-9090 is a raw-sounding pile in my estimation, and even the hoity-toity Accuphase T-100 is crispy at best. The Magnum Dynalab FT-101 left me cold. The old Yamaha CT-1000 was killer, and even the digital T-1000 and T-700 were wonderful and warm-sounding. Too bad Yamaha audio gear took the big dive in the mid-to-late 80s.

I ran into one of my old customers today in the grocery store. I haven't seen him in at least 15 years. He still has the Tandberg TR-4040 receiver I sold him used 20 years ago, and the ADS L880 speakers with gray Kimber Kable and the Denon DCD-810 CD player he bought new from me -- in addition to his B&O 2400 turntable. He still hasn't found anything remotely affordable to beat his setup, but the TR-4040 finally has power supply hum. It would be a matter of subbing filter capacitors, because the original ones do not exist, as far as I know.

I had a Tandberg TC-20A reel-to-reel from 1983 to 1985, and then traded it in on a DRAGON. The TC-20A is now revered as one of the very best, and rightly so. The Tandberg R-R machines were beautifully designed and constructed. The TC-20A had a record phase compensation network that could produce a reasonable record-play facsimile of a 5 kHz square wave (no easy feat with squishy magnetic particles and magnetic heads).

I don't want to succumb to old-fogeyism. I heard some brand-new NAD amplifiers on the shelf recently that seemed surprisingly musical for the money, compared with their equipment of 15 years ago and more. No doubt the original and fabled 3020 integrated amp was a nice enough little entry-level unit and a great value, but the sonic delivery with subsequent models didn't always hold together for a while there.

I heard some used Acoustats (or whatever?) around 1980. They had proprietary tube amps in their bases with cheesy early high-feedback IC op-amp input stages. The amps had some thermal instability, if I recall correctly. Like all electrostatics, as long as you locked yourself into the tiny X-marks-the-sweet-spot, they sounded fine until you started to have even a little fun, then they pooped out. Great for chamber music, but I want a speaker that can do homage to St. Francis (Zappa). I also want something that the other people in the room can hear reasonably well, too.

You're right about theaters, but I think concerts are usually worse. I can literally hardly go anywhere any more. Oh, well!

High-efficiency speakers can help. That's why I mentioned horns and single-ended triodes, the other end of the continuum from the one I occupy. I have heard some unique and interesting effects from such setups, but I'm stuck with what I like.

Some people like Macs and old Klipsches. Nothing has ever (ever!) sounded worse to me than a pair of La Scalas, or their domestic counterparts, the Cornholes (excuse me, "Cornwalls"). I hated all of them -- the big Klipschorns, the Heresies, the Fortes, and nearly ugliest of them all, the KG4s. OMG, ROTFFPMGO. Oh, and the cute little KG2s were sickening, too!.

Being able to listen to the main speakers from any angle, and sometimes even more than 90 degrees off axis, is one benefit of dome midranges and tweeters tilted in toward the center. This kind of setup covers the horizontal listening area and beyond in ways that no panel speaker I have heard can do. Sensitivity is usually a tradeoff with this approach. I didn't think the highly-efficient domes I have heard sounded very good.

My big old ADS L1530s have a 95 dB efficiency rating, so by living with a pair of 115 lb. refrigeratiors, I get the best of both worlds! With their angled midrange-tweeter panels, their spectral polar response is the most perfectly balanced I have ever heard. (Many women, including one of my cousins and several of my girlfriend's co-workers, have instantly crossed me off the list of socially-acceptable human beings at the mere sight of these monoliths! How shallow... )

I installed some OAP professional speakers with 60x90 constant-directivity horn tweeters in a local high school, and they actually amazed me with their performance and uniformity of coverage.

The little B&O RL40 and RL60 speakers were pretty lacking, but the earlier S45 - S60 - S80, and then M75 - M80 - M90 - M100 lines had been awesome. With their keen sense of interior decor, the Danes just saw sooner than anyone else that the "wife acceptance factor," or even "style acceptance factor," of big speakers was on the way out, Iron Law of Bass or no. The big Pentas were really good, but hardly anybody could afford them. Now, B&O is a mere oriental shadow of its former self, while Labtec sells knockoffs in K-mart. I think that's what you get for putting visual esthetics ahead of sound quality in audio gear. It amounts to misguided values.

Now I've really hijacked this thread, although I hope onto closely-related ground...

Let's see, modding a PA-7. With an amp, you can mess about with better small-signal parts, bigger filter capacitors, different wire -- but the design topology, the power transformer, the heat sinks, and the output stage, are mostly just what you get. Sometimes you can swap output devices, but I think that changing the inherent performance characteristics of a power amplifier significantly is difficult.


- Steve

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