If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#51
|
|||
|
|||
Andy wrote: correction you lamer i own my own high end stereo store and my units cost me nothing i own the place. You know your onions Andy, the high end audiophile guys all use those line voltage conditioners, that is IMPORTANT. Good post. Here's a quote from an audiophile site, this guy makes his own tube amps, preamps, speakers, etc. "About 18 years ago I did some work with our local electric company that allowed me to go inside the nuclear bomb proof underground control center that manages the power distribution for our city and surrounding area. It looked like a scene straight from Star trek. Curved walls with floor to ceiling schematics of the entire state, LED's blinking all over the place. I sat at the captions chair with the arc shaped control desk in front of me and saw a giant knob marked "cycles". There across the room was what looked like a large clock, no speedometer because it went from zero to 100. There was a large analogue hand melodically hanging at 57 cycles. Hmm, I thought, is that what I think it is? I asked the operator still waiting for me to get out of his seat, and he confirmed that that was in fact what controlled the frequency of ALL the AC generators in the three connecting plants around the state. My first reaction was hey.. You can't do that! Well, it turns out that during high heat days in the summer it cost less money to manufacture the energy at lower frequencies. Then at night around 1 or 2 o'clock, he turns that big knob and the big gauge across the room crawls up to 62 sometime even 65 cycles so that they can speed up everyone's clocks to catch up for the lost time. I thought I had found the answer to the magic hours but since then I have been using a power conditioner (a real one) and it maintains noise free 60 cycle 120 volts AC regardless of the input. And while that improved the sound during the day, well all the time really, the mystery middle of the night blooms continued. I have since then found that it seems to be many things that align themselves on a coherent harmonic that yields the effect. Although an unregulated power supply on a basic tube amp will perform better when you bump up the 60 cycle AC a bit, it turns out that it is the harmonics in the power lines surrounding your area that seem to be responsible. During the day with hundreds of things running off of ultimately the same power source, the AC power in your lines is full of contaminants that add grain to your sound, and collapse your sound stage. I believe it is the reduced level of power line harmonics that make possible the middle of the night magic, triggered by the increase in Cycles on the AC power, combined with the fact that this is the time when the Sun is on the exact other side of the planet. Radiation from the sun adds it's own effect to power line harmonics in my observations. And finally, the reduced ambient noise floor you typically have at those hours of the night let you hear more dynamic range." |
Ads |
#52
|
|||
|
|||
DeserTBoB wrote:
Idiot...UPS means "uninterruptable power supply". It's not a "line filter." Dumbass, I retired from a career in the Bell System and AT&T, as well as studio recording. I've used UPSes (REAL UPSs, not those toy single phase boxes for PCs) from 75 to 313 KVa. You've picked the wrong guy to **** with. I'm cheap...and not a fool. That's why I have good gear and money at the same time. By the way...ever consider finishing high school? Your grammatical usage and lack of typing skills show a low education level. Are you pals with Charlie Nudo? dB Bob theres no sense in arguing with Nudo's twin here. you aught to just kilfile this jerk & be done with it. -- i have an 8 track mind My other computer is your XP box. |
#53
|
|||
|
|||
On 11 May 2005 04:23:43 -0700, "CAINE"
wrote: Andy wrote: correction you lamer i own my own high end stereo store and my units cost me nothing i own the place. You know your onions Andy, the high end audiophile guys all use those line voltage conditioners, that is IMPORTANT. Good post. Here's a quote from an audiophile site, this guy makes his own tube amps, preamps, speakers, etc. snip More drivel from Charlie Nudo, our resident clueless moron. "About 18 years ago I did some work with our local electric company snipping the obvious My first reaction was hey.. You can't do that! Well, it turns out that during high heat days in the summer it cost less money to manufacture the energy at lower frequencies. Then at night around 1 or 2 o'clock, he turns that big knob and the big gauge across the room crawls up to 62 sometime even 65 cycles so that they can speed up everyone's clocks to catch up for the lost time. snip I don't know which utility this is, but I do know that such performance in the Western states would bring sanctions from various state PUCs. For years, I was in charge of emergency power generation at various sites and was the switchgear operator at one which depended a lot on emergency power due to the large amount of AC powered RF amplifiers required in those days for C-band earth station operation. We monitored frequency constantly, and there were no "57 Hz" days, even during the worst demands in summer. At worst during the hottest day of the year, we might see 59.8 or so, and that only during the usual peak at around 1700 local time, when people would be getting home from work and switching on their air conditioners. However, switching transients were common, especially whenever a big plant would go on or off the grid. I retired before the "Cheney and Enron" brownouts/blackouts of 2000, but I do understand there were several underfrequency days during that manufactured catastrophe. One can only hope that Dick Cheney goes to prison along with his Enron buddies for that fraud. The "52" relays in our switchgear were set to dump the grid at 58 and 62 Hz, and I only recall one incident where this actually happened. As the dispatcher for Southern California Edison would later report, The Bonneville Power Administration had one of their huge Westinghouse turbines take a dump at Grand Coulee Dam, and the resulting instant loss of capacity (over 1.2 GVA per turbine at the "new" Grand Coulee!) forced many smaller steam and hydro plants to re-regulate upward, something that doesn't happen instantaneously, especially with fossil fueled steam plants. In this incident, the whole Pacific Intertie grid dipped to 57.2 Hz, thus automatically starting our diesel and gas turbine power plants in several locations. I tracked the incident on an old Brush roll chart, and you could see the grid slowly adjusting upward, with the attendant voltage surges accompanying each move upward in frequency. It took the Pacific Intertie almost an hour to get to 60 Hz again, and we stayed on engines at least that long to guard against the inevitable "oops" that would occur during such an incident. We used a frequency counter with a temperature controlled crystal time base to measure grid frequency, since analog meters are notoriously inaccurate, especially when the line power contains a lot of harmonic energy. I thought I had found the answer to the magic hours but since then I have been using a power conditioner (a real one) and it maintains noise free 60 cycle 120 volts AC regardless of the input. And while that improved the sound during the day, well all the time really, the mystery middle of the night blooms continued. snip Uh huh...sure. Scientific fast is, people "hear" differently at different times in the day, due to fatigue, stress, sleepiness, even temperature. Nice try, but bull**** is bull****, no matter how much Glade you spray on it. I have since then found that it seems to be many things that align themselves on a coherent harmonic that yields the effect. snip Here comes the "audiophool" crap. Explain a "coherent harmonic" in engineering terms. Result: "More audiophool BS." Although an unregulated power supply on a basic tube amp will perform better when you bump up the 60 cycle AC a bit, it turns out that it is the harmonics in the power lines surrounding your area that seem to be responsible. During the day with hundreds of things running off of ultimately the same power source, the AC power in your lines is full of contaminants that add grain to your sound, and collapse your sound stage. snip "Grain"...another "audiophool" adjective. This guy, like most "tube heads," is out to lunch and ain't coming back. I believe it is the reduced level of power line harmonics that make possible the middle of the night magic, triggered by the increase in Cycles on the AC power, combined with the fact that this is the time when the Sun is on the exact other side of the planet. Radiation from the sun adds it's own effect to power line harmonics in my observations. snip Cosmic ray bombardment causes voltage surges during sun spot activity, that much is well documented. It also used to routinely knock major parts of the Bell System's long distance network off the air, most noticeably on the 4 and 6 GHz microwave radio routes and aerial cable and open wire routes, most of which were gone by 1980. However, power line harmonics are a fact of life, one that's been getting worse with the introduction of the PC and the switching power supply. Prior to the PC, the basic characteristic of an electric power utility's load was inductive, or motor load. An inductive load is easy to feed (assuming your feeders are balanced well enough with capacitance to provide favorable power factor) and there was little problem. Once electronics provided people everywhere with PCs, and server farms to feed them, as well as "electronic ballasts" for fluorescent lighting and tons of other non-inductive, switching load goodies, harmonic problems started showing up in droves. Large step-down and autotransformers may or may not have a problem with excessive harmonic content, as they may or may not be "K-rated" to handle and effectively choke off harmonic content to their loads, dissapating the harmonic energy as heat. One site I worked had two IPM UPSs...313 KVA and 150 KVA. Both were equipped with LC input and output filters to eliminate the harmonic content caused by the switching of the output SCRs that formed the AC waveform which came from +390V battery strings, as well as choke off the harmonics to the grid caused by SCRs on the rectifier/battery charger side. An addition was made as the station's capacity increased, and a third, 300 KVA unit was added, but the idiots in New Jersey at headquarters decided they didn't want to pay for the output or input filters. Result? Everything powered by this UPS suffered from overheated motors, motors turning off-speed high, poor high voltage power supply regulation and noise. A synchronous clock would run about 5% fast, even with the output frequency set at 60.000 Hz, since the synchronous motor would occasionally "cog" forward on one of the harmonics. After a year of this, they finally sprang for the output filter cabinet, and all the problems went away. I should note, however, that the third harmonic component in the output was equal to the fundamental (!!!)...that's 100% total harmonic distortion, folks...unlikely to be seen anywhere on a utility's grid. We also found out that not using an INPUT filter to the SCR fired rectifier sections on the new UPS would reflect big harmonic energy back to the grid, and would cause the pole mounted automatic capacitor banks on the 12 KV feeder to switch aimlessly back and forth. Edison informed us that we could either put our own input filter on the 480 V input to the new UPS, or they'd do it for us and bill us at cost plus. Management, finally figuring they'd screwed up again, paid for the input filter, as well. Getting back to tube amps, I find the "midnight bloom" fantasy to be cute, but, as with most tube fantasies, bull****. Looking at the typical RC pi section filter in any tube amplifier that was common in the 1950s, any harmonic energy ABOVE 60 Hz would be shunted to ground even MORE efficiently than would the fundamental itself, so this guy's premise is horse****. If the caps in the power supply section were defective or had high ESR (or bad series inductance problems, common in old, high voltage caps of that era), then I'd say there could be a problem, but 60 Hz hum would show up on the B+ even moreso than the harmonics in that case. "Tubeheads" are a source of amusement to me. Why anyone thinks these obsolete chunks of anchor material are somehow "superior" to a well designed MOSFET output, modern amplifier are totally beyond me, and the tale of the test gear tells the story. I sold a bunch of NOS Western Electric 417A triodes for LARGE bucks to a goof that was building a power amp out of a huge string of paralleled triodes...about as hilarious a design as I've ever seen. I think he got a total of about 10 watts out of it AT 1% THD! Duhhhhh...what's the advantage here??? Using the amp as a space heater in wintertime? Not to mention that tube ANYTHING is ecologically bad, as they're so inefficient; about 80% of the electrical energy input into any class AB tube audio amp at rated power is disappated as heat, not audio power; at lower power levels or idle, the figure approaches 100%. When you get to good solid state designs, that figure gets a hell of a lot lower in a hurry. Once MOSFET amps became the norm in the late '70s in good pro and high fidelity gear, any "advantages" of tube amplification became moot...period. Granted, many just couldn't get past those early bipolar days, when low slew rate and unknown phenomena like transient intermodulation distortion made for some really crappy sounding gear. I had my share of that, with biamped Marantz 16s...good for those days, but really ****ty sounding when pushed to the rails. These guys, not armed with any technical credentials, wound up stuck in the 1950s and early '60s, refusing to accept progress in design. Even my BEST tube amps of the past were wont to yield anything lower than about .5% THD at rated power, usually norminally 25 or so watts RMS, and when you compare that to the .004% I can get from a Hafler DH-220 at rated power that's 10 times greater than any 6L6 powered push-pull amp, the choice becomes obvious. Sure, those KT-88 equipped Macs were cool to look at, but looks don't provide results...period. This isn't to say that I'm above making a profit off these fools. A few years ago, I sold six Western Electric 350Bs, nothing more than a 6L6GA with very thick, very thorium enriched plates and very power hungry filaments, to some Japanese guys for a whopping $1685...not bad for what's essentially a gussied up 6L6, which can be had easily for $5 a shot, NOS in the box. Sure, if you're rich, it may be fun to own two Western Electric 101A power amplifiers from 1940 equipped with brand new 350B outputs, giving you 14 watts RMS at around 3% THD. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted. Not me...I'm too cheap, too practical and too smart for that. Biggest "tubehead" myth ever: old 2A3 triode amps are "better sounding." Sorry...t'ain't true. Reason: interstage transformers. Moving forward, interstage transformer coupling was a big reason that many 1960s bipolar amps sounded as badly as they did. dB |
#54
|
|||
|
|||
Andy: here's the link to that information on AC power line variation,
and how it affects stereos- this outfit makes some mighty fine tube SET amps- I tried a Zen for a while before stepping up to dual monoblock Akai SET. Makes transistor solid state sound just like that- like a transistor radio... http://www.decware.com/newsite/mainmenu.htm click on "articles", then on "magic hour" |
#55
|
|||
|
|||
bell system over paied dont know squat techs i have delt with many and shown
many thay dont know squat over me. and the ups'es i use also have built in full line condtioning "DeserTBoB" wrote in message ... On Wed, 11 May 2005 06:27:46 GMT, "Andy" wrote: shows how stupid you truely are line condtioners and UPS units are sold for a reason to make sure clean power is deliverd to youre connected loads. snip Idiot...UPS means "uninterruptable power supply". It's not a "line filter." Dumbass, I retired from a career in the Bell System and AT&T, as well as studio recording. I've used UPSes (REAL UPSs, not those toy single phase boxes for PCs) from 75 to 313 KVa. You've picked the wrong guy to **** with. just as i see by youre email address you use a cheap ass dial up isp shows how cheap you really are snip I'm cheap...and not a fool. That's why I have good gear and money at the same time. By the way...ever consider finishing high school? Your grammatical usage and lack of typing skills show a low education level. Are you pals with Charlie Nudo? dB |
#56
|
|||
|
|||
just like you a loser that has no brains
"8 tracker from hell" wrote in message ... DeserTBoB wrote: Idiot...UPS means "uninterruptable power supply". It's not a "line filter." Dumbass, I retired from a career in the Bell System and AT&T, as well as studio recording. I've used UPSes (REAL UPSs, not those toy single phase boxes for PCs) from 75 to 313 KVa. You've picked the wrong guy to **** with. I'm cheap...and not a fool. That's why I have good gear and money at the same time. By the way...ever consider finishing high school? Your grammatical usage and lack of typing skills show a low education level. Are you pals with Charlie Nudo? dB Bob theres no sense in arguing with Nudo's twin here. you aught to just kilfile this jerk & be done with it. -- i have an 8 track mind My other computer is your XP box. |
#57
|
|||
|
|||
not ever going to be over matched by you or any one on this dieing news
group as for spelling online news groups i dont care to busy makeing my 90 grand a year off my company store and keeping up my 2 houses "DeserTBoB" wrote in message ... On Wed, 11 May 2005 06:32:14 GMT, "Andy" wrote: correction you lamer i own my own high end stereo store and my units cost me nothing i own the place. snip LMAO! "High end stereo store" is usually a euphemism for "ripoff joint." Judging from the lack of capitalization and poor grammar, I'd put you on a par with Charlie Nudo, our resident paranoid delusional ****tard. Let's see...you're the one that replaces "stylasts" in turntables, right? The word is STYLUS...moron. Unsubscribe from this NG, ****tard...you're hopelessly overmatched here. dB |
#58
|
|||
|
|||
thanks for the kind words tell bob the loser who thinks he knows all becuse
he worked for the bell system doing telephones lol most of them jerks cant even properly install phone service i made my installer do it right and by code with me right behind him to spite his saying well its costly to do it this way and oure company wont like it i say tough my money you do it my way. "CAINE" wrote in message oups.com... Andy wrote: correction you lamer i own my own high end stereo store and my units cost me nothing i own the place. You know your onions Andy, the high end audiophile guys all use those line voltage conditioners, that is IMPORTANT. Good post. Here's a quote from an audiophile site, this guy makes his own tube amps, preamps, speakers, etc. "About 18 years ago I did some work with our local electric company that allowed me to go inside the nuclear bomb proof underground control center that manages the power distribution for our city and surrounding area. It looked like a scene straight from Star trek. Curved walls with floor to ceiling schematics of the entire state, LED's blinking all over the place. I sat at the captions chair with the arc shaped control desk in front of me and saw a giant knob marked "cycles". There across the room was what looked like a large clock, no speedometer because it went from zero to 100. There was a large analogue hand melodically hanging at 57 cycles. Hmm, I thought, is that what I think it is? I asked the operator still waiting for me to get out of his seat, and he confirmed that that was in fact what controlled the frequency of ALL the AC generators in the three connecting plants around the state. My first reaction was hey.. You can't do that! Well, it turns out that during high heat days in the summer it cost less money to manufacture the energy at lower frequencies. Then at night around 1 or 2 o'clock, he turns that big knob and the big gauge across the room crawls up to 62 sometime even 65 cycles so that they can speed up everyone's clocks to catch up for the lost time. I thought I had found the answer to the magic hours but since then I have been using a power conditioner (a real one) and it maintains noise free 60 cycle 120 volts AC regardless of the input. And while that improved the sound during the day, well all the time really, the mystery middle of the night blooms continued. I have since then found that it seems to be many things that align themselves on a coherent harmonic that yields the effect. Although an unregulated power supply on a basic tube amp will perform better when you bump up the 60 cycle AC a bit, it turns out that it is the harmonics in the power lines surrounding your area that seem to be responsible. During the day with hundreds of things running off of ultimately the same power source, the AC power in your lines is full of contaminants that add grain to your sound, and collapse your sound stage. I believe it is the reduced level of power line harmonics that make possible the middle of the night magic, triggered by the increase in Cycles on the AC power, combined with the fact that this is the time when the Sun is on the exact other side of the planet. Radiation from the sun adds it's own effect to power line harmonics in my observations. And finally, the reduced ambient noise floor you typically have at those hours of the night let you hear more dynamic range." |
#59
|
|||
|
|||
i forgot bob you think you know everything and have worked for every one
under the son not loser "DeserTBoB" wrote in message ... On 11 May 2005 04:23:43 -0700, "CAINE" wrote: Andy wrote: correction you lamer i own my own high end stereo store and my units cost me nothing i own the place. You know your onions Andy, the high end audiophile guys all use those line voltage conditioners, that is IMPORTANT. Good post. Here's a quote from an audiophile site, this guy makes his own tube amps, preamps, speakers, etc. snip More drivel from Charlie Nudo, our resident clueless moron. "About 18 years ago I did some work with our local electric company snipping the obvious My first reaction was hey.. You can't do that! Well, it turns out that during high heat days in the summer it cost less money to manufacture the energy at lower frequencies. Then at night around 1 or 2 o'clock, he turns that big knob and the big gauge across the room crawls up to 62 sometime even 65 cycles so that they can speed up everyone's clocks to catch up for the lost time. snip I don't know which utility this is, but I do know that such performance in the Western states would bring sanctions from various state PUCs. For years, I was in charge of emergency power generation at various sites and was the switchgear operator at one which depended a lot on emergency power due to the large amount of AC powered RF amplifiers required in those days for C-band earth station operation. We monitored frequency constantly, and there were no "57 Hz" days, even during the worst demands in summer. At worst during the hottest day of the year, we might see 59.8 or so, and that only during the usual peak at around 1700 local time, when people would be getting home from work and switching on their air conditioners. However, switching transients were common, especially whenever a big plant would go on or off the grid. I retired before the "Cheney and Enron" brownouts/blackouts of 2000, but I do understand there were several underfrequency days during that manufactured catastrophe. One can only hope that Dick Cheney goes to prison along with his Enron buddies for that fraud. The "52" relays in our switchgear were set to dump the grid at 58 and 62 Hz, and I only recall one incident where this actually happened. As the dispatcher for Southern California Edison would later report, The Bonneville Power Administration had one of their huge Westinghouse turbines take a dump at Grand Coulee Dam, and the resulting instant loss of capacity (over 1.2 GVA per turbine at the "new" Grand Coulee!) forced many smaller steam and hydro plants to re-regulate upward, something that doesn't happen instantaneously, especially with fossil fueled steam plants. In this incident, the whole Pacific Intertie grid dipped to 57.2 Hz, thus automatically starting our diesel and gas turbine power plants in several locations. I tracked the incident on an old Brush roll chart, and you could see the grid slowly adjusting upward, with the attendant voltage surges accompanying each move upward in frequency. It took the Pacific Intertie almost an hour to get to 60 Hz again, and we stayed on engines at least that long to guard against the inevitable "oops" that would occur during such an incident. We used a frequency counter with a temperature controlled crystal time base to measure grid frequency, since analog meters are notoriously inaccurate, especially when the line power contains a lot of harmonic energy. I thought I had found the answer to the magic hours but since then I have been using a power conditioner (a real one) and it maintains noise free 60 cycle 120 volts AC regardless of the input. And while that improved the sound during the day, well all the time really, the mystery middle of the night blooms continued. snip Uh huh...sure. Scientific fast is, people "hear" differently at different times in the day, due to fatigue, stress, sleepiness, even temperature. Nice try, but bull**** is bull****, no matter how much Glade you spray on it. I have since then found that it seems to be many things that align themselves on a coherent harmonic that yields the effect. snip Here comes the "audiophool" crap. Explain a "coherent harmonic" in engineering terms. Result: "More audiophool BS." Although an unregulated power supply on a basic tube amp will perform better when you bump up the 60 cycle AC a bit, it turns out that it is the harmonics in the power lines surrounding your area that seem to be responsible. During the day with hundreds of things running off of ultimately the same power source, the AC power in your lines is full of contaminants that add grain to your sound, and collapse your sound stage. snip "Grain"...another "audiophool" adjective. This guy, like most "tube heads," is out to lunch and ain't coming back. I believe it is the reduced level of power line harmonics that make possible the middle of the night magic, triggered by the increase in Cycles on the AC power, combined with the fact that this is the time when the Sun is on the exact other side of the planet. Radiation from the sun adds it's own effect to power line harmonics in my observations. snip Cosmic ray bombardment causes voltage surges during sun spot activity, that much is well documented. It also used to routinely knock major parts of the Bell System's long distance network off the air, most noticeably on the 4 and 6 GHz microwave radio routes and aerial cable and open wire routes, most of which were gone by 1980. However, power line harmonics are a fact of life, one that's been getting worse with the introduction of the PC and the switching power supply. Prior to the PC, the basic characteristic of an electric power utility's load was inductive, or motor load. An inductive load is easy to feed (assuming your feeders are balanced well enough with capacitance to provide favorable power factor) and there was little problem. Once electronics provided people everywhere with PCs, and server farms to feed them, as well as "electronic ballasts" for fluorescent lighting and tons of other non-inductive, switching load goodies, harmonic problems started showing up in droves. Large step-down and autotransformers may or may not have a problem with excessive harmonic content, as they may or may not be "K-rated" to handle and effectively choke off harmonic content to their loads, dissapating the harmonic energy as heat. One site I worked had two IPM UPSs...313 KVA and 150 KVA. Both were equipped with LC input and output filters to eliminate the harmonic content caused by the switching of the output SCRs that formed the AC waveform which came from +390V battery strings, as well as choke off the harmonics to the grid caused by SCRs on the rectifier/battery charger side. An addition was made as the station's capacity increased, and a third, 300 KVA unit was added, but the idiots in New Jersey at headquarters decided they didn't want to pay for the output or input filters. Result? Everything powered by this UPS suffered from overheated motors, motors turning off-speed high, poor high voltage power supply regulation and noise. A synchronous clock would run about 5% fast, even with the output frequency set at 60.000 Hz, since the synchronous motor would occasionally "cog" forward on one of the harmonics. After a year of this, they finally sprang for the output filter cabinet, and all the problems went away. I should note, however, that the third harmonic component in the output was equal to the fundamental (!!!)...that's 100% total harmonic distortion, folks...unlikely to be seen anywhere on a utility's grid. We also found out that not using an INPUT filter to the SCR fired rectifier sections on the new UPS would reflect big harmonic energy back to the grid, and would cause the pole mounted automatic capacitor banks on the 12 KV feeder to switch aimlessly back and forth. Edison informed us that we could either put our own input filter on the 480 V input to the new UPS, or they'd do it for us and bill us at cost plus. Management, finally figuring they'd screwed up again, paid for the input filter, as well. Getting back to tube amps, I find the "midnight bloom" fantasy to be cute, but, as with most tube fantasies, bull****. Looking at the typical RC pi section filter in any tube amplifier that was common in the 1950s, any harmonic energy ABOVE 60 Hz would be shunted to ground even MORE efficiently than would the fundamental itself, so this guy's premise is horse****. If the caps in the power supply section were defective or had high ESR (or bad series inductance problems, common in old, high voltage caps of that era), then I'd say there could be a problem, but 60 Hz hum would show up on the B+ even moreso than the harmonics in that case. "Tubeheads" are a source of amusement to me. Why anyone thinks these obsolete chunks of anchor material are somehow "superior" to a well designed MOSFET output, modern amplifier are totally beyond me, and the tale of the test gear tells the story. I sold a bunch of NOS Western Electric 417A triodes for LARGE bucks to a goof that was building a power amp out of a huge string of paralleled triodes...about as hilarious a design as I've ever seen. I think he got a total of about 10 watts out of it AT 1% THD! Duhhhhh...what's the advantage here??? Using the amp as a space heater in wintertime? Not to mention that tube ANYTHING is ecologically bad, as they're so inefficient; about 80% of the electrical energy input into any class AB tube audio amp at rated power is disappated as heat, not audio power; at lower power levels or idle, the figure approaches 100%. When you get to good solid state designs, that figure gets a hell of a lot lower in a hurry. Once MOSFET amps became the norm in the late '70s in good pro and high fidelity gear, any "advantages" of tube amplification became moot...period. Granted, many just couldn't get past those early bipolar days, when low slew rate and unknown phenomena like transient intermodulation distortion made for some really crappy sounding gear. I had my share of that, with biamped Marantz 16s...good for those days, but really ****ty sounding when pushed to the rails. These guys, not armed with any technical credentials, wound up stuck in the 1950s and early '60s, refusing to accept progress in design. Even my BEST tube amps of the past were wont to yield anything lower than about .5% THD at rated power, usually norminally 25 or so watts RMS, and when you compare that to the .004% I can get from a Hafler DH-220 at rated power that's 10 times greater than any 6L6 powered push-pull amp, the choice becomes obvious. Sure, those KT-88 equipped Macs were cool to look at, but looks don't provide results...period. This isn't to say that I'm above making a profit off these fools. A few years ago, I sold six Western Electric 350Bs, nothing more than a 6L6GA with very thick, very thorium enriched plates and very power hungry filaments, to some Japanese guys for a whopping $1685...not bad for what's essentially a gussied up 6L6, which can be had easily for $5 a shot, NOS in the box. Sure, if you're rich, it may be fun to own two Western Electric 101A power amplifiers from 1940 equipped with brand new 350B outputs, giving you 14 watts RMS at around 3% THD. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted. Not me...I'm too cheap, too practical and too smart for that. Biggest "tubehead" myth ever: old 2A3 triode amps are "better sounding." Sorry...t'ain't true. Reason: interstage transformers. Moving forward, interstage transformer coupling was a big reason that many 1960s bipolar amps sounded as badly as they did. dB |
#60
|
|||
|
|||
thank you
"CAINE" wrote in message oups.com... Andy: here's the link to that information on AC power line variation, and how it affects stereos- this outfit makes some mighty fine tube SET amps- I tried a Zen for a while before stepping up to dual monoblock Akai SET. Makes transistor solid state sound just like that- like a transistor radio... http://www.decware.com/newsite/mainmenu.htm click on "articles", then on "magic hour" |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
PART II: 66% to 75% OFF OVER 10,000 CARDS | Rose | Hockey | 0 | January 2nd 04 04:33 PM |
HUGE LIST PART II! 66% to 75% OFF BOOK VALUE | Rose | Hockey | 0 | December 28th 03 02:49 PM |
SUPER SALE PART II: 10,000 CARDS UP TO 75% OFF | Rose | Hockey | 0 | December 21st 03 02:57 PM |
SUPER SALE PART II! UP TO 75% OVER 10,000 CARDS | Rose | Hockey | 0 | December 7th 03 03:11 PM |
GOALIES @ 75% US | George Cronn | Hockey | 0 | August 29th 03 10:02 PM |