Tape Player Problem

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."

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.

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

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"

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

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.

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

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."

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

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"