Stuff you have built just because you can

Well that is certainly helpful

75 watts is a lot of wattage when the speakers are "efficient" of course efficient and speakers probably shouldn't even be in the same conversation. According to a friend of mine who has been in the business of building speaker systems, following in his fathers footsteps, speakers in general are only 3-4% efficient

My Fischer Studio Standard amplifier has meters for wattage, the amp has only 35 watts per channel but that's quite enough to drive the KLH speakers I use in the shop. At "normal" listening level the speakers are only using 5-10 watts max.

I Had an older set of AR speakers. They were the AR-3ax model. 3-way system with a 12 inch acoustic suspension woofer. (No port). They were very inefficient and required a lot of drive power but sounded pretty good. But when I put them on top of the Ureis and did an A-B compairison, I gave them away.

And the Muppets are back!
I believe starting this Tuesday. At least in the U.S.

Back as in playing the old tapes in the TV station?

I gave up on building my own airtight cabinets, they are great if you get them right, and have the power to drive them. Getting the power to drive them is much easier than building them right

Radio tubes are totally overrated. They are far from linear and can only drive very little current. What they are good at is handling high voltages. So all a tube amp can do is controlling a very small current but with a high voltage. This high voltage and low current then has to be transformed into something useful to drive a speaker. The trouble is that the transformer causes a lot of additional distortion. High quality audio amps are "ironless", they don't use a transformer. Instead, special speakers with extra big coils are required to do the trick. Those speakers are very expensive and they have a lot of mass to move so they are also cause massive distortions.

Early transistors were the other way round, they could give you a good current but not much of a voltage. Also they added a lot of white noise but transistor amps can drive simple speakers directly so you get much more signal quality for less effort.

The trouble was, that early transistors caused a lot of noise and even if they are much more linear, the distortions sound a lot worse. This is what causes the myth that tube amps are superior.

Modern transistor amps are as linear as it can get and they don't add noise. But still people think that tube amps are better. The reason is that they cause well sounding distortions and people think this makes the sound more "alive".
Also due to the transformer in an ordinary tube amp, the speakers are coupled much more losely to the signal so their own resonances are encouraged while a transistor amp driving the speaker directly suppresses the "character" of the speakers.

Same for the record player, resonance of the needle and friction distorts the signal but this also causes more well sounding distortions and people like that better.

Tube amps work best up to 5W. For more power, you need special tubes which are not only much more expensive, they "burn up" over time so they wear out over a few hundred hours of operation. Up to 10W, the wear is not that great but 20W is a great problem. Jukeboxes and other powerful tube amps need to use TV tubes meant to drive the picture tube. Those are not linear and you need to drive a very high idle current through them. As a result even those heavy duty tubes wear out quickly and they produce X-rays!

What makes the 40W AR amps so special is that they select a tube out of many hundreds which are extra linear and strong "by accident". Nobody can make those tubes on intention, they just happen to exist by chance. If you had needed a spare tube, you were on a long waiting list until they found a tube for you.

Until a few years ago, the only reason to use a radio tube was when you needed the special distortion. Electric guitars need amps with plenty of distortion to sound interesting. And until about 20 years ago there was no way to recreate those effects using transistor technology so you still had to have a tube pre-amp if you wanted this special sound. Nowadays, DSPs (Digital Signal Processor s) can be used which convert everything in real time so you can have anything you like, even the classic tube sound but better! You can even convert the guitar tunes to MIDI data and drive a synthesizer or anything MIDI you want in real time - and you can get one of those converters for less than $40!

It is also a myth that tube technology is (N)EMP proof. While a tube which isn't running is rather immune to an EMP, the rest of the circuits are far from immune. Tube amps need many coils and capacitors. The EMP will destroy the capacitors and the insulation of the coils. So after an EMP you have an OK tube but nothing to power it or convert the high voltage, low current into something useful for a speaker. Also the speaker itself will be busted.

What will survive is 19th century technology, the first morse code radios used a "Fritter", essentially nickel filings in a piece of hose which start to conduct when RF is present and stop when shaking them. Connect this to an electro magnet which rings a bell and taps the Fritter at the same time and you can receive morse code if you get enough signal power. There is no way to select the frequency though.

Might be something for the Show, an "atomic special" where they can look into "duck and cover" and what happens when hit by an EMP and what you can do afterwards. There are NEMP simulators available for tests and in the deserts of the US, there are even "open air" ones you can use to check vehicles or model homes.

There always has been a discussion on Amps.
I prefer the high quality Pots on my Creek 40-40, I prefer the "warm" sound of the older pre-digital amplifiers, I prefer Analogue.

"Nutshell" type of argument description.
Digital is just a series of binary on/off, analogue not only tells it to be on, but by how much?...

So the argument is base binary or base 10.

[ A VERY personal journey]

The amp I have sends an anti-static purge cleaning "hello" to the speakers, you hear a "whump" when you fist turn it on, it requires a decent speaker cable (QED 79 strand) to make the connection, it replicates exactly what the recording artist heard when he said "thats it!" in the studio, and after that, you dont need a graphic equaliser.
Graphic Equalisers are to correct the imperfections of your own system.
I have gone beyond that to create a system that has very few imperfections, Dual CAS 5052 delux turntable and a Revolver turntable, a simple digital to analogue CD player, a Tape deck, and as of late, a digital to analogue CD player that also has a "Input" for USB storage on it so I can play USB linked personal music players.

I prefer the old Sony CD player, its from the 80's, its very very simple, its a top loader, and if stood on a glass shelf, has very little interference.
{Note... if you have a CD player, try this trick, place it on a glass shelf that is well secured to the wall, and see if you can notice any difference?.. ]

In the quite bet between tracks, I cant hear anything at all from the rest of the system.

There will always be arguments as to who has the best system...
I do.
I have had "You need mo' POWER" enthusiasts scoff at my "puny" 40 watt speakers.
Until they experience Half Power of Dire Straits Brothers in Arms from a slightly dusty system that sort of shows you DONT need mo' POWER at all....

Then I turn off those, and go for the Lynn Cans of the other speakers in the other room.

No one has left my house saying my system is awful.

When I had that bike accident that wasnt my fault, I spent a LOT of time house-bound, unable to walk very far, and all I had was my Music.
The insurance paid out during that period, so I went and spent some time listening to various different systems to pick one that I could live with.
That was the best the 80's and early 90's could offer...
Its still here, and its still valid.

I do NOT need a little light display to tell me how well my system is working, it has one single power LED, and thats it.
My turntables are not lit up at all. They are fully manual. At the end of the record, it lifts the stylus and sops turning.....
My CD player has a power LED, and a LCD screen that isnt even back-lit, that just shows the track you are on, and has some basic controls to skip repeat forward and back.

Do I need anything else?.

In final judgement, I have what I have, you wont get much better, [in a reasonable price range], even now, 30 yrs later, all they have done is add a few bells and whistles, so unless you are spending the price of a decent second hand 5yr old car or newer, good luck.

Its all personal choice...
Some may say that their choice of turntable is better.. or that the new panasonic XYZ gadget is better... its pedantic, because even if its better to them it may not be better to me...?..
And if you can find better, and I agree with you on that its better, at what price?.

Further experiences,

The only thing I have that I can say has improved my system is my Kids idea of blu-teefing the Pad to the MP4 player thing, so that I can remote control the music tracks.
He is trying to work on the Raspberry to get that working on it as well.

I have an external hard drive with half a gigabyte of music on it, some of which is copies of my Flat-Black-And-Plastic that I have downloaded from various sources.
Yeah maybe my old record collection is not as useful or as easy to get to as it was when I was younger....
What did we loose?.
The pleasure of running the lint-free cloth over a new disc and seeing it in its shiny glorious scratch free existence, the putting of the needle to the fist track, the slight hiss, and then, new music you may not have heard before, complete with slight imperfections that were part of the music?...part of the experience?..
The Album art in full LP size, in those days, the Album covers were a work of art, you could read them without magnifiers, they were something to hold, to have, to own.

Now?.. its just a string of ones and zero's tying down your bandwidth, and I can you-tube and get the video of the band playing "live" on the TV.
Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and chicks for free

Used to be I had a day out in Town every now and again, picking out new music.
That was a day to look forward to?..
Now I can buy musak wiv me groceries "Best of" compilations, and the "Dads Musak" album that plague the shelves every fathers day, music from my youth, like they think I aint already got the full album of the songs I like anyway?...

Perhaps they changed things since the days when the finished product was piped back to the artists in a studio room that had a domestic system set up so they could hear exactly what their intended audience would be hearing then?...
I know a few artists who will not sign off on a finished recording until they HAVE listed to it back on a "Home" system.
There are some big names in there as well.

....Of course there are "some" bands in too much of a hurry to do that, and allow their "producers" to ship out any ship, wrong direction bieber fans will have one or two of that kind of crud.

But if you get that album I mentioned, Brothers in Arms, it was the first all digital album ever recorded, and has a [DDD] on the cd label to reflect that, and I know for absolute certainty that as it was such a breakthrough, they demanded to hear it back through a domestic setup so they know what was being sent out.
They were very interested how an all-digital album would sound when converted back to Analogue.


... is an absolute twerp.... and I MUST distance myself from them.
I have met a few who are so pedantic it looks like it hurts on them....
As I say, the argument will go back and forth for many a decade yet.
What I got in my own system was much MUCH better than anyone I knew at the time, because it was my Hobby,

The point I am trying to make is its still valid today, over quarter of a century on.

And how many "Beat boxes" that people paid the best part of a months wages to own have been discarded to scrap in that time?.. how outdated is the original IdiotPod?... and what number ipple-phone is it now that people are trying to prove is "better"....

The end of the argument on my end will always be, if something better comes along, prove it is better.
As it isnt, and 35 yrs have passed, I must have "Something" here.
DAT?... resigned to the outdated bin.
VHS?.. same way.
Betamax?.. oh dear oh dear oh dear, despite being vastly superior to VHS, resigned to the bin.

MP3?.. or MP4?..
They are just compression things to thin down file size, they are not a valid recording format.

People wander about with the oral contraception with a halo of distortion and say their "tunes" is "Wicked man" whilst listening to something barely recognisable as the studio recording it has been "ripped" from...
I have big heavy speakers that reproduce everything I throw at them quite happily, and I can guarantee I am listening to what the recording artist wanted me to hear.

Because to get the bits I miss, you would need a system the price of a new family car.

Older is not just better because its older, its better because they havnt invented anything better...
Yet.