Herculean DIY Autoformer wiring.

 They say a picture is worth 1000 words... well how about how about around 180 wires and 820 solder connections?  Brad from the Boston contingency wired 6 of the 28 position autoformers up for Caroll's home theater system.  I often joke that more than half of the $200 autoformers I have sold sit partially wired in a box on a shelf and this picture might explain why.

blink blink blink

 I mentioned the Feral Eye a number of years ago and the fate it met from Hurricane Sandy.  It  was brought back to life by steve berger as a PP 10 amp with a 49% nickel phase splitter and last night I got to hear it with a quad of mesh 10's from 1929.  

I'll be he first to admit that historically  I have not been a fan of either push pull or 10's and these days my daily drives are PP 300B's direct feeding stacked quad 57's and last night has me considering revisiting the 10.

The days events were to listen to cartridge variations and the mesh came in at the end of the evening as a treat for a hard days work.

Doc Hoyer's garage door opener.

 It would seem that something as trivial as a garage door opener would never find its way to these pages but often it is the trivial that gives a glimpse into who a person really was.

This seemingly Rube Goldberg approach to automatically opening a garage door is a testament to the cleverness that was Dennis R. Hoyer.  I have no idea when this was constructed but given that they date back to 1926 my guess is going to Sears was not an acceptable option for Dennis.

The key to the operation is the drive mechanism and when I first looked at it I simply thought motor pulled the door open and the casters and gravity did the trick to lower the door with the motor providing some resistive force.  Upon further inspection I realized something different was going on since the casters were pointed in the wrong direction.

A closer look at the casters quickly refuted my first idea and for a second I though that the outside collar would spin around but when I realized that it was fixed it became clear that this simply operated like a ball screw on a CNC machine.

The motor turns the shaft and the casters on the collar were clamped tightly enough and set at a pitch to move the mechanism up or down at the desired rate based on motor speed.  There was a stop at full open and closed but no other safety procedures in place. According to his cousin Damian, if anything were accidentally left in-between the open and closed positions, the results were not pretty.

Most people would have simply driven to Sears but thats not how some of the truly great ones rolled.

Maggin'

I have been playing with cartridges lately and one of the central points to any cartridge is the magnet.  I built this charging coil to re-magnetize the alnico magnet in a denon 103.

For s sense of scale here it is in relation to a charge coil for the magnet in a Sequerra ribbon.

This is a piece of more contemporary audio history.  JC built the charger for Dick Sequerra to charge the magnets for his ribbon drivers.

 The charger uses an ignitron (yes I insist on mercury even in my cartridges) to dump up to 14,000µf @ 600V into the charge coil.

While running it through its paces I was able to reverse the field in a N52 Neo magnet and in my attempt to see if I was reaching maximum charge this happened when I set the voltage to 400V and got a larger "POP" then expected.

The coil was 10 turns of #16 wire encased in JB weld.  The wire broke into several parts and the JB weld was nowhere to be found.   I have always heard stories how they would often vaporize the charge coil in big magnets.... never thought I would experience it first hand.

R.I.P. Art

It has been two months since Art left us and Janet reached out to me to help re-home the Step-Up that he was rotating through his system with his Denon 103.  This is the exact copper 1:15 H that he reviewed in Listening #176.   He preferred the sound of this copper unit compared to the identical silver version.  It has a 1:15 step-up ratio and is suited for cartridges with internal impedances from 20Ω to 50Ω.  The price at the time of review was $2400 and $1800 seems fair.  Payment will go to Janet Dudley directly and the SUT will ship from me with full support.  Physically this unit has been around the block so to speak but the function and sound is 101%.  Current pricing for this version in copper is $2700.  Pop me an email to discuss if this is a suitable fit for your system and by all means spread the word.  (SOLD)

a final reminder of Art's appreciation of the finer / furrier things in life

Doc Hoyer

Audio lost another of its treasures last week when Dennis R. Hoyer passed away in Milwaukee.  If you had a vintage transformer that needed help, Doc was the person to call.  On a recent trip to Milwaukee where I grew up I had the chance to visit his lab as 60+ years of his work was being dismantled.  As I was admiring his winder his cousin Damian put his license plate from 1980 in my hand and suddenly I got all choked up and truly knew who Dennis was.  


His files are a Who's Who of tube audio history

His winder was CNC controlled and built by him

I can't imagine driving around Milwaukee as a teenager seeing that bright yellow TESLA on the back of a Ford station wagon and not realizing I was behind someone truly ahead of his time.

ERC in the NY Times

We love to see it when friends get the credit they deserve!  The NY Times did this nice piece on what Pete Hutchison is doing in London with his Electric Recording Co.

Pete also owns peace frog records for a slightly more contemporary vibe.

Marantz 7T

Alas the "T" stands for transistor and not triode but this one was personally modded by Sid Smith.

The insides...

and in case you didn't notice, it happened to be sitting on by far the most beautiful piece of gear ever.

Sid Smith's ESL speaker

I received a call from Ijaz to go pick up a piece of equipment from Sid Smith's son in law in New Haven, CT.  Many years ago Sid built an electrostatic speaker and I was to get the wire bending machine he built to make the stators.  Below are some pictures of the machine and what it was used for.

Apparently a successor to this speaker was shown by Joe Grado at the 1968 Philadelphia Audio Show and in today's dollar it would have been a $5700.  It is unclear whether that id for a single or a pair but even at double it is still a fraction of what the market commands today.

dave