friends don't snipe friends...

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Yes, I know he already admitted it, but it is much more painful to see it your eBay box... "Sorry, you were outbid.".... like the sorry makes me feel better....


man.. and I had them for opening bid! $19.99... and this fancy New York City photographer comes along and cuts me off in the last seconds...


they were so pretty...


and pretty in use:

Western Electric Boxes

I always love opening up a boxed WE tube and recently I found an interesting situation.  This tale involves some samples of the 388A and the various packaging over the course of a decade.

1953 date code.

Aug, 1945 date code

Sure one was JAN and accepted just as WWII was ending and the other was produced much later when the economy was booming but the picture of them both together is what makes me laugh.

I always thought it was odd that they would package a tube the size of the 388A in a box better suited for a 284D and when an auction came up for 4 of the 388A's + 3 872's I figured I'd put in my traditional $37.77 snipe.  I won it for 22.27 only to later find I had actually outbid that cheapskate we know around these parts as Jeffrey.... sorry bro.... they are yours.

More crates moving....

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Another run of Lowther Field Coils is done... here is the crate all loaded into Bessie (when you have had a car this long, they deserve a name)...

Some crating pictures.... Note that on these you have to suspend the magnet. Thirty pound motor versus a few grams of paper cone is not a battle - it is a massacre! Therefore these have a BIG 1/2 13 bolt in the back... lock it to the sub-chassis... then the sub-chassis floats on four to six inches of foam and peanuts...





and I snapped this shot just around the corner from my house on the way to the shipper... I wish I could blog what these beauties smell like.. absolutely amazing.. the entire block smells like perfume... wisteria.. grows very fast.. loves sunshine... and smells just incredible... I guess there are some things about the South I really do love...


Me

the magic number

Papa Joe sent me these pics of the final resting place for some silver toys I took to CES and all I can say is I am not worthy.  I give total props to Bae and Oh for getting it and wish I could be in Munich to actually hear it with the balls on western electric system they are going to display.  More eye candy below.

Making Noodles.

I have been debating about posting this but what the heck,  we all are human and sometimes mistakes give us more enjoyment than being perfect.

I could have edited it down to show the thing I really wanted to show and avoid the obvious error but that would be a cheat.  The funny thing is, once I locked down the tool post, the linguine came off to the right and even though the cut was better the video was boring.  After the initial mistake, I made (and filmed) 10 more cuts of new pieces and they all were identical and nowhere near as interesting as this.

Walt Disney and Toy Stories.

Toys, trampolines and video games can only get you so far when you take your kids to an audio event.  At some point you need to put the kids down for a few hours and deal with the results at a later date.  I think I found the perfect service.

It was time to leave so I needed to collect the kids.

Note to self.... don't freeze your kids since they start talking in audiophile terms

Shipping Crates....

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It always feels good to get something finished and shipped - good to get it to the new listener and good to be able to move on to the next project. It is also very motivating. There is something about sinking those screws into that crate. It is closing a chapter... time to reflect on what you learned...


and what goes in the crates:



Happy Friday!

Peace,
Me

Western Electric 16A Horn....

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Yes. Again. Why? Because you people need more beauty in your life! Most of today's pics are of Atsushi Tadashi's horn.

Good Mercury and Bad Mercury...

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. yummy blue...


I know I am always posting about mercury... sorry... the stuff sounds great, but it is not easy to deal with... there is that whole toxicity issue... and then there is also a very high percentage of them that are just DOA or bad..... so how do you tell when mercury is going bad? well, the easy and practical method is color... blue is yummy good... purple is bad - headed toward death...



the one on the left is bad.... time to remove from service.... but the one on the right is pretty blue... it should be good for thousands and thousands of hours...

Me

prick the langley you want to worship.

The more well known langley is here

If you have formed your opinions... google both projects and they will bring you to tears for different reasons.



welcome to my rabbit hole.

Loss Leaders

Stories abound in the audio world and in life about the "old dead guys" that have set our destiny.  Lately it seems that loss leaders have replaced lost leaders and the rest of us just sit back and consume liters of our favorite drink and brag.





A friend from a former life initially pointed me to Glen and his works by dropping a $1 goldberg variations in my lap and I found I could play them all day without tiring of the music.

Props to Kuma on the asylum for pointing me to this video and teaching me a life lesson.

Lowther Reform School

In the course of working with lowthers you occasionally come across a bad seed or a unit that requires you to "smack it around" to get it in line.  The net result of this treatment isn't always pretty but once you get the driver in the right mind, recovery is possible.  The following is a result of just such a case.  Let me provide you with before and after pictures to start off this success story.

Before

After

The process was actually very simple, I simply turned a slightly tapered reformer out of an appropriately sized PVC coupling.  The taper is about 1mm over the 50mm length with the target diameter coming at about 20mm.  I was actually surprised how nicely the PVC turned and all three of the ones I bought to play with are 100% functional.

The ultimate finish may not be 100% but the function is there.  In the above referenced coil I was able to recenter it and move it without any rub.  The real test sample was a 5" basket that took a rather hard hit to the coil and was impossible to center. It was only mildly eccentric and had a distinct kink where the slit in the former was.  30 seconds in Dave's Reform School for Lowthers and another 30 seconds on a magnet had it centered and passing signals without rubbing.

The lathe is still set up and it only takes a few minutes to turn these so if any of you out there use lowthers and find yourselves in need of such a device, chime in and I'll send you one.

Owsley..

I just wanted to say thank you and rest in peace to Owsley... Nope, I did not make it to Watkins Glen in '73, (I was a few months old), much less Longshoreman's Hall in '66, but I know my life would not be the same were it not for Owsley...


Wolfe's book on Kesey's tests is great... and Owsley's work is documented in there... his lab work as well as the way he sculpted sound by yanking "all of that old stuff" from local theatres... Altec multi-cells and big bass horns... can you imagine lugging that stuff around?


and then there is the wall of sound... hundreds of JBL drivers... 26,000 watts of MacIntosh power.. even some tube amps for the treble...

I know I owe him for many evenings of enveloping sound in my formative years.. thanks, man! RIP!

Peace,
Me

Tension and Field Coils.

Much has been said lately about the difference between low voltage and high voltage field coils.  The first Lowther prototypes were done at 200V for the sole purpose of the cool glow of mercury in the supply. Alas I never got around to building a proper mercury supply for them before the revisions and subsequent production which ruled out the possibility of the HV supply for safety reasons.  We did get to do the mercury LV supply though.

The question of low voltage high current vs. high voltage low current is a tough one to investigate in an apples to apple way but the first step was to rework a pair with 4 identical windings which can be placed in series or parallel to compare 15V @ 2A to 60V @ 0.5A.  To get the wire to do the four parallel runs I needed to de-spool 4 rolls from a 100 pound roll of wire.  I did all of the calculations and added 10% even though things were getting me a bit nervous at the end, It all worked out.

Here they are all buttoned up and ready to go to the test subjects who will do the comparisons with 8" baskets in160hz front horns and with 5" baskets in a pair of full range back loaded horns.  Along with the field coil,  we are also sending a pair of alnico and Neo 5" drivers so we can get the report on those differences too.

Sequerra T-9

Ijaz called me the other day and said he stumbled across a pair of Sequerra T9's.  Being unfamiliar with that designation I took to google and didn't find out much so it was time for a trip to Dick's to have a chat.

The most interesting thing about this design is that it is a dipole in a sense because it has two ribbons in series, one firing forward and the other backwards.

Of course they need new ribbons but that isn't an issue since they can easily be replaced.  Below are a few other shots for google to find so there is at least a bit of info on these tweeters out there for people to find.

Now why is Dave suddenly interested in ribbons?  I'm not really, but I am interested in magnets and given a little coaxing I tend to take on some crazy projects just to see what happens.  In the case of ribbons, the magnet of choice seems to be neodymium.  I'll be honest and say that in my limited direct comparisons, I do not like the characteristic sound of Neo magnets.  Dick chose ceramic out of the scale of economy and would have much preferred to use alnico5.  Now he is excited about the possibilities of what he thinks may be the best magnet type of all.  Time will tell where this project goes so stay tuned.

Optimal Source Impedance....

For years now I have tried to explain (preach? scream?) that tube amplifiers do not have "slow" or "flabby" bass. This common misconception originated when solid state amplifiers came onto the market and the speakers boxes began to be tuned to the lower output impedance of the new amplifiers. If a box is optimally tuned for a solid state amplifier's one ohm source impedance, then it will be severely under-damped (woolly, slow, flabby, etc) with a zero feedback tube amp of a few ohms output impedance.

But what happens in the upper regions? Do compression drivers need to be driven from an optimum source impedance or is lower always better? After all, lower output impedance means a higher damping factor. We have all been told that damping factor must be as high as possible. Well, I am saying that just is not true... please prove me wrong! I was measuring anyway, so I took these plots:

Impedance plot of a JBL 2435 on LC600 horn:



I know that the mighty Bell Labs actually specified a driving impedance for their Fletcher system. It basically was the root mean square of the peak and valley of the impedance plot. They published that this driving impedance was required to meet their frequency response specification. We do not quite meet that formula here, but look at the difference in the region from 1kc to 2kc when the driver is driven directly, through a four ohm resistor, and through a twenty ohm resistor.... and this region from 1kc to 2kc is precisely where the speaker impedance peaks, dips, peaks... driving impedance will change frequency response.. that we already knew...

Frequency response plot of JBL 2435 on LC600 horn - ignore everything above 10kHz, new computer and mic calibration has not been corrected.. sorry...



This is a tight zoom on an impulse response of the JBL2435 driven directly from a solid state amp, through a four ohm resistor, and through a 20 ohm resistor... I did not move the speaker for any of these tests... just clipped in a resistor on the amplifier end...



oh... I know... I should run a square wave through there... I wonder if my measurement gear is up to it... stay tuned!

Peace,
Me