Stereo Sound Agency....

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yeah... skateboard decks... I have loved Stereo Sound Agency (for obvious reasons) for many years... but they have really outdone themselves this time... check out the fall collection... sick stuff.. want a Western Electric 755A on your board? yeah... me, too...


if you dig this stuff, head over to Stereo Sound Agency... support them.. I am sure their business model is "try not to lose too much money".....


ok... so did you catch that? jazz cats on the left... I like the deck on the far left... but the decks on the right? stacks of vinyl!


so those are the decks with drivers on them... Altec 604's and 515's... Western 755A's... these are for Iain to drool over...


Those decks have the artwork of Chris Pastras... I dig it... always have.. he is one of the two partners of Stereo Sound...


and if you need an analog/hifi/stereo T-shirt or hoodie... check them out... they will be gone very soon.. seasons and styles change probably next month... I might have to treat myself to a new hoodie this year... maybe a birthday present...


so the other partner is Jason Lee... yes, that Jason Lee... from "My Name is Earl"... he used to be a professional skateboarder.. I love the fact that he is now loved by millions but probably still gets "Hey! Get outta here!!" when skating through the park... dude is an amazing street skater... was really one of the best ollie/kick flip guys a decade ago.... VIDEO HERE.....

man, do I need to spend more time on my board... I'm getting rusty.... it really is as much fun as it looks... except for the pavement... that hurts...

Peace,
Me

Sam Phillips and Sun Studio...

yeah.. the guy that recorded all of those great Sun Studio artists.... wikipedia article here:

Sam Phillips

discovered Howlin' Wolf... Elvis... Johnny Cash... heck, the man even recorded what many consider the first rock and roll song ever - "Rocket 88".. featuring Ike Turner on guitar...

Rocket 88 on You Tube

so during a recent walk downtown, Lisa and I went by his last studio (that I know of)... check it out.. it is one of my favorite buildings in town.. the problem is that I am unsure which side I like more...

Hi my name is dave and i'm an addict.

I have been scanning the local craigslist for a few of my needs and near the top of the list is a small benchtop mill.  This morning one gets listed for $400 which is high but it also seems to come with a metal lathe.

 I know JJ could use a metal lathe and the only possible downside is it has been in storage for 10 years so I feared rust.  The lathe indeed showed rust but nothing was frozen and it happens to be the same model I have and it had a 5" chuck mounted on it. (which i could really use)

The milling machine was unfortunately a drill press.  A better one than my current one but it wasn't until i started looking in the other boxes when things became interesting.

I asked if what was in the rest of the boxes was also available and he said he needed ot vacate the storage space and needed everything gone.  I handed him $400 and loaded up the car.  What was also included is pictured below. 

I have been looking for a 6" rotary table and the 24" cross slide is an added plus

setup and measurement tools are always fun.

Chucks to the left and right of centers.

there was also a mini benchtop drill press and a box of assorted tools including 30-40 end mills and lathe bits.  They guy said his father used the press as a mill (hence the cross slide) and all the parts suggest that to be the case so for $400 I thought I 'd give it a go.

the occasional 'For Sale' ad....

Dave approved the occasional for sale advertisement... so here is a wild throwback.. an integrated 45 SE amp... this is like the second amplifier I ever built... pretty good condition considering... I reworked it a bit when Bruce went to tri-amping his horns... we yanked the parallel feed output stage and went to juicy nickel from dave... so it was never meant to be full range... it ran either his mids or treble.. and I think the Avant Garde speakers are 12 ohms.... but Bruce is a solderable DIY'er, so we designed and he built a big six channel SE amp... pretty fly.. I will get pictures next time I visit...

here it is with "vintage" knobs:


and again with "modern" knobs:


circuit and measurements shown here... it is wild for me to look back at how I did some things back then... I built it for a budget, so it was a case of few parts, but good ones.. teflon coupling caps... some MQ chokes in teh power supply... film caps as last PS and cathode bypass... I now use mercury and too many power supplies, but this is really clean... just two triodes used in their linear range.. hard to not make music with that scheme....


I can gap it down and drop the -3dB point to the high 20's... that would make it full range for people running 8" drivers... the lack of a bottom half octave would actually clean up the sound a bit... or I can swap the outputs for parallel feed... or drop in something bigger with more inductance... or convert to 46's... or 2A3's for a bit more power... it is up to you... I have about $1500 in trade value in it... I can add to that for some customization, or drop ship it as is with a pair of ST45's...

if you have any interest, send email.. experiencemusic at hotmail dot com...

thanks!

Peace,
Me

The Voigt Legacy...

Yeah, it is fashionable to bad mouth Lowthers... I get it... measure one straight on in an open baffle and it is rough... but what if I presented it a different way? how could you make the best sound with these? Can you admire what they do well (and those things are phenomenal) and live with what is not perfect? That mindset just might lead to happiness for a lot of people....

so let's look at that weird name associated with Lowther and see if we can learn anything... what did he build?


yeah, a front horn! smart man... I bet this thing sounds fabulous... (I heard teh Voigt museum does not have one of these... I found it in Hope, AR!)


look at those smooth horn curves ending in ninety degrees... even a small roundover on the very edge.. diffraction, be gone! tractrix flare... nice.....

so what else did he build? well, a corner horn.. with reflectors to get the highs out... a very well thought out cabinet... I bet one of these in the corner sounded pretty darn good...


highs were bumped out by using a small deflector.. check it out...


and the drivers from that era....


Modern Lowthers are very different than the old models. Gone is the heavy lacquered cone.. the whizzer now has a roll on it.. the light bulb phase plug has been lost... so do not believe people when they say Lowther has not changed with the times - they have... there is even an outfit making new field coils.. designed with finite element computer modeling... (very tongue in cheek)...


the newer cones are better for all of these direct radiating cabinets and back loaded horns.. the rolled whizzer helps control what the horn's air load used to... put them in an appropriate room... set them up with care.. get toe-in just right.. turn off the lights.. and you can get visiting musicians to your room.. how do I know this? well, once upon a time when I was too young to know any better, Jon Ver Halen talked me into bringing a single ended, no feedback amplifier to a Stereophile show to pair with, gulp, Lowther Medallions... we set them up by ear... and then Wally came in... took teh best seat.. wouldn't leave.. kept spinning record after record... so then he came back teh next day with measurement gear... we were +/- 3dB from 20 to 20k by cheating with a sub below 45Hz... pretty amazing for a single voice coil...


and I guess that is why I defend Lowther to the end... pretty tough to get that performance from a single voice coil of any sort.. especially at high SPL on a five watt single ended amp...

Peace,
Me

Prime Time

I had the good fortune to meet and photograph Prime for the current NFL Sunday ticket campaign.  Everyone involved in the project just seemed to get it and things went so smoothly, I actually switched my TV service back to satellite.

I thankfully survived the hurricane without issues and it was a non-event for me.  I do find some of the sympathy mass emails of goodwill a little too self serving.

DTV cared

My bank also cared.

I could go on about the virtual support offered by the man but I would rather suggest they send people rather than email out to actually help.  Sadly, the folks sent out would be unpaid interns armed with silver spoons to clean up this mess suffered by a fellow audio junkie.

Wire

A delivery truck left this sitting in the middle of my driveway.

It was 120 pounds of copper on two spools.

For scale, here is a single 10 pound spool

The scary part is in a week the wire will be gone and all we will have to show for it is 8 field coil compression drivers.

On another note, in my attempt to win "father of the year" I recently took the boys to see grandma in Wisconsin.  The oldest was dead tired on the return and was falling asleep on anything he could.  We were on one of the moving walkways and he was asleep.  As we neared the end I had two choices.  Wake him or film it.

Dang it, Mayer!

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I had all these tube box pictures lined up for a rainy day and you go and start a tube box blog thread!!... dang it!... AND you start with the best ever, the RCA world boxes.... double dang it! ok... ok... you win... but here is one I like...




I actually really like their classic logo as seen at the bottom... the "Heintz_HK_Kaufman"... very classic.. but this wild electric HK and Gammatron in black, white, and orange is just phenomenal... one of my favorites...

an affordable field coil driver?

we all know the economy of scale and that the title of the post is an oxymoron.  Since we are a bit slow on the uptake and always love a challenge here are a few pics of an oem driver that will be on the AASOA table at RMAF.

Summer Vacation....

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school has started back... so productivity has picked up again... but I already miss summer... I like summer.. who doesn't? but the crazy memphis heat and humidity does eventually get to you.. the kids get a little stir crazy.. so we have taken to crashing at Lenny's under the guise of "working on his HiFi".. really just getting up in altitude.. dropping twenty to forty degrees.. and getting in some porch time..

so how about a few pictures?

JP, my youngest, chillin' on a rock...



the HiFi we were working on... this is the "social system"... it has to sound good in the kitchen, in the living room, and most importantly, on the porch!

amp tweaking was actually easy.. it turns out the driver stage in his PT Barnum amp could not even clip the output stage, so a quick change and it actually sounded dynamic.. before the changes the volume knob acted a bit more like a compressor/tone control... ahh.. much better now..



there was a lot of talk about gardens.. but God's gardens just can't be bettered:



on teh way to the best hikes.. probably around 5000 feet...



yep.. so a crazy setup until you think it through.... Altec 416 in a big cabinet... original Goto cast horn and Goto alnico 555 (their first product) in conga drum shells up firing... time alignment was actually pretty close.. I measured all of this stuff... and TAD 4001's, with rear covers removed and domes up firing as tweeters..



and more of one of the hikes.. what I once again wish I could convey over a computer is the smell... man, oh man!



when we first set it up, it just was not really blending well.. so I asked for some scrap cardboard to try out some reflectors... this is what I got in return! probably should not show Goto-San... or maybe he would share a cold PBR on the porch with us? do you think he would dig the Richard Johnston and Elmore James?



and what a swimming hole! waterfall.. cold refreshing water.. just perfect... far from the 105 with ninety percent humidity that is Memphis... far, far away...



now back to work... with Elmore James in my brain!

Peace,
Me

Special K

Lets start at the beginning and a cool pic from one of Papa's trips to Korea

It just kills me how small that 16A in the background looks which just goes to show how insane this system is.   The owner of the system is Mr. K who happens to run a very large Korean cable manufacturer.  The reason this is important is because when the pair of silver autoformers were put in the new silbatone silver signature 300B (come to RMAF and hear it) it became clear that more silver wire that I had on hand was needed.

As it turns out, about a year ago  Mr. K's company bought one of the larger US magnet wire manufacturers and the request was made.  Unfortunately they could not produce the wire but a few days later I was told 5 kilos of silver was headed my way from a third party with help from K.

This box showed up the other day via ground service on the big brown truck.  The funniest part of it was no signature was required and it was sitting on my doorstep with this sticker clearly placed on the outside of the box.

Only in Korea kids.  Only in Korea.

ZEN I/V

Van Halen called the other day and said it was time for transformer zen.

 

The back story is covered on my forum and gasp... it uses those three legged sand devices.

At least this approach gets some capacitors out of the picture and takes advantage of AC summing and DC offsetting so stay tuned.

Music.

No audiophile BS here,  just some boob-toob videos and some fun.  JJ sent me a link to the video below and while it is all warm and fuzzy it isn't growing on me yet.



as I clicked on this, something else was spinning in the background that had much more power and meaning to me so I went to the boob to watch the video. 




then the rabbit hole hit me with one of the first songs that HIT me with lyrics and music and made me happy about the future.



Now one that brings me to tears about the past.



and one final one... boob tube is now commercial so apologies if there is an ad.

Robert's rules of order.

The boys were reading their bedtime books and the younger one was out.  I challenged the older one to quiz me on his new star wars book.  I was humbled when the guy who wore the brown hood wasn't obi wan.  I was perplexed when it wasn't lord vader with the black hood.  I quickly looked for revisionist history and the lack of official info in the front of the book had me thinking Rod Serling would be stepping out with an unfiltered camel in hand to bring things back to reality.

Fortunately, legos can only be manipulated in positive ways so I present you the $100  armrest from the land of...