Re: Mercury Magnetics --- Worth the price of admission?

RichL wrote:
koyangi <koyangi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hey guys! I have built a few Marshall clones for fun and my next
project is going to be an 18W TMB clone with a custom tone stack. I
am going
to give this amp away as a gift, so I want it to sound as good as
possible. The guitarist that I am giving it to is a jazz player, but
definitely has some blues influences and likes a nice warm tone.

I am a systems engineer for a defense contractor by trade, so price is
usually the last thing I look at in a component (I think $7,000 is a
good deal on a 19" LCD monitor). Usually I tend to overbuild, but
everything that I have built sounds great and would probably pass a
full mil-standard qualification test.

As I am making out the BOM for this amp I am torn between Heyboer and
Mercury Magnetics for the transformer set. Everything I have built up
to this point has been Heyboer and sounds amazing. I am tempted to
upgrade the transformers to Mercury, but I want to make sure it is an
actual upgrade.

I am the kind of guy that likes the Illinois caps just as well as
Sprauge but I am very picky about things like wire and screws. I have
been known to play a guitar that was not hand carved by Leo Fender
himself, but I would never admit it.

I have also been working with RADARs and power systems long enough to
know that there is still a little "mojo" out there that science cannot
adequately explain. To this day I am always amazed when I hit the
standby switch on one of my amps and that warm tubey goodness comes
out of the speakers.

So my question is ,in short, are the Mercury transformers worth it or
is it all just marketing? Thank you all in advance for your help on
this.

If you really paid $7000 for a 19" LCD monitor, I'd suggest that you
have different criteria for distinguishing between what's real and
what's marketing fluff than the rest of us.



First of all, you paid your share of the $7,000 too (and I don't even have to assume you are an American to make that true). For the military market $7000, really is cheap. Of course it is expected to take over 2000Gs of shock (yes 2000, not a typo) and still work and you have to be able to buy it for 15 years. Most of the times the $3,000 display will explode into a shower of glass, aluminum, and silicon and you might be lucky and get the same model on your next order.

After your ship gets hit with a missile, it might be nice if the targeting system still works so you can ensure the rude individuals that fired it do not shoot another. After three or four of those things, you have some real trouble on your hands...

If we are talking about avionics displays, then $20,000 is not unheard of (if that display breaks, you have no instruments and stand a much better than average chance of crashing). The point is, the cost is sometimes justified but putting a $20,000 display into a platform that only needs a $3,000 display is just wasteful.
.

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