Re: Tube Audio Question

I didn't intend to respond to your letter until the crooked garage
trader Yaeger blamed me for all your complaints. Yaeger is himself
responsible for most of the nastiness here in normal times, by
following me around with snippy little comments on my every post. When
I broke up the gang he belonged to, I kept him on as my Fool to keep me
humble; he takes his petty little job a bit too seriously.

I wish you luck with your old gear. I have a lot of old gear myself. I
also wish you luck in your search for knowledge. In about 1990 I was
where you are now except that I had a handful of introductions to a
bunch of old men who helped to create the radar network which saved the
British from the Germans in 1940. They gave me a crash correspondence
course in PP amps with oodles of feedback and I paid them in
Genelectric KT88 from a huge stash the local diyers, mostly hams, a few
audiophiles, gave me as starter junkbox. I was fortunate to come into
electronics when men still honoured the principles of the AARL. Your
library has or can get copies of their yearbooks from the tube age;
they were intended for people from your level up. Get a copy of the
RDH, Menno van der Veen's book, Morgan Jones's book and, if you can
find one, a copy of a book by Farl J Waters, which is a neddy guide to
electronics. You also need all the Crowhurst articles you can download
from the net; he is the key technical popularizer in tubes.

Read this par right to the end before you react. This is the wrong
conference for a beginner unless he is incredibly hardworking in the
RDH to look up everything that is mentioned, not for the reasons you
state (we'll help you out when you think resistors are polarized and
shit all over anyone who sneers at you for not knowing--we can all
remember when we didn't know) but because the flights of fancy here can
mislead you until you can distinguish between way-out speculation and
the hard knowledge that will be soldered in, and even a solid guy like
Patrick can be very confusing because he is congenitally incapable of
sticking to the subject and resistant to suggestions that he split two
separate subjects into two separate posts or even into two separate
paragraphs. On the other hand, if you're the sort of guy who learned to
swim by falling off the bridge into the deep end of the lagoon, you'll
learn more here in a year than in ten anywhere on the moderated
conferences.On the other hand, the niceness of the moderated
conferences probably makes up for their thin content and confuddle. RAT
may be a brutal darwinist school but here you will get the best tube
education going anywhere.

As for whining and telling us how we should conduct ourselves, by all
means waste your time. If you don't soon discover that this is
newsgroup full of rugged individualists who have long since given up
running in popularity contests (I never even started), you are probably
too unobservant to work with life-threatening voltages.

Meanwhile, welcome. We can always do with someone sincerely interested
in tubes.

Here's an important tip about electricity: If you aren't perennially
paranoid, what are you doing in tube amps? Ask yourself this question
every time you take your DMM out.

Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
"an unbelievably comprehensive web site" -- Hi-Fi News & Record Review

pfjw@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Well, forgive me for my comments. I am an amateur in every sense of the
> audio word and world. My undergraduate degree is in fine
> arts/architecture, my graduate studies (not yet degreed) are in
> engineering... civil. I do prefer the Three Stooges over Woody Allen
> and/or Seinfield, and Pogo over Doonesbury. Nor do I prefer one sort of
> audio (tubes) over another (solid-state) as I have both, enjoy both and
> see both in their place. Even a bit of miscegenation is permitted on
> occasion.
>
> I came here out of pure curiosity. I am sorry for not understanding
> that this is a mutual admiration society divided into two warring camps
> with the primary apparent purpose being to bash the other camp on
> increasingly obscure points-of-order. I have seen the absolute basic
> ignorance of one camp on a pretty simple electrical (vs. electronic)
> point, so I am getting the idea that this is the typical engineers'
> venue where some individuals know more and more about less and less
> until they reach a point where they know absolutely everything about
> nothing. This is directly opposed to the "arts" group knowing less and
> less about more and more...
>
> No, I am not a designer, nor would I scratch-build an audio amplifier.
> I have scratch-built radios as a means to understand their function,
> winding coils is a great teacher of basic principles, and tube (or SS)
> amplification is part of all that albeit at a very simple level. But
> the principles are pretty much the same and I do understand them pretty
> clearly. So, as there are far better designers than I am out there past
> and present, I will leave the fine points to them. But I am curious
> about the ins-and-outs of audio, tubes and otherwise... at a pretty
> practical level.
>
> "Unseen hand".... YIKES... we are powerless to change, therefore we
> should embrace the status-quo. Sounds like why most Americans don't
> vote (yeah, *most*, guys and gals). I have always believed that one
> should either grow and change, or one may as well die. And the goal of
> leaving a bad smell wherever one goes was never an ambition of mine,
> either. At the same time, being 'useful'... well, my hobbies are useful
> to me. Where I can I will share what I have learned with others... I am
> presently helping someone rebuild a radio at-a-distance, I have done
> hands-on public clinics on several occasions, so utilitiy is not a
> major concern of mine. But as the point has been raised, PLEASE tell me
> how strings of vulgarity and unsupported character assasination is
> "useful"?
>
> Now, I have a good bit of equipment, at present there are five
> functioning systems in place. Three of them are solid-state, two of
> them are tube, both types vary from time-to-time based on what I am
> working on at the moment. Equipment in place is made by AR, ADS,
> Dynaco, Revox, Scott, Rabco (HK), Yamaha, Grundig and Philips.
> Sherwood, Eico, McIntosh, B&O and Fisher have passed through within
> very recent memory. I have purchased equipment on-the-ground from
> Riyadh to Dubai to Manama to Istanbul to Paris to all over the US. I
> have not yet reached the Far East or Africa. From what is displayed
> here, the Antipodes is a _VERY_strange place. Mostly what I purchase is
> in rough condition and barely functioning if at all. Mostly it gets
> rebuilt and restored and then passed on as the volume would be too much
> otherwise. 80% of what I gather is given away or traded, only the
> occasional item is sold. But it should be kept in mind that the audio
> hobby grew out of the radio hobby... 'you understand tubes, can you fix
> this?'
>
> I keep a reasonably decent test bench (for radio), centered around a
> metered iso-variac, a very good signal generator (radios _IS_ the
> primary hobby, after all), a very good and properly calibrated tube
> tester, two decent VOMs, and a decent dual-trace scope. An HV cap
> checker and a signal tracer round out the instrument inventory.
>
> But as it happens, to me 'all equipment is honorable' inasmuch as
> within city limits, a $5 SS Kenwood AM/FM stereo tuner from 1975
> functioning properly will do as much as a Marantz 10B for the average
> user, and at a much more attractive price-point. Similarly a Dynaco
> FM-3 properly aligned does just fine for the tube crowd at a decent
> price. And in the sticks, a proper antenna will do more for a crappy
> tuner than a Marantz 10B will do with a crappy antenna.
>
> So, yes, I would prefer discourse at a level free of personal abuse and
> vulgarity. I would also prefer a venue where old and oft-answered
> questions are greeted with other than hostility. That question is
> likely "new" to the asker. Getting back to my upbringing, I have
> learned from long experience that the only truly stupid question is the
> one unasked. Furthermore, a good chunk of the population asks inane
> questions because they DO need assurance that what they are doing is
> 'right'.... whatever 'right' might be at the moment. And when dealing
> with those new to vintage radios, I have come to expect those sorts of
> questions from them until they gain confidence. Some never do.... but
> that condition does not give others the right to abuse them. Teaching a
> person how to read resistor or capacitor color-codes should be simple.
> Sometimes it isn't.
>
> Peter Wieck
> Wyncote, PA

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Tube Audio Question
    ... > audio word and world. ... > winding coils is a great teacher of basic principles, and tube ... > hobby grew out of the radio hobby... ... > tester, two decent VOMs, and a decent dual-trace scope. ...
    (rec.audio.tubes)
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  • Re: A note on backward, Fd up 3rd world countries
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