Thank you steakster.
It seems the preponderance of opinion is to put the amps near the speakers. However, I wonder about the wisdom of placing two Julius Futterman OTL3s converted to triode with eight 6LF6 tubes each on the floor next to Altec 604Cs and the likelihood of the tubes picking up mechanical vibrations from the drivers.
Thoughts? |
dill,
the components are:
Cartridges - Koetsu Onyx; van den Hul Grasshopper, Benz Micro, Grado for the 78s
Arm - Sumiko MMT
Table - VPI HW MK IV with SAM
Preamp - Beard P505 upgraded with Jansen caps
Amps - Julius Futterman OTL3s, converted to triode and upgraded with Jansen caps by Jon Specter, formerly of NY Audiolabs (the manufacturer of these amps) and cousin of Al Cooper of Highway 61, Blood Sweat & Tears founder and Stills Cooper Bloomfield Super Sessions
Crossovers - Mastering Labs, upgraded with Jansen caps
Speakers - Altec Lansing 604Cs
Subwoofer - Velodyne ULD-15
kacomess,
I know George Kay of Moscode. If you want it fixed, I can connect you. He lives in New Hampshire.
elizabeth,
i have akways had trouble getting slamming but clean bass.
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jperry,
thanks for the link but I’m not going to spend $2800 for amp platforms for the same reason I’m not gonna spend a lot of money for cables.
My whole system cost cost me no more than $17,000. I prefer to find a way to get 90% of performance of a $200K system while spending 10% of the money. I am more or less at that spot, if I include what I just spent on the listening room.
eg my solution for isolating the table from vibrations - rather than spend $1000s on an isolation platform was to simply bolt the platform that the table was sitting on to a 18” thick brick wall. I will do that for the table at the new space. I also kept the dust cover down when playing music, as the arm and cartridge could sometimes generate feedback from the speakers. |
The speaker cable was close to the best that Monster - a new company at the time - had to offer in 1985. I’m not sure of the gauge, actually, but it is quite thick. The system is still in boxes. |
jperry,
if the wood stand is on a wood floor, even if on feet, I don’t know if that is simply delaying the inevitable.
Maybe the amps get bolted to the brick wall also.
My old home was on a busy manhattan intersection. I could feel vibration through the building almost constantly. Mortar was always flaking off the wall, and as it was a party wall, I took that as being caused not by moisture, but by vibration. My new home is much much quieter. |
cd318,
No one has been on the other side of a black hole, unless maybe you are metaphorically referring to some members of this community: who knows how fast whatever can travel there, including and especially bs.
That aside, yes, Einstein, among others, would be surprised.
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Geoffkait, was it you that I was referring to? 😳
speaking of the speed of light, geoffkait just broke the 10,000 barrier. Well done, mate.
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Almarg,
stock 604B, C, and D were 16 ohms. They can be modified to 8. When I had them re-coned, I kept them at 16. Jon said the Futterman much prefer the 16.
E and up are at 8.
I will ask Jon about the output impedance of both taps. I’m sure he must have thought of it and never explained to me, figuring it’s tmi, but you never know.
Thanks for the advice. Looks like I have had it more or less right all along. |
dill,
no moisture. Sorry.
Old? The speaker’s serial # puts them at 1954, the year I was born.
Now that’s old! |
I went to The Cooper Union, I’m always making that mistake. Oops.
As for for the rest of your questions, they will have to wait until everything comes back out of their boxes.
That said, I have been running the Beard with the Futterman from either output with no discernible difference for 28 years. Specter returned the Beard to stock (except for the caps) two years ago, he did everything on the OTLs also and then tuned it all to the room.
The sub is a new addition to the system. I’ve used it only for a month or so before packing it up and haven’t really had a chance to fine tune things, but it sounded good though not great and made the Altec sound noticeably clearer. It went to output two.
all the caps were upgraded. Every one. |
Well, speaking of Bruce Springsteen, I saw him Upstairs at Max’s Kansas City, right after his first lp was released. I was sitting in the front row. Clarence was dripping sweat all over me.
I saw Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris there, van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Loudon Wainright, The Dolls, Tim Buckley and others.
then there was that night at The Bottom Line. A friend was the sound engineer there. We were waiting two hours for Miles Davis to start his set. I asked my friend after, wtf? He said Miles was flying high as a kite on coke, it’s hard to get your rocks off in that state but he would not go onstage until he did. It took six women servicing him.
best - ud |
cd318,
Yes. Between his 1st and 2nd LP. He was a scrawny, skinny kid then. And Parsons, that was between his two LPs of course, he was dead a mere 5 months or so later. I sat in the front row at that and most of the other shows, which as you would know if you were ever there was almost literally sitting in the lap of the artists. A friend was a waitress downstairs and she would get me in early and for free through the back. I met Debbie Harry through her, as Ms Harry was a waitress there before Blondie, but of course back then she was just Debbie and I didn't get to know her well. I eventually saw her again though with Blondie, also saw Bowie, Talking Heads, Dave van Ronk, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper (with a "C"). I missed Phil Ochs :-(
I miss those days. Micky Ruskin was a special guy, Max's was a special place, upstairs and downstairs. I think Micky died of lung cancer at a very young age, maybe 50. Mickey helped artists in need. I think I paid for only half of what I ever ate and drank there, as I myself was a struggling artist at the time and he would just wave the tab. It was no wonder he was broke all the time, but he did built up quite a collection of 60s artwork by chamberlain, Marden, Warhol, Poons, Andre, Weiner etc because they would run up these huge tabs and then just pay him with an artwork. They would be worth a fortune these days. The walls were like an art gallery.
The Bottom Line had superb acoustics, maybe the best of any club that I have heard. Miles set itself was great, but as you can imagine he was horrible. It was the Agartha period: great music but in hindsight it was also a glimpse of the beginning of the end. |
Tyray,
Actually, the dust cover is usually up. But with about 10% to 15% of my records, beyond a certain volume, say 85 decibels or so, the cartridge picks up feedback hum from the speakers. When the dust cover is down, the problem disappears completely. The cover does not “chatter” at all. I presume Westfield must have dampened it somehow. And, I presumed from that experience that it must actually be better to have the cover down all the time, but I get lazy and I otherwise don’t hear a difference. With the new room, that may change.
As for the cost of equipment generally, never mind cable, I’m from the David Halfer school of audio. You shouldn’t have to mortgage the house for good sound. I see someone has brought an updated version of the old Dyna70 back, still regarded as one of the great designs of all time. I still have my Dyna MK III monoblocks for the day that I finally get around to bi-amping my speakers.
i did not pay for that Koetsu. It was a gift from a very well known rock musician / environmentalist via his engineer. No way do I spend $10K on a cartridge. That said, it is way better than my Benz Micro. |
Cd318,
I did try removing it once to experiment but I still got the feedback. Putting it completely down did the trick. Maybe with the new space this will be a non-issue.
BUT...sometimes I think in at least some of those recordings, the engineer is messin’ with us audiophiles. As an example, when I play the overture to Tommy by The Who, about when the French horn kicks in, my dog goes running to that speaker and starts howling like a wolf. Then she hears something in the other speaker and goes running over there and howls some more. And on it goes, back and forth, left to right, right to left, driving her nuts. It’s the only time she makes that sound. My guess is since we humans can only hear to about 15K - in reality more like 8K - but dogs can hear to about 45K... you get the picture.
The dust cover is always down during parties. Guests can be really obnoxious, and I’ve had to have been very curt and rude with them to not only keep their hands off but to stay back.
As for the scene, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Only with hindsight did I realize how special those times were. I went to the Max’s 50 year reunion a couple years back. It was held in some tacky classic rock club in midtown Manhattan that felt like what you would imagine a Hard Rock Cafe off the NJ Thruway in Parsippany would be. But a lot of the old crowd turned out for it: members of the Dolls, of Bowie’s bands, Tod Rundgren, The Fugs etc.
There was also CBGB right down the street from me, on The Bowery, the Mudd Club, Area (another Warhol hangout), Sin-e, The Knitting Factory (Jeff Buckley hung out at the latter two). All are now gone.
I’ve had the system up to 95db. Almost no distortion. |
Raindance,
The tubes in both the Dyna and the Futterman would pick up ham radio from the passing taxis like crazy until Jon figured out a way to shield them.
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Kalili,
My speakers are 16 ohm and 101dB efficiency. My Dyna MK III have 4, 8, and 16 taps but the Futtermans do not. When I had the 604Cs rebuilt by Gabriel Sound, I had the option of keeping them at 16 or switching them to 8. Jon Specter, my engineer, said to absolutely keep them at 16.
It looks like I will be staying with my current configuration: long speaker cables, short interconnects.
Paulrandall,
Putting the table in a different room is an intriguingly OCD idea (let’s face it, to have this hobby, we all have to have a little OCD), but as there is only one room on this floor, not an option unless I put it out the window. It might be a little tricky changing LPs from three stories up. And then what happens on a windy day?
But that brings up something else I was recently considering.
Before, I had the table sitting on top of a record cabinet that I had bolted to the 16 inch thick brick wall in my nyc loft. I was going to bolt it to the 24 inch thick (non functioning) chimney in this space. However, my masonry guy used a five foot L-shaped steel plate to stabilize masonry on another building of ours and I got the idea of having him bolt an L-shaped steel plate to the chimney that was large enough to rest the table on. The steel is very thick. Question is: what would that sound like?
I don’t use VPI’s springs between the chassis and the base btw: I use little rubber balls. |
cd318: https://youtu.be/QN1BrD73lSsback then, the nyc art scene was either decidedly anti capitalist or at least had an ironic relationship to it. Decidedly different from today’s post Koons/Schnabel era. |
cd318: The Velvets and the Fugs both came out of an underground East Village / Brooklyn scene that was closely tied to the beat poetry of Jack Kerouac and to the lesser known but maybe more important poet Allan Ginsburg. Ginsberg hung out at Max’s along with Tuli Kupferburg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuli_Kupferberg. of the Fugs, who used some of the lyrics of “Howl” http://www.wussu.com/poems/agh.htm for a song on either the first or second Fugs album. See also Tuli’s scene as a machine-gun-toting soldier policing the streets of Manhattan in Dusan Makavejev’s W.R. Mysteries if the Organism https://youtu.be/JvA1bKLQtbMand https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.R.:_Mysteries_of_the_Organismhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.R.:_Mysteries_of_the_Organismimagine trying to shoot that scene in Post 9/11 Manhattan today. I always thought that the Fugs were more punk than the Velvets. There was also The Last Poets (invented the poetry slam) out of Spanish Harlem, tied to The Young Lords (The Nuyorican version of The Black Panthers). That led to the founding of The Nuyorican Poets Cafe on 6th Street between A and B in The East Village - known to Nuyoricans as Losaida - where poetry slamming took off. I lived in a flat upstairs from them when they got started around 1975. My wife and I got married there two decades later. I’m still friends with some of the founders (I’m part Nuyorican myself) but the Cafe is now a suburban hipster (imo hipsters are faux hippie/punks) shadow of it’s former self. Last but not least, there was The Loft Party by David Mancuso https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loft_(New_York_City)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loft_(New_York_City)I was doing a similar loft party from the late 70s onward, and stumbled into a Mancuso party through a friend three years after I had started. A concept I thought was mine, somebody had invented it already! He was using Klipsch and McIntosh, I was using Dyna Stereo 70 and Altec 604C. And booze and weed were allowed at mine. Amazing, how not only these youthful scenes are gone, but Ginsburg, Reed, Mancuso, Piniero, Kupferburg, all passed away. |
