Blow the dust off with an Air compressor remove all tubes and clean the sockets
make sure you reinstall the tubes all in the same place you found them.
Make sure you Variac the amps up or find a tech that can do this to avoid any issues
Best JohnnyR
Nestorovic Labs
We recently acquired some vintage audio: Nestorovic Labs 5AS Mark IV speakers and Nestorovic NA-1 high resolution tube power amplifiers. Upon hearing the speakers with our current 5-2-2 home theater configuration, we immediately promoted them to the front L&R positions where the Tekton SEAS Pendragons had been. The Tektons are incredible speakers but these Nestorovics surprised us with their sound. Now we're carefully exploring the NA-1 amplifiers, and honestly, I am more than a little intimidated. The amps have not been used for 10+ years and the tubes have a layer of dust on them. The goal now is to fire them up without making a mis-step that could damage the amp or speakers, judge the quality of output, and decide whether to keep or sell. Next step (I think) is hook up the amps and speakers to a CD player and a Schiit Sys for volume control. I have high expectations for the improvement with tube sound, but if there is a market for these anything close to the little bit of hype I've read about the NA-1 amps, I expect we'll sell them. It's possible their moment has passed, in which case we're on the path to tube hi-fi enthusiasm and falling into that rabbit hole. All comments are welcome as we either sell or fall in.
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I owned these speakers for a couple of years, and they are special. If you are using them in a home theatre system, then I assume that you will be using a home theatre receiver as a preamp. If that's the case, you will not be able to get the best from that amplifier, which is a very good one. You should probably sell it to someone who wants to nurture this old gem. |
@roxy54 You are correct, the theater set-up will be through a theater amp including the Nestorovic speakers, and the Nestorovic amp used to power just the Nestorovic speakers in a 2-channel system. I'm researching switches but leaning hard toward selling the Nestorovic amps, but the final decision will be made after we experience a few 2-channel listening sessions and figure out what price those amps might fetch. As for the prep for the tube amps @audioconnection is a Variac in line to provide exact voltage really necessary to run these puppies? I received other advice to go through and check all the capacitors to be sure they don't blow the speakers if one happens to go bad (it seems a bad cap would result in an annoying hum, not a catastrophic fail.) Cleaning the tubes and some attention to the tube prongs to scrape off corrosion with an x-acto seems reasonable, but anything beyond that increases my inclination to sell them to someone with a passion for the tube world.
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