Retro Hi End Trivia Question

Nope -- the Switching Class-D amp (or "SWAMP" as it was called in-house)predated the HCA by a couple years. It did fail spontaneously and the reason why was never learned despite considerable research. I think that model had just gone out of production when I came onboard at Infinity, and I helped the electronics department package the HCA for production.

Mike Elliott

Gain cells, Koss, Beveridge, Cotter bases, Fulton Gold cables, 16 inch Fidelity Research tonearms...
Whimsical, often absurd, from musical to criminal, all Dr.Suess audio from that era is eclipsed by the Hill Plasmatronics. Speakers of refrigerator girth, the top 1/3 of the cabinet housed electronics, in the middle was a odor producing purple plasma tweeter, the bottom was home to a paper 15" and 8". But the feature that granted owners unchallenged bragging rights? 5 foot tall, 50 lb. capacity helium tanks hooked to each one! Yikes!
The sequence to turn on the two devices was a ritual of awe and fear. They made horrid clacking noises followed by the rush of escaping gas being detonated by several thousand volt lightning bolt like arcs! These things were better suited to a castle lab than listening room.
To this day, no other designer has had balls to put a backlit switch etched with the word "IGNITE" on a speaker.

I AM SITTING HERE WITH ONE HOOKED TO A NAKAMICHI 630 AND
SOME JBL'S IT PLAYS AND SOUNDS GREAT ITS NEVER FAILED ME
AS OF YET AND THE BASE POUNDS!!!!!.

I pulled a Quatre DG-250 out of a dumpster in Jan '01. It had three dated repair tags on it, the latest from '93. Figuring that it had been tossed because of internal meltdown, I powered it up by slowly applying mains voltage through a Variac and measured reasonable DC across the Foster's beer-can-sized filter caps. No DC on the outputs. Much better than I expected from a dumpster dive. In a fit of bravado, I hooked it up to my Snell C-1s and my SS preamp and listened for about 5 minutes before grit-induced fatigue set in. It turned out that at some point the output transistors and half of the driver transistors in one channel had been replaced, and the output stage bias current was set very low. Bringing the bias up to about 100mA got rid of most of the grit. Bass was firm but midrange seemed congested and treble was brittle. I much prefer my Audionics CC-2 modified for inverting input. Considering the outlay in time and money, the Quatre is OK, my guess is that the quasi-complimentary output stage holds it back and stability under load is questionable.