drbarney1
Responses from drbarney1
| Who says cables don't make a difference? While there could be a difference, there is some bad physics used to sell some cables. For instance, skin effect and the claim to need to mitigate it with litz or ribbon construction. Skin effect is alleged to increase the resistance of speaker ca... | |
| Best tube preamplifier for under $15k I like the 27 SET preamplifier, but it has to have DC for the cathode heaters to silence hum and it is very tricky for its plate power. I like the blue glass Arcturus 27's and they sound good too. You have to build your own. You can also use 2C22'... | |
| What are the sexiest components ever made? My 833-A SET amplifiers; see Robert Vincelette system. | |
| Is there a Solid State amp that can satisfy a SET guy? I have come to like the 833-A SET which can effortlessly drive Magnepans more than loudly enough. The best way to do this is to build your own 1000 Volt power supplies using 3 Amp 1000 volt rated diodes two in series for twice the Voltage you will... | |
| Which one to choose between two 80K$ tube amps? Don't rule out building your own amplifier. You can have the same parts as an $80,000 amplifier and save tens of thousands. | |
| Why don’t tube amps sound like tubes anymore? Consider building your own SET. The design is very simple and for a few hundred dollars you can have something with all parts as good as an you get in a factory made SET costing five figures. It is not as difficult as you might think. | |
| These seem a bit pricey $$$ I am sure it costs more to get a box speaker with cone drivers to work really well than an open baffle planar speaker such as Magnepan. Crossovers are more complicated in cone speakers in a box because they have to deal with back EMF at different ... | |
| Do any still use an older high end tuner from the past?.... I had a McIntosh MR 7082 tuner for about 30 years but I did not care for it requiring batteries to store frequencies and the difficulty with the frequency display. I fixed it up and sold it cheap to someone who could completely rebuild it and repl... | |
| Magnepan mmg vs .7 . Real world experience opinions requested Magnepans sound spectacular with 833-A SET and Hammond 1642SE output transformers. The 833-A sounds best at 1000 plate volts and zero grid bias, but the cathodes draw 10 amps at 10 Volts and have to be pure DC meaning the final filter capacitors f... | |
| Future of cables! I studied E&M theory, taking all of the courses in it my graduate school had to offer. My qualifier exams took four days, one full day of closed book problems to be solved in electromagnetic theory and I made the top of the class in all my qua... | |
| Synergistic Research Cable Risers? A reasonable question for "exotic" cables and embellishments thereto is what kind of engineering and/or physics background does the designer who invented them have. I tried to find out what training many famous cable "engineers" have and there is ... | |
| Seriously considering tube preamp…opinions? Don't overlook building one from a kit. There are plenty of SET preamps kits and plans which are as good as many very expensive manufactured preamps. I made one using Arcturus 27 triodes with blue glass. | |
| Disappointing On Mcintosh......help I have heard McIntosh with speakers such as Dhalquest long ago and for its day it was impressive. More recently I heard McIntosh with Sonus Farber and the Sonus Farber speakers cost well over $50,000. They were well suited for duplicating the ambi... | |
| So What Is Real? The most esteemed and marketplace successful cable designers turn out to have little or no education in physics or relevant engineering in the way cables or conductors work but they have a smattering of knowledge about some of it. For me it takes ... | |
| DSD vs PCM .. Truth or Myth Having read the article about the Mystique R2R Ladder DAC I think I will stay with my MSB Platinum. It has a buffer clock to get the jitter down and upgraded R@R ladders I put in. For 5 channel SACD there is no other choice but a player with 5 or ... |