lewm
Responses from lewm
| Bad NOS tubes... Jea48, Gold-plated pins are a sure sign of recently manufactured tubes. Vintage tubes of the good old days rarely had gold-plated pins unless specified by the type. For example, some milspec 6900s had gold-plated pins but most did not. GE 5-star... | |
| Does anyone run 2 or more turntables... Tim (Pryso), I would not dare to buy yet another turntable, but if the new Technics does indeed have a coreless motor, as I also read, then it may prove noticeably superior to the original SL1200, which made me wonder why they built it to look exa... | |
| Bad NOS tubes... Czarivey, For a source of truly NOS discrete transistors that may have been discontinued, try James Electronics in California. They had every transistor I needed for rebuild of my Beveridge direct-drive amplifiers (ca 1980 vintage), when no one e... | |
| Does anyone run 2 or more turntables... Dave, It's telling for me to learn that you prefer the PD444 (direct-drive) vs your other 3 turntables, which if memory serves are either belt-drive or rim-drive types (do you have a Terminator Salvation?). I have come to the same conclusion, as ... | |
| Does anyone run 2 or more turntables... Just to keep your thread alive, I now have 5 turntables up and running, although only 4 of them get even occasional use. My Victor TT101, mentioned above, was finally fixed by a genius in NYC, JP Jones. If you have a "broken" direct-drive turnta... | |
| Bad NOS tubes... Guys, Here are the facts as I see them:(1) The OP bought 12AU7s for a preamplifier that presumably uses 12AU7s, so there is no question that he bought the right tube type. In terms of operating parameters, all 12AU7s are alike. (The OP should repo... | |
| Who needs a MM cartridge type when we have MC? If you have a Grace F9E or Ruby in need of a re-tip, I highly recommend the Sound Smith upgrades, either the LC stylus on ruby cantilever or OCL stylus on ruby cantilever for a little more money. I got the latter re-tip on my Grace Ruby, and I da... | |
| Tube advice Dear ADG, Yes, I own a Hickok tube tester, and the number of times it has served me to detect truly defective tubes is near to zero, because such tubes gave away their condition just by listening to them. It is not that useful for tube matching, ... | |
| Bad NOS tubes... The driver stage is typically low stress, and, since there is no gain in the driver stage, most likely to be "quiet". Try the "bad" tubes in the driver stage and let us know what happens. What is the vintage and brand of the original set of "sto... | |
| Bad NOS tubes... In fairness to the vendor, any tube that tests well on a given day might be prone to early failure that cannot be predicted based on those favorable test results. However, I do also empathize with you in that to have 4 out of 6 fail so early is w... | |
| Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously? Audiolabyrinth, The only question in your stream of consciousness post that I can answer is the last one; there is no "signal path" in a turntable per se. However, the capacitors you will find inside the plinth are probably in association with th... | |
| Tube advice Preamplifiers, both linestage and phono stage, generally do not require any bias adjustments. Nor do the tubes in the input and driver stage of any amplifier I have ever known about. It's the output power tubes that generally do or do not need o... | |
| Tube advice In the old, old days, the amplifiers designed by William Zane Johnson, founder of ARC, were well known to run the tubes very hard, and failures were common. To deal with this issue, ARC was known in those days to "update" their amplifiers quite f... | |
| Tonearm mount on the plinth or on Pillar ? Dear Halcro, You wrote, "The fact that you and many others can listen to vinyl played back at excessive volumes demonstrates conclusively that air-borne sound waves have no effects on the turntable system." But that is an incorrect assumption b... | |
| Who needs a MM cartridge type when we have MC? Ditto for me regarding the M20FL. I own none of the cartridges otherwise preferred by Halcro, but in my system I prefer the Grace Ruby, either OEM or re-tipped by Sound Smith (I have one of each), the Acutex LPM320, and the Stanton 980LZS. |