lynn_olson
Responses from lynn_olson
| Is Mark Levinson still considered up there with the best of the best? The power relationship between designer, corporate CEO, and the marketing department are different for every company. Quite a few well-known high-end companies (not going to name names here) are little more than marketing departments, hiring desig... | |
| Is Mark Levinson still considered up there with the best of the best? What matters is the designer, not the manufacturer or the promoter/salesman/marketer. The designer is responsible for the sound ... the marketer just sells it. If a manufacturer changes their house sound, that means the design staff has changed or... | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp Kind of expected because: 1) the specialized damper diode rectifiers have very soft switching compared to solid-state diodes, thus much less 50/60 Hz switching noise radiated into the rest of the circuit and out the AC power cord 2) the regulate... | |
| DC Offset Issue in Don Sachs Preamp Actually, posting these little "how-tos" on the forum is good for me, since the content can be added to the product manuals. I’m the one that writes them for Spatial. Plenty of experience writing these things ... nine years at Tektronix in Oregon... | |
| DC Offset Issue in Don Sachs Preamp The final stage of the preamp is a cathode follower with an active pull-down, which is cap-coupled to the RCA output. The output is shunted by a large-value resistor to discharge the output cap. Don’t remember if there is a muting relay to mute th... | |
| DC Offset Issue in Don Sachs Preamp Don is still with us, contact him by email. My guess is the load resistor on the output of the cap has gone open, but I wouldn’t expect both channels to do that at the same time. Maybe something has gone wrong with the regulator. It would help to ... | |
| Audio Research Preamps vs. Conrad-Johnson preamps Audio Research and CJ use different tube lineups, which accounts for most of the sonic difference. You might prefer 6DJ8 vs 12AU7, which have very different distortion spectra. | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp Hi, Theophile! I’ve written a lot of stuff over the last thirty years, both in print and many different Internet forums (going back to "rec.audio.high-end" in the days of the Arpanet). That’s when I was still at Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon, an... | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp Spatial is ramping up production; the units going out now are part of the first production run. As they make more, production processes will be streamlined, along with parts ordering (this is typical of all manufacturing, not just Spatial). | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp Good questions to ask Spatial, who are building the preamps (and the Blackbird power amps). Spatial Audio Lab | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp Actually, I am very curious which phono preamps are a good match with the Raven. As mentioned earlier, the Raven sounds equally good with RCA or XLR inputs, so it caters to all kinds of phono preamps ... solid-state, vacuum tube, or hybrid. Not g... | |
| Is It Worh Modding An Amp Keep in mind most manufacturers will refuse to service "modded" equipment, because the quality of the mods is all over the place. Some mods actually damage the circuit, or make it unstable and failure prone. If a manufacturer sees that when they ... | |
| Spatial Audio Raven Preamp No adjustments are necessary. The only requirement is the sections within the 6SN7 are internally matched, which is true for any good-quality tube. Each channel has its own 6SN7, and it is preferable the stereo pair are matched, although not essen... | |
| 300B, 2A3 experiances wanted Good point: the 300B driven by an interstage transformer is a completely different animal than a 300B driven by RC coupling. From that perspective, an IT is almost mandatory to hear the full potential of the 300B tube. By contrast, the 45 and 2A3 ... | |
| 300B, 2A3 experiances wanted The sonics of the 300B are mostly limited by the power and linearity of the driver section, because it is much harder to drive than the 45 or 2A3. IF the driver is linear and powerful enough, the 300B has a power and expanse unmatched by anything... |