|
Why do I write about my audio hobby? I sat on this piece for a
while, because it is perhaps not so productive to publicly expose my
oddball hobbies. Arguably, the whole thing is a waste of time -- and
indeed, as you will read below, I myself decided that I was rather too
involved, and wanted to cut back as I too have better things to do.
But, you could say that about most any hobby I suppose. Nevertheless, I
seem to feel an obligation to tell others what I have discovered, both
people already involved in the hobby, and perhaps those that might be
interested. It's strange that this goofy thing actually has funny
aspects and complications to involve the adult mind.
It seems to me that creative people have creative hobbies. By
"creative people" I don't mean artists necessarily, but also
entrepreneurs or
fund managers -- people who aren't just cogs in someone else's machine
doing what they are told, with no particular aspirations beyond that
(or even understanding of what I am referring to), but who want to do
something in the world that is theirs alone. Likewise, noncreative
people, or rather, people whose natural creativity has been suppressed,
do not have creative hobbies. Their "hobbies" tend to involve buying
things others have made, which is also what 98% of "audiophiles" do,
who are not designers and builders like I am. As you have no doubt
noticed, I have not just been a designer and builder, but also a person
who tends to design and build particularly florid and elaborate
things, because, if you're going to take the time to do this anyway,
why not go big? Thus, my fun and games here serves as a sort of
template for creative hobbies in general, and also, creative activities
in general, in the wider world as a whole. A person whose creativity
has been suppressed can perhaps help it to blossom again by adopting a
creative hobby. I suggest Legos -- especially the old-style generic
rectangular blocks. Brat Pitt and David Beckham have said they enjoy
playing with Legos as adults.
* * *
Today's tale is mostly about the aspects and complications.
Although this endeavor is not really a major focus of mine at this
time, nevertheless a lot has happened since my last update a year ago.
The most interesting thing is that I completed my horn speaker project,
which was underway early last year. Further steps involved designing
some subwoofers, which I later had custom-built by a local craftsman.
Then, I had to buy all the associated amplifiers and digital
crossovers. Since I already had a small tube amplifier that could serve
as a tweeter amp -- a cute and actually rather well-made little item
from China that actually cost $200 including shipping -- I decided to
try replacing my speaker-level tweeter crossover with the digital
crossover and multi-amping the tweeter. The digital crossover allowed
both steep fourth-order crossover slopes and time alignment, plus
control over the level, all of which I found made a substantial
improvement. I added a bit of digital equalization at the source level,
and a bit more in the digital crossover.
Thus, we ended up with a rather complicated system, with three
amplifiers, an analog line-level crossover plus a digital crossover,
plus two layers of (modest) digital equalization. Definitely not
something sold in stores.
And I immediately had the urge to sell it.
This is not because the result was disappointing. Not at all -- it was
awesome, and exceeded all my hopes. Almost every time I turned it on, I
thought "I didn't remember that it actually sounds this good ..." The
sense of tone in the midrange was intense, burning, addictive,
riveting, edge-of-your-seat type stuff -- the kind of effect that I
have only found with SE DHT amps directly wired to compression drivers.
The dynamics were thrilling. It was ... what a wild and crazy stereo
system should be, a magic carpet ride of delicacy and power, subtlety
and searing emotion and drama. Notice that I don't say "accuracy" or
"imaging" or "neutrality", because this system is not accurate or
neutral, doesn't "image" much at all, and besides it doesn't matter. I
say this having owned and listened to a lot of other stuff including
Altec A5 systems with 288B drivers and 1005 horns, multiamped with
single-ended triodes and tube line level crossovers; Fertin field-coil
wideband cone drivers on open baffle, with multi-amped open-baffle bass
and supertweeters; RCA MI-9584 drivers on MI-9595 horns; the RCA
"Ubangi" basshorns loaded with Altec 515s, and a lot of other stuff
that many people think is pretty good, and is indeed pretty good. They
were stepping stones.
Read
a more detailed description of this speaker system here.
Why did I want to sell it? There were a few reasons. First, because I
was enjoying the speaker-building process, and had a bit of momentum by
then which might have translated into new projects. Second, because I
wanted someone else to hear what I was hearing ... to understand what
was possible in this stupid audio hobby, and for not really very much
money either. I wanted someone to leapfrog across the desert of useless
opinion and boring gear-of-the-month hype and perhaps bring something
special into their life.
Eventually, I settled down. After the initial momentum of
building-enthusiasm -- the momentum that was needed to get this done in
the first place -- faded, I decided I didn't really want to keep on
building things, but rather enjoy the fruits of my labor for a while.
Also, it really did sound good, and it was all set up and running, so
why not just turn it on and enjoy it for a while, like a year, or maybe
ten years?
But, then another thing came up. I found that these speakers didn't fit
my lifestyle too well. An ambitious device like this just begs to be
used. And, that would mean bothering the neighbors more than I would
really like to. I live in a rural area, but in a village rather than a
country hobby-farm. Plus, it really is big, and doesn't fit my space
well. But, more than that, I found that I just didn't want to think
about these things anymore, and that I would somehow have to carry this
burden just by owning this thing, even if the building process was
done. Like a fine restored vintage automobile, a system like this
becomes a thing that you do. And, I mostly like doing other
things these days.
In short, I discovered, after five years of listening to headphones
before setting up this system, that headphones fit my interests better.
Also, there was another thing: the completion of this system
represented a long cycle of endeavor going back to late 1999, when I
bought my first vintage large-format compression driver on EBay, of
putting together a really great superefficient horn system to use with
directly-heated single-ended triodes. My RCA "Ubangi" basshorn-based
system of 2008 was very good but was never really "done" before I had
to sell it. There were still a dozen bugs to work out. This system was
not really "tweaked," but it did represent a realization of its
potential and my vision for it -- no halfway hacks like my initial use
of a single cheapie subwoofer for bass duties, for example. Everything
was finally built-out the way it should be.
I felt like I had somehow completed what I had set out to do, going
back as far as 1999, and didn't really have to go on unless I felt like
it.
So I did sell it. I put the whole thing up for sale, with multiple
amplifiers and crossovers and cabling and everything. A complete
turnkey system. All of my efforts over lo these years, and all you have
to do is just buy it readymade -- which you can't do in stores. The
only other way to get to a place like this is to walk the path
yourself, which would take years, and you might never get there. Most
never do. The price was little more than the cost of the parts. $3800
including everything but the Welborne 2A3 main power amps. This is
peanuts. Plus, I'd sell you the Welborne amps too, for $1200 which is
about the new cost of the tubes alone, if you didn't already have some
amps.
I suppose this sounds like a lot of money to some people, but it is
really a bargain.
But, nobody wanted to buy it.
I realized that one reason something like this is not sold in stores is
because a typical plug-and-play audiophool really is not suited for
owning something like this, even in its completed state. I say
"completed" only by my standards -- the standards of someone who can
design and build both electronics and speaker systems. I realized that
a lot of people are sort-of serious about audio but they have no idea
that a "first-order highpass passive line-level crossover" means a
capacitor and a resistor, or how you would make one even if you did
know that, which happens to have a cutoff frequency of 150 hertz and is
compatible both with your signal source and amplifier input stage. Even
if you did know all that, you still have to built it, which means
firing up a soldering iron and drilling holes in boxes, which a lot of
internet-surfing knowitalls are allergic to. For me, this is like
making toast. The third-order passive line-level crossover in this
setup, for example, has a pair of 9.6 henry signal chokes, which I had
custom-wound by Jack Elliano of Electraprint. Yes, I called a man in
Las Vegas and had him specially wind some wire around a core of
magnetic steel, to my specifications, because you can't buy something
like this even from a giant electronic parts store like Digi-Key. (That
was back in 2006, which was a big year for these things.)
The crossover is completed with some paper-in-oil capacitors that were
made in the Soviet Union, and were sent to me from a man in Ukraine,
via EBay, before hostilities there of course. This is nothing special
among builders, but it is pretty special if you stop and think about
what it actually is.
Anyway, keeping something like this up and running is a bit like a
1960s British roadster. OK, not nearly that bad, but sometimes there
are a few little problems, you have to do a little diagnosis, and
perhaps some soldering.
I have a friend in the area who is kinda into this stuff, and actually
owns a 300B single-ended amplifier that was custom-made for him by
Blackie Pagano in New York City. I think the design is basically the
Reichert Flesh and Blood. I thought these speakers would be a big step
up from his Cain and Cain fullrange cone driver speakers -- and he
could probably sell those for more than I was asking for these, and
pocket some money too. But, he wasn't interested. Maybe it was a little
like asking a California weekend beachbreak surfer if they want to
paddle out at Pipeline at the North Shore. Yes, but ... no. Maybe a
speaker like this is really best for someone who builds their own
amplifiers, like a 45 SET driven by a 10Y interstage coupled, powered
by a 250V stack of sealed-lead-acid batteries, actively biased with
another -50V battery bias supply, and which includes 12 pounds of
filament chokes -- an amplifier that I actually built, specifically to
drive these horns, in early 2007. It produced about 1.5 watts of peak
output power. The vintage bakelite panel meters that I put on the
battery B+ supply were really cute.
Eventually, I did sell this speaker system, in parts. What a waste.
But, the people who would be interested in something like this are
builders themselves, and builders are interested in building.
Even then, in that tiny subculture, most people have no appreciation
for these things. The most important part, the crazy big midrange horns
and vintage wideband compression drivers, were purchased by a
Vietnamese man in New Jersey who owns a rather nice nail salon, and
didn't speak good English. Anyway, he already had a lot of speaker
parts himself, and will have no problem adding subwoofers and tweeters
and crossovers and helper amplifiers to his own heart's content, from
his own large inventory of such things. He told me that he intends to
replace the dented sheet-aluminum quarter-sized horn mouths with some
custom flares made of fiberglass, with full-size mouths, which would be
a whopping 44" in diameter. That is so cool. I hope he actually does
it, and I think he is crazy enough to carry that football all the way
into the endzone.
So, all of this helped me realize that I was no longer interested in
owning speakers. I had my chance and made my decisions. I could change
my mind, and maybe in five years, if I live in a different place, I'll
be buying or building something again. But, for now, I see no speakers
in my future, except the little wooden shoeboxes now set up in the
kitchen. I am happy about this.
This allowed me to sell all my amplifier-related stuff, and also my
vintage gear like compression drivers, 416A woofers, bullet tweeters,
and a lot of other stuff that I thought I would like to play with
someday. Most of it went to EBay, and almost all the buyers had
unpronounceable Asian names.
Along the way I sold my turntable, which I bought when I was fifteen.
It was a Micro Seiki DQ-3, pretty nice stuff for a teenager. Over the
years, the electronics inherent in the quartz-locked direct-drive
turntables of that era sort of decayed, and the deck developed some bad
speed issues. In short, it was broken. Nevertheless, I was able to sell
it for more than my new purchase price, because people today know the
Micro Seiki stuff was the pinnacle of ambitious 1970s-1980s Japanese
turntable design. Plus, it has the spiffy MA-707 tonearm.
This reduces me to headphones, and a digital source. The headphones are
the same Sennheiser HD600 cans that I've been using for ages. You might
remember that I tried some other, recent options like the Sennheiser
HD800, at roughly four times the price, and found that I preferred the
classic HD600 by a large margin. In the past I also owned a
heavily-modified Denon D2000 from Lawton Audio, which was also supposed
to be oh-so-much-better than the HD600, but which I could never get to
sound right. The digital source is the same Metrum Octave DAC from last
year. Audirvana has been supplemented by uncompressed 16/44 streaming
from Tidal (tidalhifi.com), with the help of Amarra, which improves
things by a shocking amount compared with using Tidal alone.
Naturally, I wanted to nail down my headphone setup. My 01A-71A
headphone amp, which I originally built in 2001, was begging for a
rebuild, which I hadn't got to in the midst of all this speaker stuff.
I can't even keep track of how many times this was rebuilt. Oddly
enough, after versions with direct coupling and odd biasing schemes, I
ended up with a simple self-bias cap-coupled design. The
eighty-year-old 01A tubes (handmade by American craftsmen in the Art
Deco era) tend to drift a lot and have various levels of wear. I wanted
something that was stable and reliable, and was willing to give up a
little nth-degree of refinement to get that. I also installed a new
rear panel to keep all the cords off the top sheet, which is ugly.
I also ended up rebuilding the SLA battery B+ supply previously
mentioned, putting it in a much smaller box. It now has 150V of B+ but
four separate 7Ah batteries for use as independent filament supplies. I
put together an eight-pole Speakon cable for an umbilical, plus there's
another BNC cable to handle B+. (DHTs are complicated.) Between the amp
and the battery box, this rebuild was pretty comprehensive and
approached the difficulty of building everything from scratch. This is
the fifth version of the battery box I think, since its original
incarnation in 2001. I also put together a little battery-powered amp
using ten 2SK170 jfets in parallel, which sounds pretty darn good, even
compared to the 71A amp. I call it the "Beast of 10 jfets," and think
of it as sort of a Pass SIT-1 for headphones. It instantly obsoleted my
other solid-state headphone offerings around here. And, even with its
batteries, it fits in a 7.5" square Hammond 1590F die-cast aluminum box.
But, the big discovery this year was that I could listen to most of my
digital music, about 80%, using the outputs of the DAC direct to
headphones. The Metrum DAC actually has no output stage. Like the old
Kusunoki TDA1543 design (which I point-to-point wired in 2001), the
output comes directly off the chips, with I/V conversion by a simple
resistor. So, I am going direct from the R2R ladder in the chips to my
headphones with no intervening electronics. (I don't think the DAC even
has an output cap, but uses a balanced arrangement.)
This sounds really good. Better than any of my amplifiers. Some
recordings need additional amplification, but most don't.
And so, after all this, chronicled in part above, I am listening to
something close to nothing at all. Not one single stage of
amplification. I could live happily with this DAC-direct setup, plus
the jfet amp when I need a little more on some recordings, and put the
71A amp away altogether. But, I just like the Christmas-tree aspect of
the DHTs, especially those 1920s-era 01As with their thoriated tungsten
filaments, and all-battery-powered all-DHT amps are kinda special, and
it does sound better too.
Actually, for a lot of recordings, I need up to 12 db of attenuation
even off the unamplified DAC outputs. (I find that I have to attenuate
by roughly the degree to which the recording is mastered too
hot.) I put together some 600-ohm autoformer volume controls for
that purpose, wound by Dave Slagle, which also happens to be one of
those things not sold in stores in a plug-and-play form, and which
finalizes that little cycle as well.
This is the part of the story where the drama ends and I live happily
ever after. Great music reproduction is like great food or great wine,
or great books or great clothes or great furniture. Many people are
perfectly happy to live without it, but you can bring it into your life
if you want, and it might be nice if you did.
| |
