kirkus
Responses from kirkus
| How do we remember 1970s amplifiers? Lacee, you're probably right that I was a bit too harsh on the 3020 . . . NAD's manufacturing quality steadily declined through the 1980s, then plummeted under the ownership of KH America in the early-1990s . . . and this is when I serviced them. ... | |
| How do we remember 1970s amplifiers? SAE was also founded by James Bongiorno who founded G.A.S. and also co-designed the Dynaco 400. I thought Bongiorno was just one of several people who designed different SAE products (not one of the founders), but I may be wrong. I had forgotten h... | |
| How do we remember 1970s amplifiers? Lacee, thanks for bringing up the little 20W NAD . . . this is the perfect 1980s equivalent of the Phase Linear amps. I serviced these back in the day, and even had the "Power Envelope" decendent (3225PE?) as a test-bench amplifier for several yea... | |
| How do we remember 1970s amplifiers? Wow, I'm really enjoying everybody's comments, thank you. I particularly like the venomous reactions to the Phase Linear amps . . . as I think it's in so many ways the poster child of 1970s solid-state amplification.Yet, it's earlier repuattion do... | |
| Chasing 60 hz hum In the end, I'm left with the feeling that simply double-insulating the ac wiring and isolating safety ground from chassis could very well be a solution that can be directly applied to most if not all designs without sonic penalty, but the thread ... | |
| Bang and Olefsun Stereo System Junk the whole system by selling on Audiogon, less the cd player which is for the trash.The Beosystem 5000 usually sold with the Beogram CD50, which is definately NOT a trash-can item. It's actually a superbly-engineered inverted transport (the di... | |
| Low damping factor but fast& high current SS amps? There is both some conceptual as well as terminological confusion here.All this talk of damping factor without a single tip of the hat to the 'q' of the speaker. Critically damped speakers...Q-0.707 need much less amplifier damping.Hi Q speakers c... | |
| Low damping factor but fast& high current SS amps? It's very simple to add a resistor in series with the output of an amplifier with a high damping factor (a.k.a. low output impedance) to get whatever damping factor you desire. The resistor value can be calcuated by dividing the nominal speaker im... | |
| more sound in left channel than right channel? Most likely guess would be a burned screen-grid resistor or similar issue on one of the output tubes' sockets . . . an easy repair, but basic diagnostic and good soldering skills required. | |
| XLR to RCA Adapters Hi Talk2me . . . Al managed to find much more information about your amp than I did, and his advice is spot-on as always. If the Burmester amp indeed only has a balanced input with a 2K input impedance, then there's a chance it's only a 1K impedan... | |
| XLR to RCA Adapters It is indeed! Did you get a chance to check the bandwidth at 10Hz and 5 Hz also?I just ran an existing scripted procedure on the M-2, and it started at 20Hz. The Gen-Mon results I did manually, but I neglected to change the LF end of the sweep. An... | |
| XLR to RCA Adapters All of the line output transformers I have ever seen need some kind of load, but its not so much for transient response as for flat frequency response.Proper transient response and flat frequency response of course go hand in hand, especially in t... | |
| XLR to RCA Adapters Sorry Atmasphere, I didn't mean to imply that CMRR was the raison d'etre for your inclusion of the termination resistor. It usually only shows a handful of dB improvement for the CMRR in practice, sometimes a little more at higher frequencies. A c... | |
| XLR to RCA Adapters Al, you're exactly on the right path regarding the performance of input vs. output transformers. Put another way, output transformers require tighter primary-to-secondary power coupling to maintain low output impedance, and the resulting low disto... | |
| Great films where music is a central theme. "Un Cour en Hiver" fits the bill and uses a wonderful performance of Ravel's string quartet . . . but what a depressing movie!I also think "Super Fly" needs to be mentioned, as one of the most significant aspects of the film is how Curtis Mayfield... |