Quote:
Originally Posted by slidertogrid
The strange thing about this is that despite it being badly built and using cheap standard parts it must sound good.
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What it illustrates is that making a good-sounding solid state amplifier is no longer difficult. You really do have to do something particularly bad to muck it up.
Of course, you can still make ones which sound good but which have hidden stings in their tails.... reliance on special operating precautions, going off-song as components age, just plain impromptu detonationk, and so on.
If, someone has worked hard to actually get impairments to cancel leaving only very low level residuals, then you have a system in which any small drift in characteristic in any component can spoil the cancellation, and the impairments increase dramatically. Subtractive processes can increase demands on stability hellishly.
Re Colossus... Yes, at one end of the racking in the re-creation at Bletchley, is a very nice triple-ganged variac transformer made and donated by Claude Lyons ltd. It is a monster! It is used to bring u the heater power gently. It isn't just a matter of leaving them on, it is also a matter of not shocking them at turn on, and being able to regulate their voltage.
A lot of 'high end' amplifiers discourage people going inside and they try to keep service info under lock and key... principally to stop people seeing how ordinary the innards are. Well here you have an amp planned to stop people seeing that they are rubbish.
Governments have spent billions on finding how to make electronics reliable. It's become open knowledge. It costs nothing to exploit what was hard-won. Would I pay a lot of money for something that threw it all away?
Nope!
David