Quothe ben franchuk, from writings of Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 09:07:46PM -0700:
> You get what you pay for! The same goes for good quality audio.
True (much of the time, that is)... but I don't see how someone who
spends $15,000+ for a fairly low-wattage tube amp is getting his
money's worth when someone can spend a fraction of that for some new
Hammond audio and power transformers, plus some new or NOS tubes, a
recycled chasis (heck, even the case from a PC could be used. :-)
...now, there's a good use for old '386 PCs! ), an assortment of caps,
chokes and resistors from one's spare parts collection, spare wire,
solder, etc.
> Parts for a good amp is about $600 US with more $$$ for 'vintage' parts.
> So far for my 4 watt/channel amp I have spent $250 on the big iron
> and $250 for new electronic components.
Wow, that seems like a lot for only 4 watts per channel. It seems
that, with new and spare parts, one could build one of those for much
less (it wouldn't cost me anything, due to having the transformers,
tubes, etc. here for building an amp of that size, scavenged from
equipment that I obtained, very inexpensively, some time ago, for
parts.
For not too much more than that, I was thinking that one could build a
much larger tube amp, over delivering 200W RMS... ok, well... I stand
corrected; actually, just the Hammond iron alone is going to cost
nearly US$600, plus a few hundred dollars more for new tubes. Still,
it's a heck of a lot less expensive than what people are paying for
assembled tube amplifiers... still, too expensive for me at this time.
Is what you're building a class-A triode amp, by the way?
Other good news... not sure if anyone else has heard it, but Western
Electric plans on resuming the manufacture of not only the 300B tubes
here in the U.S., but possibly other types of tubes as well. :-) After
resuming the manufacture of 300B tubes a while back, they had to
reloate their equipment, and production stopped in 2002). That's right,
audio tube production in the U.S., hopefully in 2004!
For more info:
http://www.westernelectric.com/whatsnew.html
> The other $100 is for the
> box to mount the stuff on,and keep the cat's paws off the tubes.
Hmmm, wouldn't a PC chasis, some chicken-wire and some bailing twine
have been far less expensive? :-)
> Unlike classic computers, you can still build tube stuff out of your
> basement.I have not seen any U-build computer kits, that made real
For that reason, I've gone back to spending more time on my far older
hobbies of electronics and audio and less time with computers, except
for the applications that I need to use them for.
> computers from TTL. ( IE front pannel, > 4k words of memory, real I/O. )
> Hal Chamberlin I think had plans for a real computer years ago, but I
> read that in Kilobuad and am not quite sure.
Somewhere around here, I think that I may have a book from the 1970's
pertaining to building a computer from TTL... will have to look for
it. I only recall Byte (an article by Steve Ciarcia?) having
published an article about building a computer from chips, but I think
it used a microprocessor... hopefully someone can prove me wrong about
that.
--
Copyright (C) 2003 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd_at_rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.
Received on Fri Jan 16 2004 - 00:38:11 GMT