2. amps-preamps
  3. 140029-80294

Does anyone care to ask an amplifier designer a technical question? My door is open.

I closed the cable and fuse thread because the trolls were making a mess of things. I hope they dont find me here.

I design Tube and Solid State power amps and preamps for Music Reference. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, have trained my ears keenly to hear frequency response differences, distortion and pretty good at guessing SPL. Ive spent 40 years doing that as a tech, store owner, and designer.
.
Perhaps someone would like to ask a question about how one designs a successfull amplifier? What determines damping factor and what damping factor does besides damping the woofer. There is an entirely different, I feel better way to look at damping and call it Regulation , which is 1/damping.

I like to tell true stories of my experience with others in this industry.

I have started a school which you can visit at http://berkeleyhifischool.com/ There you can see some of my presentations.

On YouTube go to the Music Reference channel to see how to design and build your own tube linestage. The series has over 200,000 views. You have to hit the video tab to see all.

I am not here to advertise for MR. Soon I will be making and posting more videos on YouTube. I don’t make any money off the videos, I just want to share knowledge and I hope others will share knowledge. Asking a good question is actually a display of your knowledge because you know enough to formulate a decent question.

Starting in January I plan to make these videos and post them on the HiFi school site and hosted on a new YouTube channel belonging to the school.


128x128ramtubes

Showing 5 responses by 4krow

4krow
80 posts
 
Well, that just figures, doesn't it? Living way out here in Wyoming, my chances of having a conversation about this is more than rare. Then in the last few weeks, I have an opportunity to tap into 3 different audio engineers, electronic engineer, amp designer. It's funny how that can be.
  So here is something that probably has been asked before, but there are just too many pages for me to go through. Why shouldn't decent tone controls, and maybe even loudness controls come back in fashion? For it is simply that I need them at times, being 61. Now, mind you, I have bought many a product in the past that had such controls that were not worth the solder. Then, I got ahold of a low cost Yamaha integrated that changed my mind about such things. When it came to a loudness control, they chose NOT to increase the bass/treble, but instead to reduce the midrange. Cool idea. Other companys were spot on in the thinking tone controls whose turn over frequency for that particular control could switched to a more desirable frequency to start the correction. So if you were to use the bass control, you might have a choice of adjustment starting at either 100 hz or lower, at 60 hz, for example. The fact that these could be switched out of circuit when not needed, is enough for me to buy such a product.

  Your thoughts...
4krow
80 posts
 
There would be a step beyond desire for the implementation of 'tone' controls, i.e. to weak a control, and nah, give me soup. Too much, but then it becomes my mother. "Do this-do that, this isn't quite right, what about another..." You see, I either listen to the music, or listen to Everything else! Choice ends when the system is set at the positive. All is right with the beat.
4krow
80 posts
 
Actually, after looking at the Harmon Kardon Citation 1 pre-amp, I noticed that all of the EQ that was mentioned about it pertained to phono, not tone controls. Yes, there are tone controls, but that is all they are. The adjustment is not flexible except for the plus and minus positions. I would rather have a tone control that can be set to a particular frequency... in fact, once the unit was at my house, maybe then I could determine those needed frequencies and change out capacitors/resistors to adjust to the needed frequency. Or, to get a bit fancier, as i mentioned before, there could be two or three choices, per a switch to choose which turnover frequency that you would want to use. Much better than a 33 band EQ in my opinion, and in some cases even a parametric EQ.
4krow
80 posts
 
 For the price, I wouldn't hesitate to go with Yamaha again after all those years ago. When I was struggling, I owned an inexpensive Yamaha integrated that really surprised me to be as good as it was and flexible as well. Like I have stated before, 'some' tone controls are flexible enough to be practical, at times anyway. The bulk of them just don't do it for me.
4krow
80 posts
 
Concerning tone controls, thank you,,, very good to know.
More to discover