Roger Alan Modjeski (RAM) 1951 - 2019

@tomic601 for his service Roger specifically requested Lyle Lovett and Linda Ronstadt songs be performed. He was also a big fan of Billie Holliday, Willie Neslon, Emmy Lou Harris, and Keith Jarrett. He also listened to classical programming on KQED while working.

Here is an interesting story. Roger receives a call from someone who asks him why he made the fuses so hard to access on the RM-9 MkI. Turns out this guy had a couple of them and he had to change the fuse in one and found it to be a pain to have to remove the bottom plate to do so. During the conversation it turns out that it was Keith Jarrett who owned the amps and per Roger he was the influence behind the decision to mount the fuses on the top plate in the MkII edition of the amp.

Shocked and very saddened to hear of his passing. We were only chatting a few weeks ago but he didn’t mention anything amiss. I’ve known Roger since about 1991 and he has been an inspiration to me ever since. We were always chatting about things like EL84 loadlines, coupling capacitor charge pumping, a good current to run a 6dj8, EI vs toroidal (‘Ugh!’) output transformers, biasing, even automatic biasing, jfet and bipolar linearity, tube noise, etc etc! Having stayed at his in Santa Barbara way back then it was fun to have been driven around in the Jensen Healey and come back to be educated about the tempered tuning of pianos. We had a very close friendship, almost a relationship. He was always keeping an eye on the stock market on a tiny B&W TV. One day we were chatting and he had just received boards for the then new RM200. I sat and looked at it. LM394s for the input stage?, I said, dismayed. He was shocked and a little awed I had worked out the circuit from looking at the unmade circuit board. From then on he didn’t hold back from the engineering aspect of our discussions. Why use heated jfets? he said. One of many discussions about MC headamps. Another... ‘But that’s too much power for the screen grid!’ he retorted, disappointed that I’d neglected to work it out, unfolding a well worn chart of curves for the EL34 he’d made on his computerized valve tester, all written in Basic language. Another year, we went to Borders in SB where he gleefully pulled out a Class A review from Stereophile for the RM200. ‘Yessss!!’, he jolted excitedly. It really meant a lot to him, to be validated for all the hard work that went into it. We had a great time touring the countryside in southern Australia together, and he really considered moving there as he ‘didn’t like the way the US was going’. ‘Those mad Australians!’, a reference from his talk at the Burning Amp 2018 possibly referring to me..? A sad week this week. RIP my friend Roger. I am missing you already.

P.S. I live in the UK now and if you have one of Roger’s amps here I might be able to help service it. I used to service them down under.

Yes I think Roger considered it a mild form of entertainment to check out other maker’s products, ARC a specialty. What he mentioned at Burning Amp 2018 we ranted about years earlier in the 90s! I feel he kept his best work from entering production. The RM-5 preamp was ok but I would give him a go over little things like choice of regulators for the power supply. He would come back with measurements to prove it. (If there’s no noise on it, there’s no noise on it!) But I’m not sure if he ever built his all singing, all dancing preamp that was completely direct coupled from input to output, and used 6 6dj8s. Also loved his direct drive amp for electrostatic speakers, a product of his time at Beveridge. Perhaps the RM9 mod to have a self-balancing driver stage came about as one of our talks? I think he wanted to put auto-bias into an amp as well but didn’t get to having it work the way he wanted. Later he loved Emission Labs tubes for their sheer linearity. He was fascinated people preferred single ended to push pull poweramps, but having built some for himself could see their point. He made a few solid state single ended experiments as well, but they never entered production.
Phew. Bit of a hole in the heart here.