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Roger Alan Modjeski (RAM) 1951 - 2019

It is with great sadness that I announce Roger A. Modjeski passed away peacefully in his home in San Pablo, CA after an 12 month battle with cancer. Roger started Music Reference in 1981 and later RAM Tubes, The Tube Audio Store, and The Berkeley HiFi School. For more than 38 years he tirelessly ran his business and designed some of the most unique and well received audio components in the industry. Right until the near end Roger was working, designing, and teaching until he physically was unable to continue.

The link below will take you my playground where I have posted my tribute to Roger (click ENTER after the page loads):

http://www.electrafidelity.com/

Fare thee well my friend.
clio09
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,487 posts
 

To read lots of Roger’s thoughts on all things hi-fi (and some musical. I remember him mentioning Emmylou Harris’ and Beethoven’s names, two favorites of mine as well), head over to the Music Reference forum on Audiocircle. His Circle has been closed since 2014 (apparently after a complaint from Ted Denney of Synergistic Research ;-), but is still acessable. Lots of info and ideas to be found there, including Roger’s "informed" opinion on hi-fi reviewing and tweaks. Prepare to have your conceived notions challenged!

For a song I find particularly fitting, give a listen to "No Time To Cry" by Iris Dement. Iris and Emmylou are mutual-admirers, the latter appearing in one of the former’s early music videos. And speaking of videos, let me reiterate that the videos viewable on You Tube of Roger's seminars at a few of the annual Burning Amp Festival events in San Francisco (in 2015 and 2018, iirc) are REALLY something you want to watch. A free education in tubes and tube amp design! Tape them, as you will want to watch them more than once.

ndevamp
55 posts
 
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.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,487 posts
 

Wonderful remembrances @ndevamp, thank you. I would occasionally drive up to Santa Barbara from L.A. for the weekend in the 1980’s and 90’s, before I knew about Roger and Music Reference. I of course now regret missing my opportunity to drop by his place there. Beautiful city, lots of music and record company business honchos have houses there.

Reading your words just reinforces my opinion that Roger understood tubes and amplifier design like few living engineers. Just as a master composer or songwriter sees the weakness in another’s work, so too did Roger in his competitor’s products. His comments about a few of them in his Burning Amp Festival presentations are delightful ;-) .

ndevamp
55 posts
 
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.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,487 posts
 

My introduction to ARC's build design and parts quality was when I turned on my new SP-3 for the first time. It immediately made a popping sound, and I learned what a burnt resistor smells like ;-) . Years later, Tom Carione showed me the scorched circuit boards inside all the ARC power amps that had been traded in at Brooks Berdan Ltd. for Music Reference, VTL, and Jadis amps. Power tubes mounted on a circuit board?!

I so wish I had been in a position to get myself a pair of Roger's ESL loudspeakers and direct-drive OTL tube amps. 5,000 volts delivered straight from the tubes to the ESL stators. No power amp output transformer, no ESL step-up transformer---ultimate transparency! I suppose that design has died with Roger.

In his final (third) version of the RM-10 (still referred to as Mk.2, but now 25w/ch Class A), Roger DID go to auto-biasing. He told me my RM-10 (original 35w/ch version Mk.2) ran in Class A up to 15 or so watts, which is where the original Quad ESL has it operating most of the time (especially when high-pass filtered at 100Hz). Also owning an RM-200 Mk.2, I just have to get myself an RM-9 ;-) .

Roger stated he found power amps much more interesting than pre-amps, perhaps why he is better known for the former. As does Nelson Pass, Roger felt that whenever possible (system gain structure, impedance matching, etc.), a passive pre is preferable to an active one. He wasn't driven as a businessman to fill a market demand, but rather to create a design that hadn't been done before. 35 watts out of a pair of EL84's, 100 watts out of a pair of KT88/6550's (into both 8 and 4 ohms!), both with around 10,000 hours of tube life, that he certainly did. And with no burnt resistors or scorched circuit boards ;-) .

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