kevin gilmore

i'm thinking that hirsch means 7044's no such thing as a 6044. Unless that's a mikhail private label

My guess is that the barn on his property is likely filled to the very top with tubes. So likely its not costing him much. Last time i checked, that property had still not been sold. Now mikhail if he was smart he would insure whats in the barn for some obscene amount, and then arrange for it to get hit by lightning and burn to the ground.

Here is what i mean by stupid, on ebay today under mikhail's supra_buyer account 4cx350 mikhail said he had a couple hundred of these. Absolutely wonderful tubes if you are building a ham radio transmitter. Completely useless for audio. In fact these days, just about completely useless for any reason because cheap solid state has finally replaced items like this. Now maybe a direct drive electrostatic amp for speakers... With a plate voltage of 5 killovolts. Can you just imagine a mikhail built amplifier with a power supply like this. A neon sign transformer comes to mind m599a magnetron I'm not sure how many he has of these, but without the magnet assembly the thing is also completely useless. And in fact as a X band magnetron it would have only one use, and that would be lighting up a commercial satellite. Which would get you in hot water with the FCC real fast. Lots of mid size and large western electric tubes. Most are DHT's. Wonderful tubes with absolutely no use whatsoever. The sockets that would go with them are unobtainable, and probably cost more than the tubes are worth. Now 5687's, mikhail probably has 10 thousand of them. Too bad the only manufacturer making amplifiers that use 5687's is ray samuels. The good stuff like gold lion kt88's and mullard el34 and el84's are long gone. Having 2 full size semi's filled with useless tubes seems more of a hastle than a profit center. The competitive edge that mikhail had disappeared as soon as he started using those horrible (but hey they were cheap) sockets. Does anyone think that mikhail selling a few hundred dollars of tubes each month is going to allow him to pay back $50k or more? Does anyone think that mikhail will ever fix or even send back all the customer units he is sitting on? Mikhail was in fact sitting on a GOLD mine. He could have put decent transformers in the units. He could have put in decent tube sockets. He could have charged for all of it. He could have, and should have by now been rolling in money. Mikhail for all his faults had some really good ideas. The implementation of those ideas was a disaster. And as far as number of tubes, Kevin Deal is probably sitting on 10 semi's worth of tubes. (upscale audio)

I'm going to add a bit more to this. 6385,2c51,396a... All of these tubes are 9 pin with an internal shield. Problem shows up when you take a 9 pin tube and try to stick it into an 8 pin hole. Just measured one of mikhail's adapters, and the shield goes nowhere. Which means that it picks up noise. Lots of noise. One solution would be to wire that 9th wire to one of the filament wires. But now you have to hard wire the filament circuit to ground, and that is not good either. Bottom line, more mikhail stupidity. It would be better to take the shield wire out directly and add a banana jack to connect it to which is wired to chassis ground.

Here is the real gotcha with untested input tubes on extremes. The input tube is directly coupled to the output tube. Plate to grid. So if the emission on the input tube is 30% low, then the plate voltage is 30% high, and the resulting cathode voltage on the output tube is 30% high. And then guess what, the cathode load resistors which are just barely rated for power at normal voltages suddenly see much more power. Which is why on some of the amps pictured over there, the cathode resistors are also burning their way thru the circuit board. Owning a SP without also owning a tube tester is a bad idea. I think it is well known by now that more than half of mikhails monster tube collection is bad tubes, and the other half is stupid stuff he will never sell.

But they sound fantastic.

Find me some good high voltage (>=900V) transistors, or fets. Especially p channel or pnp. I have lots of new designs waiting on solid state devices. Just don't want to go the stacked devices route.

So its going to end up cheaper than i thought. So sue me. Mostly its because the power supply board is not going to be full size and that is going to make things cheaper. So the amplifier board really is what i said above unless there is some other charge i don't know about.

About time the artists got paid for their work.

patched kernel available if you know where to look. besides which you can do all the updates, then install the 10.6.1 kernel and get all of the bug fixes, some of which still don't work right. But much more fun and coming soon is a virtual machine for windows 7 that runs osx. Apple needs to pull head firmly out of their ass and start selling the operating system seperately. Otherwise the pirates will continue to make magic discs and give them away.

Maybe Summer Glau's performance might change things. Maybe not.

mikhail taught him..

Yep. I think the problem is actually getting stamping time at the manufacturing plant, but who knows why this is taking so long.

At this rate the one year subscription will take about 5 years if you include the other 2 sets.

Tyll seems to have a thing for sushi and booze. And immaculate 3 piece suits.

The chairs are even better. herman miller aeron's... The rooms are sound wise completely dead. If people want, a room with speakers could be next door, and as long as the door is closed you can't hear it even next door. And the networking is stinkin quick. Although we were not the ones paying for it this time. Not sure how much it is really going to cost if we want the up and down speeds we were getting courtesy of the physicians next door. I will however say that the lighting is a challenge for taking pictures. The lights flicker at some very high rate and it throws off the automatic metering systems of most cameras. So without a flash, the pictures come out a bit dark, and with a flash they are over-exposed. So far that room got me twice. It won't get me a third time...

Consider my ass spanked severly. It won't happen again. It may already be too late, in which case that is OK.

board files for the amplifier board just shipped to pcbnet to be produced. The amp board should be $93.32 + tax (i'm in illinois, no way around this) +shipping. Still have a bit of work to do on the power supply board.

Well we discussed whether the picture would stay or not. There are other pictures there of people in those t-shirts that are still there... What?? I can't have a little fun once in a while.. Once every 4 years seems ok... The entire CJ010 crew are active head-casers.

since it was deleted from over there... http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/chiunify7.jpg

quick pic that explains the concept http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/nc3fdh.jpg Correction... There is a switch on the amp board that connects amp ground to the neutrik ground pin for those situations where it is necessary. Like using the xlr for single ended inputs. The outside of the xlr connector is connected to chassis ground.

Neutrik nc3fdh connectors. Go look it up on their website. krell uses a lot of these. you solder the inside piece to the circuit board directly. Then insert thru the panel, add the outside piece, and then there is a slot for a small screwdriver that locks them together. craig also uses them on his BA. The one hole that is missing on the back panel is the hole for the ground wire which connects thru the umbilical cable to the same place on the power supply. Everything floats inside both boxes to get rid of any ground noise. There is a switch on the amp board that connects amp ground to chassis ground for those situations where it is necessary.

amplifier back panel. The amphenol power jacks can mount on the inside as shown, so you can build it and wire it and then bolt it to the back panel from the inside. Makes taking it apart if necessary a breeze (something mikhail needed to learn). And the neutrik's are in 2 pieces too... http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis13.jpg

I think that there will be a couple extra circuit boards... Will know next week when i decide how many to buy.

Those are temporary vintage feet. Still hoping that craig can get some more of the feet i really want without having to buy 5000 pieces. Weight of amp chassis 15.56 lbs...(no circuit board, or tubes or other parts) power supply would be the same plus 7.5 lbs of transformers (plus parts)