Craig Sawyers

The JC-2 is a nice box for sure to put something in. Has a nice two gang Penny & Giles pot in there too.

Have you ever tried to export to China? I have. They refuse to accept CE and UL approval, and insist on putting a product through their own process (protocol 60) - the company is 9 months in and counting, driven by a Chinese speaking employee. Oh - and you have to supply full engineering drawings, full BOM and documentation pack translated into Chinese, and a product for "testing" - no ifs and buts. The process takes an eternity, and you have to down your pants and ask them to kick you right in the ass in order to sell into China. So do I believe that there is a policy of obstruction to exporting to China? Yes, absolutely. Where does that policy originate? The Chinese government in whatever shape you want define it. That is leaving aside that they have had a product and manufacturing data for 9 months......

I had a pair of 57's on stands - and my wife knocked one over. It was saved from damage by the speaker cable, but the super expensive silver connectors got trashed. But those 63's were responsible for my obsession with high end audio - visited a room at the Heathrow show in the early days of Meridian when they were importers of Mark Levinson. Meridian CD player into dual mono ML pre, class A power into a pair of 63's on stands. Brothers in Arms was playing - and it sounded so completely different to what I was used to hearing. I left that room determined to aspire to that sort of sound quality. Little did I know where that go....

^But delicious.

RIP the amazing Victoria Wood, cancer age 62. CBE, dual BAFTA winner, comedian, musician, scriptwriter, actor, director. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36094827 Out of a clear blue sky. Bugger.

IIRC my original T2 clone build gets to about that.

In fairness to the 2 transistor circuit, the original 1965 circuit used germanium transistors, Mullard OC44. Price in 1965? 8s3d from the Mullard price list, or in today's money 41p. Correct that for price inflation and you get £7.61 or $11, times 2 or $22, times 2 for stereo - $44. - for which you can now buy 4 AD797 or 16 LM4562 or 68 NE5532. The 1967 Quad 33 used the same circuit, but moved across to silicon BC109 - which were equally expensive back then. The 12 transistors in the 33 would have been the determining factor in the unit's cost. You can make that 1965/7 performance much better by adding a transistor (to up the open loop gain, and give enough drive current for the RIAA), something they probably knew - but that would have added a lot to the semiconductor cost. Which is all horribly irrelevant, since it is not going to be used!

The mag PU design was in a Mullard apps note from the mid 1960's, published by Dinsdale in Wireless world Jan 1965. You're right to leave it alone - the performance was marginal at best. In fairness to Stax they are running it from 30V, which improves linearity as compared with the usual 12V, and the emitter bypass on the second transistor of 100uF kills of capacitor nonlinearity - so they thought about squeezing every ounce of performance out of mediocrity. It's noise performance is either dominated by the 2.2k resistor in series with the input, or the poor noise performance of the first 2SC458 transistor (16dB noise figure at 30Hz). The red line is the correct treatment!

I take my hat off - that is a thing of beauty.

^This

From a purely thermal management point of view - absolutely, 100%. But from the product safety perspective to CE or UL, the general rule is 25C above ambient (to max ambient of 40C and external part temperature of 65C) for touchable anodised casework - and an external heatsink counts as casework. So most manufacturers of power hungry audio gear now put the heatsinks inboard. Like Krell and Emotiva - but not interestingly Mark Levinson who still put their heatsinks on the outside and don't bother to certify for external temperatures.

I'd do it somewhat differently - release final Gerbers, BOM etc but only to those on the list who are (a) trustworthy (by some criterion like long term, regular contributors, no newbies etc (b) agree formally not to release to a third party. Something like that might be workable and prevent blatant commercial design duplication. Probably achieve nothing other than satisfaction, but why not send a letter to the Russians who are selling the BHSE. Also I know Brian Sowter - I am sure he would be devastated to know that he is supplying his attenuator transformers to someone ripping off the hard work of someone else.

If it isn't the Chinese plagiarizing products it is the Russians. In a business meeting a year ago or so, the visiting guy had been shown the inside of a unit in China where they had a team of 200 whose job was to decompile embedded code, FPGA code, ROM contents etc of Western products. We don't stand a chance in hell against that level of industrial scale ripping off.

I sure hope they are paying Kevin a royalty on sales. The Sowter (UK, Ipswich) attenuation transformers used are really good though, and very well thought of.

I've got a forward looking one that is not in the car at the moment - the micro-SD card died. New one on the way. But if I was doing this again, I would have the variety that looks both forward and backward so you can record rear end collisions, or car park damage.

Easy thing to check with a thermocouple for anyone with a carbon or kgsshv. The caps in the KG-T2 probably get pretty toasty, but that animal drags ~200W out of the mains, the transformers run hot, and there are two massive heatsinks along each side of the case that also get hot. So although I have not measured the temp of the reservoir caps I suspect that they get pretty hot through association with their surroundings. But noone is gong to leave the T2 on for much longer than you are listening; I let mine warm up for an hour (two max).

OK - I'll bite - what is KR, ( M ?

This was too good to be true. So famous that Wikipedia has an entry, with first sentence (wait for it) "Vera Coking was a retired homeowner in Atlantic City, New Jersey whose home was the focus of a prominent eminent domain case involving Donald Trump." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Coking

All down to Arrhenius for semiconductors. And electrolytic capacitor life about halving for every 10C temperature increase. Not counting infant mortality. And thermal shock every time it is turned on. So in this context, what do you mean by MTBF?

I was wondering that too - I don't immediately recognize the glass envelope.

Well bugger me - I'm British through and through back as far as I've looked (late 1600's) and I knew absolutely none of that. Other than that there is a City of London, I had no idea of the inner machinery.

Happy birthday!

The other thing to work out is which end of the primary winding is next to the secondaries. You really want the hot or live input to be next to the core, and the neutral or low input next to the secondary. It will of course be perfectly OK the other way round, but makes-borne noise coupling via the interwinding capacitance much easier. As far as I know there is no straightforward way of figuring that out.

Somewhere I have a photo of some poor sod's old man after he peed against an electric fence. Imagine you took a blow torch to a sausage, for several minutes.

Yes - Dalbani were the outfit that supplied me with junk 2sc3675's. When I put one or two spares on the curvetracer they broke down at 400V or thereabouts instead of 900V minimum. Avoid Dalbani like the plague.