I guess I don't know how to make a blog show up. Sound and Flavor, soundandflavor.blogspot.com, Pendleburt Lengerton and lpendleburt get no respect-or notice-from Google's home page.
I'm an analog builder, not a programmer, damn it! (Well, DeForest Oelley is dead, but you get the idea.)
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
ROTFLMAO-without compromise?
"Hand built without compromise to perform without equal". Such is the official motto of one transformer vendor, Magnequest, of Philadelphia, PA. It's pretty safe to say no other transformer maker would make that assertion, because no engineer or component buyer would be ordering from that vendor.
They'd be laughing too hard!
Years ago I was into another hobby activity which is, like transformer design, mostly the province of degreed engineers. I was talking to such an engineer and I was going over the drawbacks and advantages of some of the various designs available, and I said, "Boy, I'd like to design one right, with no compromises." He sprayed the Coke he was drinking all over himself laughing at my stupidity, for stupidity it was. When he got done cleaning himself up and regaining his composture, he said something that has stuck in my brain ever since. "ALL ENGINEERING IS COMPROMISE. All designs are a matter of trading off one thing for another. What separates a good design from a bad one is knowing what to trade off for what else, when, and how.."
Boy, was he right. I've learned that lesson in studying and DOING THINGS in several fields and anything requiring what can be called design really is a compromise. You NEVER have an infinite supply of anything, ever. Any real world implementation of something is always a series of tradeoffs.
Look up the properties of a perfect transformer sometime. It can not exist in the real world, because transformers are made out of actual materials that do nothing perfectly.
So how does Magnequest carry off a motto like that? Simple. It does not do business with engineers or commercial component buyers, only with technically unsophisticated and gullible people. Magnequest is not a transformer wind shop in the usual sense of the word: it is one individual, with no engineering degree nor any hands-on experience in the workaday transformer manufacturing business, who bought up some old blueprints (or salvaged them from a dumpster) and got a few of the many retired transformer winders in eastern Pennsylvania to show him how to run a winding machine.
As it happens, I actually have worked in a transformer plant, and I know enough to know that one guy with an old Universal winding machine does not constitute a facility capable of putting out the kind of transformers he is claiming to be able to offer. In a real transformer plant, you have a lot of women who wind transformers all day, under the direct supervision of both their wind line supervisors and an engineering QC staff who continually test the product. It takes a fair amount of time for an one of them to learn to wind any given transformer, when dealing with complex interleaved designs as most good audio transformers are, and each of them is in effect certified to wind one or a limited number of parts. You would no more hand a winder an unfamiliar wind sheet and have her wind one on her own than you would take a 737 captain who has never seen an Airbus, hand him the pilot's manual and checklists and send him out to an Airbus full of passengers on a revenue flight.
It's telling that with a "design library" with dozens of in demand designs for matching and line transformers highly sought by the recording industry, he refuses their business and winds mostly his own designs aimed at the single-ended-triode, no-feedback cultists. There, a part can be pretty flawed and no one would know the difference, since the amplifiers perform so marginally anyway, and the builders usually have no test equipment nor would they care to use it if they did. The proprietor isn't a 737 captain trying to fly an Airbus: he doesn't even have a pilot's license.
They'd be laughing too hard!
Years ago I was into another hobby activity which is, like transformer design, mostly the province of degreed engineers. I was talking to such an engineer and I was going over the drawbacks and advantages of some of the various designs available, and I said, "Boy, I'd like to design one right, with no compromises." He sprayed the Coke he was drinking all over himself laughing at my stupidity, for stupidity it was. When he got done cleaning himself up and regaining his composture, he said something that has stuck in my brain ever since. "ALL ENGINEERING IS COMPROMISE. All designs are a matter of trading off one thing for another. What separates a good design from a bad one is knowing what to trade off for what else, when, and how.."
Boy, was he right. I've learned that lesson in studying and DOING THINGS in several fields and anything requiring what can be called design really is a compromise. You NEVER have an infinite supply of anything, ever. Any real world implementation of something is always a series of tradeoffs.
Look up the properties of a perfect transformer sometime. It can not exist in the real world, because transformers are made out of actual materials that do nothing perfectly.
So how does Magnequest carry off a motto like that? Simple. It does not do business with engineers or commercial component buyers, only with technically unsophisticated and gullible people. Magnequest is not a transformer wind shop in the usual sense of the word: it is one individual, with no engineering degree nor any hands-on experience in the workaday transformer manufacturing business, who bought up some old blueprints (or salvaged them from a dumpster) and got a few of the many retired transformer winders in eastern Pennsylvania to show him how to run a winding machine.
As it happens, I actually have worked in a transformer plant, and I know enough to know that one guy with an old Universal winding machine does not constitute a facility capable of putting out the kind of transformers he is claiming to be able to offer. In a real transformer plant, you have a lot of women who wind transformers all day, under the direct supervision of both their wind line supervisors and an engineering QC staff who continually test the product. It takes a fair amount of time for an one of them to learn to wind any given transformer, when dealing with complex interleaved designs as most good audio transformers are, and each of them is in effect certified to wind one or a limited number of parts. You would no more hand a winder an unfamiliar wind sheet and have her wind one on her own than you would take a 737 captain who has never seen an Airbus, hand him the pilot's manual and checklists and send him out to an Airbus full of passengers on a revenue flight.
It's telling that with a "design library" with dozens of in demand designs for matching and line transformers highly sought by the recording industry, he refuses their business and winds mostly his own designs aimed at the single-ended-triode, no-feedback cultists. There, a part can be pretty flawed and no one would know the difference, since the amplifiers perform so marginally anyway, and the builders usually have no test equipment nor would they care to use it if they did. The proprietor isn't a 737 captain trying to fly an Airbus: he doesn't even have a pilot's license.
Friday, December 16, 2011
A trainwreck that's no Trainwreck
Amongst guitar players, two makes of guitar amplifier inspire fanatical devotion and the expenditure of insane sums (many tens of thousands of dollars) to own one, the Howard Dumble and the Trainwreck. Both were built in very limited numbers by one solitary basement genius, one Alexander Howard Dumble and one Kenny Fischer. Dumble is out of California and Fischer, who committed suicide apparently after determining that he had terminal cancer, from New Jersey.
Both these legendary pieces of equipment-I don't like calling a guitar amplifier an amplifier, because in most cases they are selected not to amplify but to modify and add to the guitar's sound-have, as one might expect, been intently copied by hobbyists and by a few small "boutique" companies-most one man garage operations themselves.
One might ask, why the Chinese don't simply copy them also, sell them cheaply and make a fortune. After all, that is what they are often accused of doing to so many other things. But as it turns out, China isn't as good at copying as many think.
To be sure, I have seen some well built equipment out of China. Often it is good value, reasonably well built, and intelligently engineered-whether they did it themselves or relied heavily on the existing art. But when it's crap, boy is it ever crap.
"Poorly Made in China" is the title of a book-an excellent book, I might add-by one Paul Midler. He has a great blog and I urge all and sundry to avail themselves of it.
http://www.paulmidler.com/
Both these legendary pieces of equipment-I don't like calling a guitar amplifier an amplifier, because in most cases they are selected not to amplify but to modify and add to the guitar's sound-have, as one might expect, been intently copied by hobbyists and by a few small "boutique" companies-most one man garage operations themselves.
One might ask, why the Chinese don't simply copy them also, sell them cheaply and make a fortune. After all, that is what they are often accused of doing to so many other things. But as it turns out, China isn't as good at copying as many think.
To be sure, I have seen some well built equipment out of China. Often it is good value, reasonably well built, and intelligently engineered-whether they did it themselves or relied heavily on the existing art. But when it's crap, boy is it ever crap.
"Poorly Made in China" is the title of a book-an excellent book, I might add-by one Paul Midler. He has a great blog and I urge all and sundry to avail themselves of it.
http://www.paulmidler.com/
Lawful Prey
"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey."
Attributed to the late John Ruskin, this quote is famous because the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain displayed it in each franchise for decades. I like the quote, but it turns out probably to not be authentic at all. Several ruskin scholars have been completely unable to find it:
http://victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/quotation.html
There is a corollary to that quote, which is that there is also nothing that can't be made cheaper and sold for _even more_, and that those who consider quality to be determined by price are even tastier prey.
I always liked Baskin-Robbins ice cream, which is not considered to be all that great by serious ice cream buffs. They consider it middlebrow, "mid-fi", mediocre. And it is not terribly cheap, although it is cheaper by the scoop than some more trendy places I have visited. I buy it, and it satisfies me.
I have never made ice cream. I have built some hi-fi equipment and I have a good idea what constitutes good construction practices. Much of what is sold in the high end audio retail emporiums today doesn't quite meet my standards, but is it actually negligent? The fact is that much high end audio equipment constitutes "Veblen goods", and if it lasts a few years that's all the buyers care about. They will come back in a certain amount of time and the salesman will tell them that the new products are so much better-even though they can't be, assuming they were honestly built in the first place, because analog electronics for audio hasn't made any fundamental changes in a quarter century-and they will listen to those salesmen. Such is the way of life.
On the late William Z. Johnson
I had never met him and I have serious criticisms of much of the Audio Research equipment I have had to work on over the years, but still, it has to be said that he was a seminal figure in the serious music reproduction business and his success, along with a few others, made the whole high end audio industry-for better and for worse-seem like a real business instead of a few cranks dedicated to building odd and seemingly obsolete stuff.
He was 85 years old, an age when one's passing is, under normal circumstances, more a cause for a fond recollection of a life well lived for those who have succeeded at something beneficial than one for grief or regret. We humans just live a short time in the sun, and then we are no more.
I own an old Atwater Kent radio that was made roughly around the time of Mr. Johnson's birth. It was lovingly restored some years back by a man who himself was of similar vintage and has been, as they say in ham radio, a Silent Key for at least a decade. He died of cancer, heart disease and emphysema and like so many of his generation had drank and smoked heavily. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died and he told me that he knew he'd shortened his lifespan by those behaviors, but he had no regrets: he had lived a full life, worked in the defense plants during WWII-he had a club foot and was designated 4-F-raised two families with two wives (not at the same time), and had seen America in its best days. He had worked for both Saul Marantz and later McIntosh as well as Collins Radio and at one time RCA, on audio projects as well as the Apollo space TV camera and some broadcast equipment. In his dotage he turned to ham radio as well as flying model airplanes and large format photography. As we are reminded by television productions like "Mad Men", "Pan Am" and the recent film on the alleged romp of Marilyn Monroe with a third assistant director currently screening in art houses, people were different back then.
As I write this, the radio is playing softly. It is reproducing the barking mad commentary of one of the indifferentiable neo-conservative talk show 'hosts' that are all we hear on AM besides sports. Its tubes, none of which are less than seventy years old, are glowing softly, the original batteries being filled in for by a homebrew A supply and B+ from a surplus switchmode brick in a filtered screened box. It works now as well as it ever did, and that is pretty well.
Life is pretty good for me now, and I hope Mr. Johnson in his last days experienced the contentment my late friend of so much longer years did.
He was 85 years old, an age when one's passing is, under normal circumstances, more a cause for a fond recollection of a life well lived for those who have succeeded at something beneficial than one for grief or regret. We humans just live a short time in the sun, and then we are no more.
I own an old Atwater Kent radio that was made roughly around the time of Mr. Johnson's birth. It was lovingly restored some years back by a man who himself was of similar vintage and has been, as they say in ham radio, a Silent Key for at least a decade. He died of cancer, heart disease and emphysema and like so many of his generation had drank and smoked heavily. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died and he told me that he knew he'd shortened his lifespan by those behaviors, but he had no regrets: he had lived a full life, worked in the defense plants during WWII-he had a club foot and was designated 4-F-raised two families with two wives (not at the same time), and had seen America in its best days. He had worked for both Saul Marantz and later McIntosh as well as Collins Radio and at one time RCA, on audio projects as well as the Apollo space TV camera and some broadcast equipment. In his dotage he turned to ham radio as well as flying model airplanes and large format photography. As we are reminded by television productions like "Mad Men", "Pan Am" and the recent film on the alleged romp of Marilyn Monroe with a third assistant director currently screening in art houses, people were different back then.
As I write this, the radio is playing softly. It is reproducing the barking mad commentary of one of the indifferentiable neo-conservative talk show 'hosts' that are all we hear on AM besides sports. Its tubes, none of which are less than seventy years old, are glowing softly, the original batteries being filled in for by a homebrew A supply and B+ from a surplus switchmode brick in a filtered screened box. It works now as well as it ever did, and that is pretty well.
Life is pretty good for me now, and I hope Mr. Johnson in his last days experienced the contentment my late friend of so much longer years did.
On reproduced sound and ice cream
It's too cold to go out for ice cream right now, so I thought I'd write about ice cream and stereo equipment instead.
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