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Eico HF-87 & HF-89

gogofast

gogofast

Addicted Member
i finally took my Eico HF-87 in for a complete service at a place of this 'Eico Man' in my area. As we took the bottom off and he started measuring here and there a few obvious (to him but not to me) problems were detected. anyways, he kept saying that over 50 years of his experience in tube amp servicing and building, that Eico HF-87 & 89 are the best sounding amps. i'm a big fisher lover, but he says that eico's are far better in circuit design and sound. i dont' know if i totally agree with that since the fisher's sound very nice to me - even though Eico's do sound amazing.

what do you guys think? how do Eico HF-87 & 89 compare to ..... fisher, scott, or other tube amps - even marantz and McIntosh?
 
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EICO I think is getting more respect now than it did when it was in production. They were designed by engineers and thoughts of making them even start to look WAF was never a consideration. The company marketed them as part of their lineup but never really tried to go after the audio market but the kit builder. Heath was better in that it targeted the audiomarket in separate advertising campaigns and of course Dyna was only audio. As for quality, core parts were really good but components were motr. The big plus is that they have room to work as they were kits. As for sound. As good as they were put together or as bad but on average they really did not design any dogs.
 
I have tube gear from Eico, McIntosh, Fisher, and Heathkit. I can easily live with them all or any of them. In fact, I enjoy all of them. It is kind of like asking me which one of my kids I like better. I can't answer that.

Eico's are very well built and sound fantastic. However, they can be ugly. I love my HF-87.
 
I had an HF-89 and I liked it a lot but not enough to keep it.

I am under the impression that the HF-87 may sound better.
 
Octal small-signal tubes like 6SN7 sound bigger and better than puny 12A#7s. I like my HF-89. I've grown to respect the voltage doubler circuit it uses, too.
 
I don't think that there is much quesiton as to the Eico's superiority. Both the 87 and 89 are excellent amps. Other lesser Eico's I'm not as convinced wer anything particularly special though.

But the basic Eico Design of the 87 and 89 had a strong resemblance to the Marantz 8b, and were good enough that Conrad Johnson, and Jolita mimicked many aspects of the design inside of a number of their amps.
 
soundmotor said:
You mean because they had vacuum tubes in them?

:D

The 8B had a pentode input & the EICO a triode one.
Click to expand...
Ok, perhaps I didn't state that very well. :o

The input stage represents the single biggest difference in overall topology between these two amplifiers. Both used a differential driver stage, and an ultra-linear EL34 output stage. The 89 is the more similar of the two due to using fixed bias, rather than self bias like the 87. And the 6FQ7 driver in the 8b is, I beleive, nearly the electrical equivalent of the 6SN7 driver, but just in a skinny package.

If, for example, you were to compare an HF-87/89 to a Dyna stereo 70, or a McIntosh MC275, or an Audio Research D-70, or an HK-Citation II, you will discover that there is almost no resemblance between these circuits (please cut me some slack about the UL output on the Stereo 70 for the sake of this discussion). But from a high-level standpoint (I'm not talking about the details here, and I am completely omitting the power supply) the resemblance between this circuit and that is used inside the Marantz 8b and the HF-89 is reasonably strong.
 
goldear said:
Didn't I just say that? :headscrat Anyway, I can see that we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point.
Click to expand...

:saywhat:

We both agree they are tube amps but really, the similarities are thin.

8B

Pentode input
Fixed bias
CLC PS filter

Eico HF-87

Triode input
Self bias
CRC PS filter
 
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