I had guests SET12 and No Regrets over on Sunday for an afternoon of listening. SET12 brought his monster 30lb (1645?) Hammond OPTs for us to audition on my amps. After about 90 minutes of listening we shut down and cooled and then did a quick solder job. We removed the B+ lead from my OPTs and hooked up the monsters. After warm up we listened to some of the same songs for comparison. It turns out the three of us have very similar hearing. We all felt that there was a marginal improvement in space created by the big iron. We also all felt the tonal shift was very slightly lower than before. Bass was slightly better, the highs were there but a bit softer. After an hour or so we changed back to the original OPTs and listened some more. I'll let the others chime in if they want to make any further comments on what they heard. One of the other benefits of these get togethers is listening to different music. For me No Regrets won in that category with a Chris Botti CD titled "Italia" it was some of the smoothest trumpet music I had ever heard. I ordered my own copy this morning!
For those that read back a few posts, the Sophia 300B globe mesh plates have a few hundred hours on them now and are really nice tubes, I'm totally satisfied with them.
Hi Dave,
Thank you so much for having me to your beautiful home to listen to your system. You have done an excellent job building your 300B amps. You are quite a craftsman, with an excellent attention to detail. I was very impressed to say the least......folk's, as nice as these pictures do look, they just do not capture the true essence of how they look in person.
To my ears, your system was very musical and enjoyable indeed. It was an interesting experiment trying the two different output transformers. As can be seen in the photo, the sheer size of SET12's transformer certainly commands respect. I would agree that the three of us did hear things very similarly. I wish we could combine some of the strengths of Dave's transformers with those of SET12's.....that would really be something.
It is true when you hear people refer to "synergy". It is extremely important. All to often when people hear a great sounding system, they tend to think along the lines of ..... "Wow, those are great speakers!" or "Wow, what a great sounding amp!" Thinking that it is that sole component that is making all the difference. They tend to forget that it takes everything (source components, cables, tubes, capacitors, transformers, speakers, room interactions, etc) to work together as a system. What can truly sound beautiful in one system can inevitably sound not quite so in another. It's not just one part, but rather the sum of all the parts working together as a whole that truly makes a system sing. It can take a very long time to "voice" one's system to match what your expectations of sound are. That journey, if you will, is all part of the fun that we so much enjoy with this hobby.
I would say that Dave is well on his way with this journey. He has put together a system that is highly entertaining. We played a great variety of music that afternoon and it always impressed with great vocals, great speed and dynamics, wonderful ambiance, always sounding musical. We all had our heads bobbing and toes a tapping. It was great fun!
Thanks Dave for such an enjoyable afternoon!
All the best,
No Regrets
