dcruze

I am a hard core Phase Linear guy who owns almost every model Phase Linear-Pioneer ever built at the A&P basement factory and the Lynnwood facility. I have known Bob Carver off and on since the mid-1970s when he came out with the 4000 preamp (I have a couple of those too). The 4000 was how I met him. I got one of the first of these preamps produced by the factory in a deal with him where I had to let the Boston Audio Society (BAS) [of which I was a member] test, write, and publish a review on the new revolutionary preamp. My very good BAS friend Alvin Foster and I stayed at Bob’s big Victorian house in Woodinville once when he was developing the Amazing Loudspeaker. Bob was a very interesting fellow and has had a lot of bad drama heaped on him during his life.

I got my start in high end audio in the early-1960s when I (a 19-year old teenager) walked into an electronics store in Huntsville, Alabama. I was in Huntsville because I had become a NASA intern on the Apollo moon program at the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal. I was looking for a portable record player-changer to play pop music 45’s and walked into their hi-end audio room. For an audio demonstration, the salesperson played Wagner’s Das Rheingold opera scene where Donner (Thor) smashed his hammer on the rocks and the gods start crossing over the resulting rainbow bridge shooting up into Valhalla. Wow !!! It just blew my mind hearing the power and beauty of that music over a pair of Bozak B410 Concert Grand speakers powered by a McIntosh MC240 tube amp. Those five minutes altered my life in ways you can’t imagine. I forgot all about pop music and became total immersed in the world of classic music, opera, and hi-end audio.

Then in 1969 or so, I walked into a bare warehouse somewhere in Boston’s industrial warehouse district, sat on the concrete floor with a few hundred other people and saw Pink Floyd for the first time. They and their equipment were sitting on the same concrete floor about 50 feet in front of me, no stage. This was their Ummagumma tour and their first time in America – they were virtually unknown here at the time. I was amazed by the sounds they created and immediately got hooked on something other than classical music. It led to me to adamantly following their musical development and, at one point, with me sitting in an 11th floor hotel room with them personally several years later. I am now an adamant Pink Floyd fan and think David Gilmour is one of the best guitarists around.

In those early years I built Dynakit tube audio gear from kits and the world’s first transistor preamp, the Harmon Kardon Citation A, from a kit (“flat from 1 to 1 million cycles” as the ads said) and the first transistor power amp, the Citation B (40W), also built from a kit. My first speakers were the Altec A7-500W which I still have. I even built some Heathkit TVs and the world’s first transistor tuner, a Heathkit, from a kit. I never had one failure building any of these kits because I was good at following instructions, staying disciplined and focused, and developed precise soldering and QA techniques for putting the kits together. That Heathkit tuner was how I met and came to know my best friend, Alvin Foster. We both lived in Boston at that time and somehow he found out I had the tuner which he wanted to test for the BAS. So I joined the BAS, whose member roster read like the Who-Is-Who of audio pioneers, and we rigorously tested that tuner. Alvin had a PL700 for his audio system which, to me, looked like just a boring lab DC power supply, but I was impressed with its sound. However, I bought a Marantz 250 amp to update my audio system because it was what I could afford at the time.

Then around 1972 another significant event occurred in my life that changed everything in my audio world. I met the Pink Floyd in Jacksonville, FL on their Dark Side of the Moon tour. At the concert I was walking around before the show eyeballing the audio equipment they had set up. Their friendly sound engineer at the big mixing console in the middle of the big basketball arena, Alan Parsons, saw my interest and he started talking to me. He let me follow him around as he was doing sound checks and for some reason, we went over to a bank of speakers on the right side on the arena and there they were – a cluster of 6 PL700Bs stacked together in all their glorious beauty which blew my mind. He invited me to come up to the Hyatt Regency hotel after the concert which I did. There I met all the band members (except Roger Waters) and the road crew. That turned out to be a very interesting and memorable night.

I carried that image of the stacked cluster of PL700Bs with me for several years until I moved into a fancy huge apartment in Boston’s Back Bay area in 1974 and I bought my first pair of 700Bs. I built a quad channel light show in that apartment based on the music of Pink Floyd that took a year or so to put together. Then I started giving free light shows to friends, coworkers, BAS members and audio industry executives. The show was done mainly to Dark Side of the Moon and even had a large 3 foot model of a Boeing 747 I had built from a kit that flew across the large room and crashed into a huge flash power explosion in the large black marble fireplace at the end of “On the Run”. This is the same event and at the same time as what I saw in the Jacksonville show except their airplane was much larger and flew from the back of the arena to crash on the left side of the stage.

Then around 1982 I decided to build a 7.1 sound system and bought another 4 PL700Bs so I could bi-amp the six AR-9 floor standing speakers that I acquired from AR (in the Boston area) when they stopped making the speaker and dumped inventory. My friend Alvin had a pair of AR-9s and I had spent a lot of time listening to them through his PL700 and knew they were the speaker I wanted. I knew AR’s Ed Villchur (he had attended one of my Boston light shows) and he let me buy 6 pairs of the AR-9 at the dealer closeout price. Over the following few months I sold 3 pair for the price I paid for all 6 pairs, so the net cost of my 3 pair was $0. I also knew Henry Kloss (who also attended one of my light shows) who built one of the first 3-gun projector TVs. He gave me the dealer price on his projector so I added that to my system. My inspiration for building my current 3-bay 19 inch rack mount equipment console (8 ft tall, 5 ft wide, 14 inch deep) came from another major audio figure, Dick Burwen (he too had attended one of my light shows). I was in his Cambridge, MA home where I saw he had built a sound room onto the back of his house where you were basically sitting inside three huge room size horn loaded speakers driven by 17 PL400 amps. You can see his setup at “burwenaudio.com” where he has 3 large mirrored balls inside the horns, an idea he saw in my light show.

Over the last 10 years I have collected samples of all the models ever built by Phase Linear (including 3 more 700Bs for a total of 9) and have run out of space in my huge equipment cabinet. I designed and installed special 30A wiring from the house fusebox and a timed power-relay power-on delivery circuit providing a sequenced turn-on to all the equipment the rack. I believe the turn-on surge current draw of a PL700Bs is around 50 amps so you don’t want them all trying to start up all at the same time – that would probably pop the circuit breaker. I also added a 4K JVC DLA-RS1 projector with a black velvet framed 152 inch Stewart Studiotek 130 screen. I also added the Oppo UDP-203 4K Ultra Blu-ray disc player to complete my home theater setup.

My background is I was born in 1943, graduated high school in 1961, graduated from University of Maryland’s Engineering College with a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1968, spent 36 years as an aerospace software engineer working all over the country, spent 2 years living as a ski bum in Aspen, CO (in 1970 and 1971), and retired from Lockheed’s F-35 program in Ft. Worth in 2006. I ran an unsuccessful PC company, Sunrise Systems, for a number of years building computers and installing networks. I lived in Santa Fe off and on from 1978 to 1995 and still consider that my home having owned property there. Now I am 77 years old and have been working on my hobbies of audio equipment, computer systems, and Porsche car modifications. I am busier now than when I worked in aerospace, these hobbies piled up undone until I retired. Now I have time to work on them. However, my health is poor which slows me down at times.
Birthday
Nov 2, 1943 (Age: 80)
Location
Colleyville, TX (5 miles west of DFW airport)
Tagline
hard core Phase Linear guy
Gender
Male
Occupation
retired aerospace engineer
Top