- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
- Messages
- 482
- Location
- near Liverpool, NY
- Tagline
- Lifelong student / listening = bliss
For what it's worth I've been accused by those who know me of enjoying a rather eclectic approach to life...but after lurking here for awhile I think I've finally found the only place on the entire internet where the patrons make me feel quite normal by comparison. 
Really, really glad to have finally discovered where The Right Stuff in Phase Linear land hang out!
For example, this evening I just read all 19+ pages of Grapplesaw's "Ultimate Dual 500" frame-off resto/debugging saga - that was a better read than The Hunt For Red October, a personal favorite! I poured over every photo, was amazed by the sheer quality/quantity of work, and especially appreciated the post-reassembly debugging marathon, where the willingness of others to share their deep knowledge was on display - Impressive.
*** "Please allow me to introduce myself" ***
In the mid '60s I was fortunate to grow up in a house where my parents had classical music on way more than the telly. I can't tell you a thing about the TV, but I have vivid memories of a Dual 1019 turntable, a Roberts reel-to-reel, "The Fisher" preamp/tuner (100-T) with micro-ray tuning eye candy, feeding into a Dynaco ST-70, which in turn drove a set of custom speakers with 12" Electrovoice drivers and outboard electrostatic tweeters. According to Northwinds' definition, my father was definitely an audiophile, for his stereo was worth way more than the cars he drove.
Given the above, I had a real appreciation for quality sound from an early age. Fast forward to the mid-'70s, and when I started attending concerts I was deeply offended by the barrage of distorted Low-Fi sound over the tortured PA systems of the day. The sound was so bad that you couldn't understand the vocals unless you wore earplugs. (or stuffed torn strips of paper napkins into the ear canals.) No real bass or treble, just the sound of the world's largest pocket AM radio turned up to 11. (!)
Why do I share all this? Because I can tell you the exact date that I first experienced The Powerful Difference. You see, on June 21st, 1977 I found myself at Kemper Arena, freshly graduated from high school, and waiting for the Pink Floyd concert to begin...and at the same time bracing to hear the worst-sounding version of the very favorite records in my collection.
Oh my word, from the 1st note I was slack-jawed - this was by far the loudest yet at the same time cleanest, clearest concert sound I had ever experienced. It was impossibly good - Finally, a concert where the live band sounded as good as/better than the record! I decided that at the first opportunity I had to go down & check out what they were using for the sound reinforcement. When the lights came up during the intermission, I hot-footed it down to the side of the stage, and I saw amazing stacks of amps with the cursive script "Phase Linear" on them. By the end of the concert, I absolutely *knew* that I may never own a Ferrari...but if I had to commute in a used Ford Fiesta in order to enjoy this level of sound, then I would be living the dream.
****
After taxes, it took a couple of years & well over a 1000 hours worth of saving the proceeds from landscaping/pool cleaning at Bircain apartments...but I ended up purchasing a Dual 500, 2000 pre-amp, 5100 tuner, and connected it all up to that old Dual 1019 & a set of used ESS AMT-1b speakers. I was following in my dad's footsteps, for my audio system was worth way more than the used 7-year old Capri sitting in the driveway.
Shortly afterwards, I moved from the midwest out to Boston in order to join DEC as an entry-level FS engineer. Weekdays I was struggling to learn how to make 9-track vacuum column tape drives read/write the customer's data while not 'blowing the columns', align the heads on disk drives the size of washing machines, and keep big drum line printers from hammer faulting and knocking themselves offline. And a weekend a month I'd get to work (ie: train on) the Avionics on the F-106 Interceptors down on Cape Cod. Was barely keeping my head above water, technically-speaking, but what great memories. Talk about drinking from the fire hydrant of knowledge...
****
Fast forward a decade to the spring of '91. While on a 2-week business trip out in Colorado Springs (to teach a troubleshooting class on a large, fast ECL VAX to some Remote Support folks) I asked the class if they had any 'destination' audio stores in the area. Sure enough, they did, so that Saturday they took me to it. Seems that this store featured an 'easy trade-up' program, where if you bought equipment from them, you could then later trade that same equipment in for the price you paid for it in order to apply that towards the price of admission of even better equipment. And they also offered consignment sales. So this store had a tremendous amount of really cool equipment in it, up to & including a cost-no-object system based around a set of Infinity IRS Betas. Which is how I ended up accidentally stumbling across a set of (then) 15-year-old Infinity QLS-1s in better than new condition. At the time I was carrying around a Donald Fagen Nightfly CD that I was very familiar with. I don't remember the CD player or amp, but when I heard the backing vocals on Ruby Baby the 1st time, I literally got goose bumps!
Long story short, that's how I ended up with my Dual 500 / QLS-1 combo at home, and simultaneously driving a $250 Fiesta to/from work through the valleys in VT...and I was the happiest ratty '78 Fiesta owner on the planet. (I was 1st-time homeowner broke at the time, complete with twins burning through diapers like there was no tomorrow, so I really couldn't afford those speakers...but I promised the boss that I would sell the 5-liter Mustang & cheerfully drive around in that cheap Fiesta...which I did. Actually, I had to put those speakers on Lay-a-Way while scraping up the coin, so it was a few months before they were shipped from CO to VT...but that's how we rolled back in the day.
****
...But just like so many others here & elsewhere, life got a little more than sideways & all the good stuff was put into storage while weathering corporate takeover(s), stress-induced divorce, being forced to leave the reserves (F-16 avionics for the Green Mountain Boys) ...and then, when it seemed that it couldn't get any worse, 9/11 happened...and 9 days later, I found myself back on the flightline, now full-time for the 1st time, determined to give our pilots the most unfair advantage humanly possible. And I (we) followed those planes around the world, wherever The Mission took us.
**** The Good Stuff ***
If anyone is still reading this, apologies for the long, strange trip to the here & now. The point is, Rip Van Mellor wakes up in the fall of 2021, and realizes that the nicest stuff he's ever personally owned on planet earth has been in cold storage for 20+ years. I came close to selling it several times...but I *knew* that if I let go of this I would never be able to replace it. So I always found a way to hang onto the sound system...promising myself that if I ever made it over the retirement finish line, I would dig it all out, restore it to better than new condition, and make up for all those years of listening to .mp3 streams full of lossy-compression birdies on crappy cans driven by whatever laptop was in front of me. Arrrgh.
Somewhat surprisingly, through all this I somehow managed to locate/purchase a *2nd* Dual 500. It's cosmetically alright, but I've never powered it up. Yet. You see, the Infinity QLS-1s need a lot of power in order to really make their magic, between the dual-voice coil (8 & 2 ohm) Watkins woofers + the line array of soft dome midranges & EMIT (planar) tweeters.
My plan? Rebuild both Dual 500s ala the Grapplesaw method, and then dedicating 1 amp to each speaker, vertically bi-amped. (1 channel for the woofer, the other for the remaining drivers.) To be perfectly honest, this just might be on the overkill side of the line, but in it's prime the system was already effortless, and here (and only here?) the typical reader comprehends the natural law that if some is good, then more is gooder.
NOTE: I'm not after sheer quantity -- circling back to the beginning, I still remember what I experienced 44+ years ago in Kemper arena, and it wasn't just the giant pig floating about above the crowd.
Go big, or go home. In my case, I am going out to storage in order to bring the big home. It promises to be pretty stoopid, in the best possible way.
Thanks in advance for helping an old vet look forward to more than occasionally visiting the Salt City VA hospital & wondering where all the time went.
Cheers --
dave
Really, really glad to have finally discovered where The Right Stuff in Phase Linear land hang out!For example, this evening I just read all 19+ pages of Grapplesaw's "Ultimate Dual 500" frame-off resto/debugging saga - that was a better read than The Hunt For Red October, a personal favorite! I poured over every photo, was amazed by the sheer quality/quantity of work, and especially appreciated the post-reassembly debugging marathon, where the willingness of others to share their deep knowledge was on display - Impressive.
*** "Please allow me to introduce myself" ***
In the mid '60s I was fortunate to grow up in a house where my parents had classical music on way more than the telly. I can't tell you a thing about the TV, but I have vivid memories of a Dual 1019 turntable, a Roberts reel-to-reel, "The Fisher" preamp/tuner (100-T) with micro-ray tuning eye candy, feeding into a Dynaco ST-70, which in turn drove a set of custom speakers with 12" Electrovoice drivers and outboard electrostatic tweeters. According to Northwinds' definition, my father was definitely an audiophile, for his stereo was worth way more than the cars he drove.
Given the above, I had a real appreciation for quality sound from an early age. Fast forward to the mid-'70s, and when I started attending concerts I was deeply offended by the barrage of distorted Low-Fi sound over the tortured PA systems of the day. The sound was so bad that you couldn't understand the vocals unless you wore earplugs. (or stuffed torn strips of paper napkins into the ear canals.) No real bass or treble, just the sound of the world's largest pocket AM radio turned up to 11. (!)
Why do I share all this? Because I can tell you the exact date that I first experienced The Powerful Difference. You see, on June 21st, 1977 I found myself at Kemper Arena, freshly graduated from high school, and waiting for the Pink Floyd concert to begin...and at the same time bracing to hear the worst-sounding version of the very favorite records in my collection.
Oh my word, from the 1st note I was slack-jawed - this was by far the loudest yet at the same time cleanest, clearest concert sound I had ever experienced. It was impossibly good - Finally, a concert where the live band sounded as good as/better than the record! I decided that at the first opportunity I had to go down & check out what they were using for the sound reinforcement. When the lights came up during the intermission, I hot-footed it down to the side of the stage, and I saw amazing stacks of amps with the cursive script "Phase Linear" on them. By the end of the concert, I absolutely *knew* that I may never own a Ferrari...but if I had to commute in a used Ford Fiesta in order to enjoy this level of sound, then I would be living the dream.
****
After taxes, it took a couple of years & well over a 1000 hours worth of saving the proceeds from landscaping/pool cleaning at Bircain apartments...but I ended up purchasing a Dual 500, 2000 pre-amp, 5100 tuner, and connected it all up to that old Dual 1019 & a set of used ESS AMT-1b speakers. I was following in my dad's footsteps, for my audio system was worth way more than the used 7-year old Capri sitting in the driveway.
Shortly afterwards, I moved from the midwest out to Boston in order to join DEC as an entry-level FS engineer. Weekdays I was struggling to learn how to make 9-track vacuum column tape drives read/write the customer's data while not 'blowing the columns', align the heads on disk drives the size of washing machines, and keep big drum line printers from hammer faulting and knocking themselves offline. And a weekend a month I'd get to work (ie: train on) the Avionics on the F-106 Interceptors down on Cape Cod. Was barely keeping my head above water, technically-speaking, but what great memories. Talk about drinking from the fire hydrant of knowledge...
****
Fast forward a decade to the spring of '91. While on a 2-week business trip out in Colorado Springs (to teach a troubleshooting class on a large, fast ECL VAX to some Remote Support folks) I asked the class if they had any 'destination' audio stores in the area. Sure enough, they did, so that Saturday they took me to it. Seems that this store featured an 'easy trade-up' program, where if you bought equipment from them, you could then later trade that same equipment in for the price you paid for it in order to apply that towards the price of admission of even better equipment. And they also offered consignment sales. So this store had a tremendous amount of really cool equipment in it, up to & including a cost-no-object system based around a set of Infinity IRS Betas. Which is how I ended up accidentally stumbling across a set of (then) 15-year-old Infinity QLS-1s in better than new condition. At the time I was carrying around a Donald Fagen Nightfly CD that I was very familiar with. I don't remember the CD player or amp, but when I heard the backing vocals on Ruby Baby the 1st time, I literally got goose bumps!
Long story short, that's how I ended up with my Dual 500 / QLS-1 combo at home, and simultaneously driving a $250 Fiesta to/from work through the valleys in VT...and I was the happiest ratty '78 Fiesta owner on the planet. (I was 1st-time homeowner broke at the time, complete with twins burning through diapers like there was no tomorrow, so I really couldn't afford those speakers...but I promised the boss that I would sell the 5-liter Mustang & cheerfully drive around in that cheap Fiesta...which I did. Actually, I had to put those speakers on Lay-a-Way while scraping up the coin, so it was a few months before they were shipped from CO to VT...but that's how we rolled back in the day.
****
...But just like so many others here & elsewhere, life got a little more than sideways & all the good stuff was put into storage while weathering corporate takeover(s), stress-induced divorce, being forced to leave the reserves (F-16 avionics for the Green Mountain Boys) ...and then, when it seemed that it couldn't get any worse, 9/11 happened...and 9 days later, I found myself back on the flightline, now full-time for the 1st time, determined to give our pilots the most unfair advantage humanly possible. And I (we) followed those planes around the world, wherever The Mission took us.
**** The Good Stuff ***
If anyone is still reading this, apologies for the long, strange trip to the here & now. The point is, Rip Van Mellor wakes up in the fall of 2021, and realizes that the nicest stuff he's ever personally owned on planet earth has been in cold storage for 20+ years. I came close to selling it several times...but I *knew* that if I let go of this I would never be able to replace it. So I always found a way to hang onto the sound system...promising myself that if I ever made it over the retirement finish line, I would dig it all out, restore it to better than new condition, and make up for all those years of listening to .mp3 streams full of lossy-compression birdies on crappy cans driven by whatever laptop was in front of me. Arrrgh.
Somewhat surprisingly, through all this I somehow managed to locate/purchase a *2nd* Dual 500. It's cosmetically alright, but I've never powered it up. Yet. You see, the Infinity QLS-1s need a lot of power in order to really make their magic, between the dual-voice coil (8 & 2 ohm) Watkins woofers + the line array of soft dome midranges & EMIT (planar) tweeters.
My plan? Rebuild both Dual 500s ala the Grapplesaw method, and then dedicating 1 amp to each speaker, vertically bi-amped. (1 channel for the woofer, the other for the remaining drivers.) To be perfectly honest, this just might be on the overkill side of the line, but in it's prime the system was already effortless, and here (and only here?) the typical reader comprehends the natural law that if some is good, then more is gooder.
NOTE: I'm not after sheer quantity -- circling back to the beginning, I still remember what I experienced 44+ years ago in Kemper arena, and it wasn't just the giant pig floating about above the crowd.
Go big, or go home. In my case, I am going out to storage in order to bring the big home. It promises to be pretty stoopid, in the best possible way.
Thanks in advance for helping an old vet look forward to more than occasionally visiting the Salt City VA hospital & wondering where all the time went.
Cheers --
dave
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