Sunday, January 2, 2011

A visit to a very different tube museum.


A while back Jeffrey blogged about a museum that had a certain disconnect between the labels on tubes and what the actual tubes were.  Over the holidays I had an experience of listening to an amp that seems like it would fit nicely into that museum.

None of the tubes matched their sockets

The more valuable ones must have been stolen.





Strange tweaks were used.

The amp is a push pull 300B residing in a gutted RCA chassis using some scavenged Marantz 8b output transformers. I had the pleasure of listening and playing with it for the better part of four days while visiting an audio friend.  As most of you know I am a SE guy but I really enjoyed spending time with this amp and it actually inspired me at the start of a new year.  

I kept looking at the piece of wood between the outputs and had to ask for its purpose.  The answer given to me inspired true hope for the future of audio as we see it.  The sole purpose of that chunk of fir was to let the original builder flip the amp over to work on it without removing the tubes.  Today it serves its intended purpose perfectly by protecting the output tubes built some 60 years ago.


 engineering 101 from an engineer who just wanted to sing.

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