dsavitsk

Practice with one of these

Are you sure that it isn't one side of the amp that's noisy?

The Cinemags are very nice, but you'll lose a little resolution. The Jensens are essentially identical but they cost more. The Lundahl LL1592s are a little more expensive, but resolve enough better to make them worth the difference to me. The Lundahl LL1690s are more expensive still, but are absolutely transparent. They are what I used in the L-2 by default.

Input transformer is never overkill ...

glad to hear she is doing better. lots of good advice. for food, lots of cats love baby food. just make sure there is no onion or garlic in it - pureed chicken and turkey go over well here. also, strong smells sometimes work. our old vet used 9 Lives tuna for getting post operative cats to eat. truly the nastiest food on earth.

happy birthday!

very sorry for your loss.

Refenestration?

HBOGo via a Roku? Or a cable from a laptop to the TV, or Google's new Chromecast, or some other screen sharing technology. The first few seasons of The Wire are low def, so the delivery method does not really matter that much.

I stayed in a hotel in Italy where the toilet was in the shower. Nice scooter, Steve. I spent the day doing trigonometry.

The Z out on both the L-2 and DSHA-1 on the high setting is ~40 Ohms. On the low setting, it is lower, ~10 Ohms for each. Much of this comes from the copper resistance in the transformers. Adding series resistance on the low setting will make both sound worse. This is because the transformers only have so much inductance. Beyond a certain point, the load has too high of an impedance for this inductance. Adding the series resistance will create a mismatch and you'll lose bass, and just muck thing up.

It's a little weird. I could see converting to digital and doing the RIAA using DSP, but as is it makes no sense.

I tend to think it is the opposite. With complicated crossovers, a non-zero Zout will lead to the crossovers operating at a different point than they are designed for. It is likely part of the reason that high Z out is not that detrimental to headphones -- they are more like single driver speakers in this regard. Again, I'd think the opposite: if the drivers are not damped, then you would want a lot of electrical damping. As it is, since high damping factor seems to over damp things, that suggests that the drivers themselves are reasonably well damped. On the other hand, output impedance may well be a red herring here. If the drivers are not damped, then they would kick back lots of back emf, and it could be that they don't play well with amps with lots of feedback due to this. So perhaps they need some electrical damping (and 300/50 = 6 is actually a reasonably high damping factor) and that you want enough, but want to avoid doing it via feedback to keep from generating high order harmonics. Here's the L-2's THD which, if nothing else, is free from high order distortion. DSHA-1 is sold out, if that makes things easier Adapters are not included, but I end up supplying a lot of them. Part is Neutrik NA2MPMF.

You'll probably need some voltage gain. I was working on such a thing before everything went into storage, so look for it this fall/winter ...

Happy Birthday!

You are welcome to borrow my HD800s to try it if you like.

Hard to know exactly. Any tube is going to slowly degrade over time, and at the point where it is too compromised to work well in one circuit, it may be fine in another. Or it may still meet its specs, but not be sufficient in certain circuits. But it is generally not a hard line of good vs. bad. In the case of the L-2, the tubes are run only moderately hard, but they do need to maintain their Gm to work well. I'd venture that 1000 hours is a reasonable expectancy, but that will vary from tube to tube. I've personally never used a 6c45 for long enough to kill it, but then I have a lot of different amps so that is not necessarily surprising.

With another pair. It sounded like they were just getting old.

Yup, no problem. Shoot me an email and we'll discuss.

The circuit is horrible, the build is horrible, the layout is horrible, etc. But if there is proper ventilation, the upside down tubes does not bother me so much. Guitar amps do this and it has been working fine for 100 years.

It rains 1 in 5 days in the Bay area.

Happy Birthday!

There are a couple out on loan right now. I am of course hoping that the people who have them buy them, but in the event that that does not happen, we can do a little loaner program. Just PM or email (my user name at ecpaudio.com) me. Dibs to people who might want one permanently, but I am happy to send them around to anyone willing to cover shipping expenses.