kevin gilmore

The boxes are 16.5 deep and 15.5 wide ! Bottom feet are at about 10 inches x 13.5 inches. When you see the power supply stuffed, you will know why it has to be this big.

Front feet to back feet about 13.5 inches Chassis front to chassis back 16.75

http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis20.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis21.jpg as a tip of the hat to my friend mikhail, singlepower chassis screws temporarily holding in the neutrik connectors 6-32 screw goes into the keystone 7700 on the board.

I've had an ekornes for about 20 years. Love it a lot. Every 6 months i have to get out the tool kit and tighten up the main hexhead bolts that hold the thing together. Every time you rock it back and forth, the bolts come loose a bit. If they come out all the way, you need another person to hold it place otherwise you can't force it back together. Leather finally wearing a bit after 20 years.

I think that justin's board stuffing rates have just gone up. I wonder if he would accept $100 an hour for this kind of pain

So with the proper tools that i made myself, stuffing the heatsinked transistors was a snap. Picture with the tools on the left. Since the tools are dirt cheap (they take me less than a minute to make) i will probably supply them in the kit. Better than spending over $300 on the real tool. tool widths... .1618, .3271,.4780,.5780 I'm going to stick with the following numbers superman (as in justin) assembly time 6 hours me (as in me) assembly time 9 hours normal human (everyone else) 12 hours http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2ampboard2.jpg

But there are 2 power supply connectors, and the whole thing is wired completely as dual mono. So i built the thing completely so i did not have to go thru the pile of resistors twice. I can and likely will power up only half of it the first time. Besides which the power supply will be tested completely first.

after 6 hours of board stuffing http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2ampboard1.jpg only errors so far, on one side of the amp 2 of the resistors are labeled as 100k when they are in fact 10k. Obviously everything fits perfect. Custom stainless steel hex head screws the exact length should be in tomorrow, then i can mount the stuff on the heatsinks. trimpots go on the top of the board for easy adjustment. missing resistors are backorder A reasonable person should be able to stuff the board in 12 hours... Not so bad

Its the quality i care about, i really don't care where they are made. A long time ago i had some boards made by a board house definitely in the usa, because i was at their factory in lake in the hills illinois. The stuff was crap.

updated parts spreadsheet including resistors for the power supply and the .1uf/50 volt caps i was missing as i stuffed the board... (what a mess... the spreadsheet that is, the board is gorgeous) having imagineering do the circuit boards was definitely a good idea even though they cost a bit more. Solders just great. http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2parts3.xls stax X1t ------------- NOPE! but i am getting closer to wireless hdmi based SACD...

shipped power supply board this morning. parts stuffing starts possibly today. No later than saturday morning. fact is i'm sure i'm missing a few parts. I can stuff parts and solder the board in 4 hours! (I'm lying my ass off. )

http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis16.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis17.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis18.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis19.jpg The holes for the 2sc3381's came out very tight, but other than that, it looks real good

As goofy as it sounds, this will actually work. Make absolutely sure you don't get the ac input wires to spritzers board backwards as its not isolated and you want to make sure neutral and ground are the same. Which might cause a ground loop.

Thats the battery charger for the nikon. Not going in the power supply box. No room!

Well then, a couple of more pictures http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis14.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/t2chassis15.jpg all thats left to do is the backpanel for the power supply, and to buy some shaft extenders (and pick a normal knob) (and pick which stax jack) glad i waited on the power supply board, as one of the mounting holes would have run into the front panel flange. amp boards should be here next week for those people just itching to start stuffing the boards. Angle brackets also available. Perfect for turkey day... I'm pretty much back on schedule.

i'm thinking that hirsch means 7044's no such thing as a 6044. Unless that's a mikhail private label

My guess is that the barn on his property is likely filled to the very top with tubes. So likely its not costing him much. Last time i checked, that property had still not been sold. Now mikhail if he was smart he would insure whats in the barn for some obscene amount, and then arrange for it to get hit by lightning and burn to the ground.

Here is what i mean by stupid, on ebay today under mikhail's supra_buyer account 4cx350 mikhail said he had a couple hundred of these. Absolutely wonderful tubes if you are building a ham radio transmitter. Completely useless for audio. In fact these days, just about completely useless for any reason because cheap solid state has finally replaced items like this. Now maybe a direct drive electrostatic amp for speakers... With a plate voltage of 5 killovolts. Can you just imagine a mikhail built amplifier with a power supply like this. A neon sign transformer comes to mind m599a magnetron I'm not sure how many he has of these, but without the magnet assembly the thing is also completely useless. And in fact as a X band magnetron it would have only one use, and that would be lighting up a commercial satellite. Which would get you in hot water with the FCC real fast. Lots of mid size and large western electric tubes. Most are DHT's. Wonderful tubes with absolutely no use whatsoever. The sockets that would go with them are unobtainable, and probably cost more than the tubes are worth. Now 5687's, mikhail probably has 10 thousand of them. Too bad the only manufacturer making amplifiers that use 5687's is ray samuels. The good stuff like gold lion kt88's and mullard el34 and el84's are long gone. Having 2 full size semi's filled with useless tubes seems more of a hastle than a profit center. The competitive edge that mikhail had disappeared as soon as he started using those horrible (but hey they were cheap) sockets. Does anyone think that mikhail selling a few hundred dollars of tubes each month is going to allow him to pay back $50k or more? Does anyone think that mikhail will ever fix or even send back all the customer units he is sitting on? Mikhail was in fact sitting on a GOLD mine. He could have put decent transformers in the units. He could have put in decent tube sockets. He could have charged for all of it. He could have, and should have by now been rolling in money. Mikhail for all his faults had some really good ideas. The implementation of those ideas was a disaster. And as far as number of tubes, Kevin Deal is probably sitting on 10 semi's worth of tubes. (upscale audio)

I'm going to add a bit more to this. 6385,2c51,396a... All of these tubes are 9 pin with an internal shield. Problem shows up when you take a 9 pin tube and try to stick it into an 8 pin hole. Just measured one of mikhail's adapters, and the shield goes nowhere. Which means that it picks up noise. Lots of noise. One solution would be to wire that 9th wire to one of the filament wires. But now you have to hard wire the filament circuit to ground, and that is not good either. Bottom line, more mikhail stupidity. It would be better to take the shield wire out directly and add a banana jack to connect it to which is wired to chassis ground.

Here is the real gotcha with untested input tubes on extremes. The input tube is directly coupled to the output tube. Plate to grid. So if the emission on the input tube is 30% low, then the plate voltage is 30% high, and the resulting cathode voltage on the output tube is 30% high. And then guess what, the cathode load resistors which are just barely rated for power at normal voltages suddenly see much more power. Which is why on some of the amps pictured over there, the cathode resistors are also burning their way thru the circuit board. Owning a SP without also owning a tube tester is a bad idea. I think it is well known by now that more than half of mikhails monster tube collection is bad tubes, and the other half is stupid stuff he will never sell.

But they sound fantastic.

Find me some good high voltage (>=900V) transistors, or fets. Especially p channel or pnp. I have lots of new designs waiting on solid state devices. Just don't want to go the stacked devices route.

So its going to end up cheaper than i thought. So sue me. Mostly its because the power supply board is not going to be full size and that is going to make things cheaper. So the amplifier board really is what i said above unless there is some other charge i don't know about.

About time the artists got paid for their work.

patched kernel available if you know where to look. besides which you can do all the updates, then install the 10.6.1 kernel and get all of the bug fixes, some of which still don't work right. But much more fun and coming soon is a virtual machine for windows 7 that runs osx. Apple needs to pull head firmly out of their ass and start selling the operating system seperately. Otherwise the pirates will continue to make magic discs and give them away.