kevin gilmore

Earl let me be a bit more specific. The picture with the mpx3 and the 6y6g's is clearly for show. Some idiot may see this and try it themselves. Although it probably won't do any damage it won't work either.

Earl, I hate to pick on you or anything, but the 6y6g is a single pentode. It is not going to stick into any mpx3 unless you like the sound of one hand clapping. You are going to need a total of 4 of them to work in a mpx3. Same thing with el34's and 5881's, 6l6's or kt88's. Now the 6080/6as7 would work as those are a dual triode.

Just verified to be true. B52 power supply is exactly the same as 2 x original raptor power supplies with trendy toroid transformer and vertical standup ceramic thin film resistors replacing the 300 ohm series resistors. Lm317 for the filament regulator and Lm783 as the high voltage regulators. Ray is nothing except consistent. Take a piece of shit design and duplicate it many times. Working on schematic of B52 amplifier now, sure seems to be exactly the same as 2 x raptor's with the addition of one extra tube (per channel) to do the unbalanced to balanced conversion. Ray is going to croak when he finds out who sent me the pictures of the inside of the b52 amplifier chassis... $5k He has gotta be kidding.

directly from a person who had his unit upgraded. A particular crack on the plastic of a particular cap migrated to the new power supply. Also notice black caps in one picture, and blue caps in the next... Ray is saving $14... A poor immigrant needs to do such things

Not like i want to beat a dead horse or anything... plitron transformer pricing off line, equivalent hammond pricing $32.67 (100's) cincon cfm40s120 switching supply made in hong kong (EXACT PART!) $22.00 (100's) 470uf/400 volt CDE manufacturer (the blue ones in second picture) $4.99 (100's) 100uf/400volt nichicon $1.81 (100's) circuit board, input recepticle, switch, resistors and diodes, heatsink and regulator chip $20 (absolute max) (oops, lets not forget that oxygen free copper circuit board) So even at $200 ray is still making 100 percent profit even if its all brand new parts.

This just in... For all those people upgrading the power supply, ray actually de-solders all the electrolytics in the high voltage part from the old supply board and puts them on the new board to save money. What a high level of quality customer support. Brand new power supply with pre-burned in caps. Guess the 350 hours of burnin does not apply to this unit

Time for me to speak up again... That $8 switching supply is the same thing that is in the stealth. The ultimate in noisy miserable and unreliable piece of shit. Same thing in those $49 external hard disk drive enclosures. Lasts no more than 1.5 years before the primary rectifier caps explode. And heat will make it worse. Ray is the only person i know that can't even make a simple regulated 12 volt fillament supply thats quiet and efficient. Not sure why, there are at least 50 places he can steal one from. The high voltage supply is under rated for sure. And he is still using a 150 volt regulator part at 250 volts. The price is interesting however. A complete new power supply for $200. Add that to about $100 for the amp board, and you end up with something that really should have a retail price of $499. So those few people that said that the parts cost of the raptor was something north of $900 are completely out of whack. All those people who spent $1295 for a raptor now get to spend $200 for a power supply that runs cool, but is likely to explode 1.5 to 2 years later. What absolutely fabulous customer support. Sell a piece of shit that is way overpriced, then upgrade it with something even worse. How does ray get away with this. Go and buy a new production Zana Deux. Blows the crap out of the raptor for about the same amount of money.

The entire membran sacd collection is available from jpc.de for the unbelieveable price of about $5 per disc. All classical of course, the bach organ music (18 discs) is just wonderful. Also the olympia jazz sacd's (from the olympia jazz club in france) are available for about $10. Fixed price shipping of about $13 for all orders over $50.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82520 $249 plus shipping. You can run it at full power if you have 240 volts available for primary, or at 70% power if you run it as 120 in 120 out. Shipping for 100 lbs...

200 members with brains (except for billy of course) are better than 41215 members with no clue.

I'm well aware of the new krell evolution stuff as i have one on order. I too know many people at the factory. The KAV stuff was always supposed to be entry level mass market krell. Whether or not that has actually happened is hard to tell. Compared to other stuff in that category especially some of the japanese stuff it is hard to tell which is better and by how much. Some companies like parasound design in the usa and manufacture overseas to get the cost down. Krell's attempt at that failed pretty bad. Clearly what happened to levinson is an example of how the high end is disappearing and how quickly. Without harmann international to swoop in and buy levinson, they would be out of business. All their new stuff is less than half the price of the old stuff. The number of baby boomers willing to spend $100k on an audio system or $200k on a home theater system is pretty slim. For those people with huge wads of cash laying around, it is still hard to get them to spend on systems like that because the music business is dying. When its all about how many hours of noise you can cram into your ipod who is going to be interested in krell. I'll continue to buy krell. And I'll continue to buy Wilson. I'm in the minority i'm sure.

Billy as usual you don't have a clue. ABT sells krell locally only, and has only a single store front. They are the only master reference krell dealer within about 100 miles. They also sell the entire line of JMLab speakers including the Grand Utopia (about $85k). They also sell the qualia projector. Basically they sell lots and lots of very expensive and exclusive products. None of which are advertised on their website. They have specific salesman that are the only ones allowed to demo and sell this kind of merchandise. They are no threat to the rest of the krell dealer chain, or any other manufacturer. And yes they sell a BUNCH of krell. They keep at least 6 of the fpb850cx monoblocks in stock at all times for immediate delivery. ($37,500 a pair)

As far as amplifiers go the voltage gain is far lower than other amplifiers of this type. Its the amount of power output that is significantly higher than all other amplifiers designed for headphones. The amount of class A current that can be delivered was designed for dificult loads such as k1000's and qualia's. The signal to noise ratio is way up there too, so while you could use this thing with earbuds, it would be a real bad idea to do so. I'm sure with some very minimal resistor changes i could get it unity gain stable if i wanted to. At a voltage gain of 2 (6db) it is not going to add any detectable noise to any signal.

Once you ditch their amplifier and hook it to something real they sound VERY nice. Certainly at least he60 nice. Their amp though... Yikes is it ever bad. Sounds darker than dark. By the way these headphones with the koss amp play significantly louder than any other electrostic headphone ever made. Louder in fact than virtually all dynamics too. 2400 volts peak to peak stator to stator is almost twice everything else.

What you really want is a mint condition mc275. Way more balls than a mc225. And should you ever see a pair of MC300 monoblocks, or the even more rare mc350 monoblocks find a way to grab them. Output tubes for the mc350's are absolutely impossible to find!

most of the older ones are voltage doublers directly off the ac line. You can convert the doubler to a quadrupler and then it works fine. You need 2 extra diodes and 2 extra disc caps.

There are a number of ways of making a toroidal transformer, one way is you wind the primary all the way around the thing, then afterwards add the secondary also around the entire core. This definitely adds capacitance between the primary and the secondary. The otherway is to wind the primary on one part of the core (say about 40%) and then do the same thing for the secondary. Way less capacitance and basically equivalent to an EI core except the magnetics are more efficient. The torroids i use are split primary and secondary this way. Not sure about the others. As far as balanced vs fully isolated, i use both, but in any case they are wired as fully isolated. So when there is a center tap on the transformer i don't use it. Instead i use a .75 inch diameter solid copper ground rod 10 feet long and pounded into the earth. Then a significantly large copper strap runs inside the house where it is attached to the ground plugs of the power strips that distribute the power. The idea is to get rid of all conducted and radiated noise on the neutral leg. Starting with 220 which is already balanced definitely helps.

What is in the tripplite voltage regulator is an 8 tap transformer. Picks the appropriate tap via relays for +5, +10, +15, +20, -5, -10, -15, -20 % I have a picture of the insides of the lc1800 somewhere. Years ago, people raved over the lc1800. Don't remember if the lc1800 is isolated or not. Kind of limited for power... (at least for people like me)

1/1500 second F9.6 yeah baby

I do so love a job well done... I sure hope it can hold the weight of a few birds... (warning: huge pictures) http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/birdbath2.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/birdbath3.jpg

That one is good for 500 watts. So it really depends on what your home system consists of. If its a headphone only system, (amp, cd player) it should be more than plenty. Don't forget about shipping weight. The one in my picture is about 125 lbs. (maybe more, have not moved it in quite a while)

this is the 3kw unit http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?handler=displayproduct&lstdispproductid=275163 which means mouser sells many of these units. There are definitely cheaper places, and lots of places to buy things like this used.

Here is what i use for my audio system at work. http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/sola.jpg Works way better than any audiophile grade crap for home use as long as you don't exceed 1800 watts. Cheaper too.

Wilson MaXX series 2 (main system) B&W 801 matrix 3 (family room) Quad esl 63 (basement) B&O 4000's stacked (bedroom)

Nope, no smoke. I'm reallly allergic to just about all kinds of smoke. A single cuban puts me away for weeks. However there is that 1 gallon bottle of J&B Significant deteriation in the pictures, which is why i scanned them in. I do have the original negatives somewhere, probably not in much better shape. 50 to 100 year archival life. HA