Components that You like (or as Guy Clark would have said, stuff that works)

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Ingvar Ahlberg

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I don?t know about You friends but I tend to get stuck with some pieces of equipment, trying alternatives but always reverting to the right gear.

I have cleaned the main system out, only consists of a turntable, a preamp, power amp and two spekers (there is actually also a SUT between the Stax tonearm and the preamp to provide optimum load and gain for the Ortofon SL-15) also a bunch of cables that are of appropiate length for connecting the divices to each other.

Presently the turntable is rather new at that shelf as the DDX-1000 replaced the Sony TTS-3000 so that can get it?s first service after doing duty since 1969.

Preamps have been tested on the shelf dedicated for that use but the GAS Thaedra has been used there for the last few years and will remain for a while.

The power amp thou, Mark Levinson ML11, bought in 1982, remains in situ, I do have a lot of power amps and have tried a lot more but this remains, first reason is that this sounds, to me, better than any other power amp I ever heard, it also prooved itself on a few occasions.

Many years ago when i still produced the H.A.D QW-1 speakers I also used them for testing drivers, primarily LF drivers of suitable design.

QW15b_zps0ca68d69.jpg


But when the magic  Beyma Liberty 8 (modernised better version of JBL E120) moved in:

liberty8b.jpg


I also started testing new HF drivers as there was quite some evolution in that field just then, my test setups were imaculate, most would have regarded them as finished production design.

cd10c_zpscb62deb3.png


One afternoon I was playing loud, I mean real ridiculously load, guess around 126 dB, and that was extremely fun so I turned the volume up a bit more, still was good until on strong peaks there was this brutal clipping, listening to almost square waves in the peaks, sounded awful.

This was an 8 Ohm load and the ML11 is specified as 50W in that load, 100W in 4 etc.

consequently i carried the Accuphase P-300 to that shelf insted to check if those extra 6 dB it should produce in 8 Ohm would make any difference.

After connecting and switching power on it refused to do that, just flashing with the backlight in the VU meters, not pulling the output relay.

So I checked the cross over section for the HF driver and found out that I had reversed it, the inductor was put before the capacitor and thus presenting a nice load of around 0,25 Ohms to the amp, the Accuphase went on strike, the ML11 just played on until clipping.

So this old, 38 years, magic piece of equipment (to me) from Tom Collangelo keeps its place, also sounding so much better than anything else I ever tried.

Stuff that works for me.

Ingvar



 

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