We counted a total of 20 peeps at the meet yesterday. I had a really nice time! Great to see newer faces as well as a lot of the old crew. And the projects were most impressive. I had a pair of the new speakers running after finishing the second one at 6pm the night before (thanks, JR, for getting that cabinet to us in such a timely fashion!). Josh set the system up to run them in overnight so we didn't have to suffer through the first few hours of speaker break in on the new right channel box and wiring. By morning they had settled in pretty well.
We started with a Kaiju running the speakers. No problem running nice and loud in our 19' x 25' x 14' room. Bass is quite adequate. The horns are a bit directional. So they throw a great image when you sit on the centerline between them, and as you sit more off axis the image is a little more diffuse. Not a bad thing in the typical living room that tends to be a bit on the bright and reflective side. The tonal balance holds up nicely and they sound good from a variety of listening positions. It's hard to objectively judge a project you have been immersed in for several weeks. Your point of reference gets muddled. So I was delighted to hear a few folks say they planned to order a pair after hearing them.
Next up was Mike's recently completed Stereomour II, sporting all Psvane tubes. Mike did a gorgeous build and the amp was dead quiet with that lovely neutral, natural 2A3 sound. The 3.5 watts was plenty of power for the speakers. We did have to boost the signal coming out of his portable player a bit to get enough drive for the amp. I added a Quickie in the chain, effectively giving him a tube output from his source. Sounded pretty darned good!
Next I switched in the new S.E.X. amp, which uses the 6FJ7 tube. Sounded very nice though perhaps not my first choice for running the new speakers in that big room, as the amp would clip a bit in the bass region when trying to crank up the tunes to max output. At more modest levels it sounded very good. And dead quiet. This amp is much more quiet than the previous iteration of S.E.X. and I hope it will be considered a nice step forward in the evolution of our very first product.
Next up was Aaron's big, beautiful insanely wild headphone amp. He worked this one out with PJ and PB to create an amp that could run both dynamic and electrostatic headphones. It uses a choice of 6SN7, 6J5 or 2C22 driver tubes and 71A output tubes, which run into MQ TL-404 autoformers for the dynamic cans. Aaron brought his STAX cans and Jim had some HD800s handy, so we got to hear both. They were each different and both delightful, particularly listening to some amazing recordings of Cuban music that Jim has made recently that will be coming out on HDtracks soon.
Following that was a really pretty pair pair of hunky monoblocks that PB had cooked up, using a 6550 cathode follower to drive a - hmm, was that an 811A? - in deep class A2 for about 15 watts. Very punchy drive, great amps for rocking out.
The final amp of the day was a monster. PJ and Ed had collaborated on taking a stab at a high power amp that might become a future Bottlehead product. There have been attempts at this in the past, but none were giving us what we hoped to hear.
Well that was not the case yesterday. The monster monoblock, which uses 2X4s for the wood base and weighs 70 lbs., runs four 6550s in parallel single ended configuration, driven by an el84. Output is about 50 watts. Feedback is minimal and just around the output stage, similar to the Seductor amp. Ed's build was lovely as usual and the amp was affectionately labeled Big Betty. Even with just one amp running both speakers in mono the sound made me sit up and take notice. The bass is amazing. Ed says the amp measured super linear right up to 50 watts, and with the 93dB sensitive speakers there was not even a remote sign of stress in the bass when the amp was cranked. The top end was nice from the get-go, though right at first I thought the upper midrange was a little veiled. That really surprised me as I was expecting a kind of unrefined sound, but it was more a sin of omission. Which then became a moot point as the amp warmed up and the midrange opened up quite nicely. It's good enough that when I was asked whether it was worth building the second channel I said yes, please!
I truly appreciate the effort everyone made to make the meet and to bring such well developed projects. Josh took a few pics and maybe he will post some here. You guys set a very high bar for future meets! We had a very brief discussion about future meets as some of the guys were headed out. The consensus was monthly might be a bit too often for everyone to try to have something new and different to hear. We're tossing around the notion of meeting every other month or perhaps quarterly. I'd be interested to hear what you guys think about that.
And that is not to say that there won't be other things going on here at BHQ on the odd months. When I got home last night I had a message from Jacqui Naylor asking if we might be able to host a show at BHQ in early December. Heck yeah! I'm hoping to be able to flesh out a 2017 show schedule with some really great up and coming local artists too.
Thanks hugely to the BH crew for helping get this meet together. The entire crew worked very hard to get things ready for the meet, with Eileen and Josh making sure we had all the stuff we needed and then cleaning and organizing all day and Kelvin hammering away at every crazy last minute solder job I was requesting. You guys are the best.
Thanks also to Shannon Parks of Parks Audio for bringing by a gigantic bag full of primo Nichicon 'lytic caps for everyone to help themselves to. Around that gang it was like throwing a bag of candy on the table! And thanks to those who brought edible goodies. The snacks were well received. You guys did a good job of consuming them and keeping me from ODing on the leftovers today.
