Wright Sound products support - or lack thereof

Doc B. · 682

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Offline Doc B.

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on: December 13, 2021, 12:32:20 PM
We get occasional inquiries about Wright Sound products, which were built by George Wright. George was a fellow Seattle area audio manufacturer, who built inexpensive, good sounding tube audio gear in his home workshop. Sadly George passed away in 2009. After he passed I was asked by his ex wife to see if I could find any documentation for his products in the, shall we say, extensive collection of surplus electronics gear and parts in his house and outbuildings. Anyone who knew George will not be surprised to hear that there were no documents to be found. George pretty much built his products from a schematic he drew up on scratch paper or out of his head, and often used the different parts in different builds of the same model amp or preamp.

You may see where this is going. There are now people who excitedly buy a piece of George's gear, discover it doesn't work, and then start asking around A) where to get it fixed or B) where to find schematics. Option A used to be Roger Hug, a local tech of some reputation in the vintage gear circles who would take on repairs of Wright Sound gear. Unfortunately Roger passed away in 2018. Option B I covered above - you will simply have to reverse engineer the circuit yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

George's stuff sounded good, no doubt. We shared ideas about tube audio design in the 90s, and George was influential in the design of our original Foreplay preamp. That said, we don't really have any better resources for George's gear than anyone else. There is a schematic for an early phono preamp design of George's in an issue of VALVE. Perhaps a forum member will be kind enough to look it up and post a link. PB may or may not be interested in helping with a repair. You will need to ask him directly about that. If the gear needs caps or something else that is relatively simple it might be worth asking him. If it is missing components, has a blown transformer, is a one off that wasn't a commercial product, etc., one might be better off moving on to a more easily repaired project.

Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.


Offline seattlemagpies

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Reply #1 on: December 13, 2021, 06:28:43 PM
LOL - that probably would have been me calling about the WPL20 I picked up sans power supply.

I've been striking out on any sort of spec for this, so maybe asking a broader question is more appropriate...Is there any practical way to reverse engineer the power supply specs from the circuit of the preamp itself?  I presume it's feeding DC at some voltage.  Can that voltage be figured out and then substitute an appropriate power supply with sufficient amperage?

BTW - not a techie, will be farming this job out to someone.



Offline Paul Birkeland

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Reply #2 on: December 13, 2021, 06:46:48 PM
Yes, of course you can do that, but you really need to trace out most of the circuit to get a good idea what all that would be.  If the preamp in question is a simple device with a couple of triodes per channel, that's not the end of the world, but doing that to a WPL-20 would take longer than building a new preamp because there's a lot going on in there!

If you brought me your WPL-20 sans power supply and a complete WPL-20 with power supply, I could clone the power supply for the one you have.  That's not a particularly affordable solution though, and the new power supply isn't going to be cosmetically convincing.

Paul "PB" Birkeland

Bottlehead Grunt & The Repro Man