Greetings from Salectric

Salectric

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I have been a member of Hifi Haven for quite a while but I have never posted details about my system, so here goes.

My listening is 99.9% to vinyl. Over the years I have gradually accumulated a decent size collection (3000 LPs give or take) of mostly jazz but also some classical as well as rock and folk. My musical tastes coincide with the years when the LP was king (1950s through 1970s), so the music I like is nearly all available on vinyl and some of it has never been reissued on CD.

My vinyl playback gear has been pretty constant for a number of years. The spinner is a Galibier Gavia with either a Triplanar VII or Analog Instruments Siggwan tonearm. To tell the truth, while I love the Siggwan, I have used the Triplanar exclusively for the last couple years. I am just too lazy to swap arms. Or change cartridges—-I have a Benz LP that I bought new ten years ago, it has been retipped twice by Soundsmith and will be going back again next year. I love the Benz!

The Benz is a low output moving coil so it gets amplified by some 1:10 Emia SUTs before heading to the phono preamp. The phono preamp is the D3a/5687 circuit described in a separate thread.

I have two options for my linestage. For active gain I have an Emotive Audio Epifania which uses a single 12B4 gain stage per channel. Most of the time, however, I use an Autoformer Volume Control wound by Dave Slagle of Intact Audio/EMIA. The AVC sounds almost as good and is dead quiet.

I have several power amp options. My everyday amps are 6L6 floating paraphase monos I built earlier this year. They sound very nice and their modest power (15-20 watts) is fine with high-sensitivity speakers. Other options have both higher and lower wattage. My Emotive Audio Vitas are push-pull KT120s with about 50 watts. And my 46 single ended amps are slightly more than 1 watt.

My primary speakers are Open Baffles using a Jensen P15LL, a YL (Yoshimura Labs) horn midrange, and ElectroVoice horn tweeter. The drivers and horns are all from the 1960s or 1970s.

Recently I started using another set of speakers that use the same woofer and tweeter but with a Western Electric 32A horn and 720a driver. The woofers are in a vented cabinet which sounds quite different from open baffle.

My interconnects and speaker cables are all Audio Note, both copper and silver. Power cords are Audio Note Isis except for the phono preamp which uses an Ocellia Reference silver power cord. All the power cords have Furutech FI-50 NCF connectors.

I will post some photos in a separate post.
 
Here are some pictures of the Galibier table showing the Siggwan arm and the Triplanar.

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Next up is a shot showing the turntable on a Sound Anchors stand and some of the electronics in a Box Furniture rack. To the left of the turntable stand is a separate stand for the Teddy Pardo power supply for the table. On the other side, on the Box Furniture rack, the top shelf has a Cambridge CXC transport (waiting for me to build a DAC), the shelf below has the two SUTs and the AVC, the shelf below that is the audio chassis for the phono preamp, and the bottom shelf is its power supply.

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And here’s a photo of my Left channel speakers. The one in front is the vented cabinet with WE 32A horn, and the big cabinet behind it is the Open Baffle. The plywood platform on the floor is the crossover for the vented cabinet speaker. I like having the crossover accessible because I make changes rather frequently.

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Very nice ! Did you post any pics of the 6L6 amps after your build ? Or can you now, I'm interested to see how they turned out.
 
Very nice ! Did you post any pics of the 6L6 amps after your build ? Or can you now, I'm interested to see how they turned out.

Here’s a photo of one of the 6L6 amps.
Don’t be misled by the EICO chassis. Yes, the chassis is from an HF-22 but the chassis and the output transformer are the only parts remaining from the EICO. The HF-22 chassis just happened to be a convenient platform for building some new amps.

I stripped each chassis of all parts, cleaned them thoroughly, and then widened the various openings to fit octal tube sockets and larger power supply caps. The power transformer is a 300 series Hammond, much cooler and quieter than the EICO iron. I also changed one side panel to fit an IEC inlet and modern binding posts, input jacks and power switch.

The amp circuitry is a 6SN7 input (only half is used) feeding a second 6SN7 gain stage configured with a floating paraphrase inverter. The outputs are NOS GE 6L6GC. Despite the modest appearance the amps are close to an all-out build. I used what I consider the very best sounding parts for each spot including CuTF V-Cap couplers, Riken carbon films in certain spots and Audio Note Silver Tantalums in some other spots.

The exterior photo was taken right after I built it so the photo shows EL34 outputs instead of 6L6. Other than that the exterior looks the same today. The interior shot also dates from the early days so it doesn’t show the AN Silvers for instance.

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To fill out the amp picture a little more, here are two more photos. The first is one of the Emotive Audio Vita amps. This is an early photo with KT88 outputs. The KT120s sound much better at least in this amp. I use JAN Phillips 5U4GB rectifiers in the Emotives. Each amp has a pair in parallel. The input and driver tubes are 5687. The Emotives have tiger maple bases.

The second photo shows another DIY effort. These amps started out as E-Linear KT-77s with 6AC7 pentode drivers. The circuit design came from Douglas Picard (“PakProtector” on some forums). It has since gone through several redesigns and is now awaiting a total gut job so I can rewire it as Western Electric 124 clones (but without WE iron). These amps have birdseye maple bases which I spent a long time making and I really like. I am hoping they can once again become my everyday amps.

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Some very lovely gear!

I tend to leave my crossovers out on a board for easy modification as well. I would love to see the rear of the open baffle speakers, if you have any pictures of them from back.
 
Some very lovely gear!

I tend to leave my crossovers out on a board for easy modification as well. I would love to see the rear of the open baffle speakers, if you have any pictures of them from back.

Thanks! Here’s a picture of the back side of one of the open baffle speakers. The crossover is a little different today but the essentials are still there.

You can see the wiring from the crossover to each driver. The woofer and YL midrange each have Audio Note Lexus (copper litz). The EV tweeter has Audio Note SPx (Silver litz). The speaker cable going from amp to speaker is also SPx.

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I bet the YL combo sounds fantastic. Did you wind your coils yourself?

The coils in the YL/OB speaker are Solen 14g Perfect-Lay air cores. They don’t have super low DCR but I think the OB woofer benefits from a little extra resistance.

The coils in the crossover for the vented cabinet are North Creek air core—10 AWG for the woofer and 12 AWG for the midrange horn—and they have lower DCR. I tried North Creeks in the OB too but preferred the Solens.
 
I thought the coils looked big, 10 and 12 awg is quite big indeed. I'm not familiar with North Creek, I'll have to check them out.
 
I thought the coils looked big, 10 and 12 awg is quite big indeed. I'm not familiar with North Creek, I'll have to check them out.

Unfortunately North Creek ceased business a couple years ago. It's too bad because it was a quality operation and the owner had some unique ideas abut the construction of coils that sound good as well as measure good. North Creeks occasionally come up on Ebay but of course the chances are not good that you can find what you're looking for when you need it.

The 10g coil is very big but if you can believe it they later made an 8g version that supposedly sounded even better.
 
That's a real nice assemblage of audiostuffs! I like your choice of parts and I dig the blend of old and new. Nice job!

I'd like to hear those Jensen woofers. Your posts have certainly made me curious...

Your transformers are mostly Electraprint and Magnequest?
 
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