- The shimmer in cymbals
- The breathiness in flute and its balance against a harp
- The rich tone of a fully fleshed violin
- The #1, Air-spaced Finewire interconnect cables work best between the CD player and the preamp (short cable, 150 mm long)
- My diy Silver Highway RCA cables (900 mm) worked best between the preamplifier and power amplifier. They worked better than my twisted WWW cable, but only slightly better.
- Multi-stand heavy OFC speaker leads (3 m long) with heavy brass banana plugs only just outperformed the #6, Air-spaced Finewire speaker cables (2 m long).
- DIY Silver RCA Interconnect Cables
- Cross-connected Belden 89259 DIY Speaker Cables
- DIY Low-Inductance Speaker Cables
- Belden 83803 DIY Mains Power Cable
The Tube Preamp Cookbook - Allen Wright
Manufacturer: Vacuum State Electronics - Allen Wright
Approximate price: US$40 (internet sales only)
Reviewer: Werner Ogiers
Reviewed: May 2001
As you may know already I feel that a pre-amplifier can be a system's most critical part. And this not only in a turntable system, but even in a digital-only context, where one would be let to believe that a CD player's 2V output simply obviates the need for a preamp.
As such I always have been fascinated with pre-amplifiers, and of lately I have been so with the few big and serious valve phono preamps that are around: the Arthur Loesch; our own Thorsten's interpretation of it, the Toccata; and Allen Wright/Vacuum State Electronics' FVP and RTP series. What all of these have in common is that they are essentially DIY components, not even always commercially available, but most certainly always of a non-compromising nature.
Recently the Vacuum State (VSE) single-ended FVP5 and balanced RTP preamps have been made available readily-built (and still as kits, of course), which prompted me to poll Allen Wright for a review of the FVP. No demo sample could be sent at short notice, though it still may happen that both Geoff and me get our hands on an early and reworked prototype FVP5 later this year, also sprach Allen. In the meanwhile, why not read and review a couple of VSE's audio cookbooks?
And so I got a Tube Preamp Cookbook (obviously) and a Cable Cookbook (slightly less obvious for those who know me).
Behold the word
Any fussy mainstream-high-end casualty (you know, the ones with wooden dots on their walls and luxury wooden cable boxes in their luxury wooden closets, a $1000 laser system setup tool and a score of burn-in CDs) would immediately condemn the Cookbook as way overpriced.Indeed, the TPCB is a low-key, low-budget publication (probably the only way to actually have it published at all), made with what seems to be a 1987 word processor and printer, most of the schematics hand-drawn, and enough inconsistency in the layout to be charming. Less charming is the horizontal A4 format: I tend to read my books in bed..
But as JRRT already so rightfully pointed out: all that is gold does not glitter.
An older version of skype. And damn the right-wing high-enders. Just as it is about the music, and not about the sound (well..), it is also about the words, and not about the paper they're printed upon.
More than a technical and dry volume on the basics of thermo-ionic valves and amplifiers made thereof, the TPCB reports on a decades-long journey made by a self-proclaimed loony in search of audio components with the so elusive quality of leaving the music intact. This means that it isn't an introductory course to tube amps. Rather, if you know how to calculate your gain stages, how to make things stable, and other indispensable basic recipes of the cuisine, then the book suggests ways of making things sound good too. At least, in Allen's opinion.
OK then, read it!
Wright starts out by defining the goal: the reproduction of music by a system harmless to it by virtue of a wide bandwidth and a wide 'Downward Dynamic Range' (DDR, is that why Thorsten got so involved in this valve stuff?). The goal is split into a number of elementary criteria the system has to fulfil, and then we are given a overview of the building blocks to our disposal to build such a system with: passive components ('trash those styroflexes!'), cable ('must be thin solid core'), valves (how to distinguish real Telefunkens from post-seventies east-german tubies with the same name), decent pot, connectors, audio magazines (!), transformers, .. Each of these reviewed with an underlying philosophy of purity, of low distortion, and of signal integrity, and put into the context of the extremely wide - in all respects - nature of the music signal, and of human perception: there are anecdotes of near-magical perceptional experiences, not all of them audio-related. These are amusing at the least, and often fascinating.
On it goes then, with a review of active and passive circuit configurations for preamplifiers: ordinary stuff such as common cathode stages, cascoding, RIAA-equalizers-done-wright, Miss Piggy, .. but also less often seen things ripped out of old HP and Tektronix scope frontends, and Wright's solution for driving real loads: the 'Super Cathode Follower'. These circuits are nothing without sound nutrition, so the next chapter makes choke-filtered power supplies mandatory, and continues with an advanced solid state high (and low) voltage shunt regulator, the 'SuperReg'. All of these concepts are not only listed with their schematics and their development histories, but also, and more importantly, with a lot of humour, and with their sonic properties as perceived by Allen Wright.
