18 Aug 2001

           Cactus Tube Dudes of Arizona

Cactus Bottleheads
Get together.
We had a few technical difficulties at the meeting at Rich's house. However we had fun, even though Murphy crashed the meeting.

You know it is an educational meeting if the scope and soldering irons both get pulled out!

I didn't bring my Horn Shoppe Horns as planned because I damaged my left hand earlier in the day and couldn't hold anything with it. Royce brought his Straight 8's in and we were first  listening to them with the McIntosh/ Foreplay set up. They sounded a bit hot. So we drove them with my Paramours. Now things were worse.

First we thought my Paramours were damaged during the trip to Rich's house so we brought out Rich's oscilloscope to find out the Paramours were putting out almost 20 V pp and were clipping. At that level the Straight 8s should have been parting the hair on our heads. We then found out a solder joint broke inside the Straight 8s disconnecting 4 of the woofers. Royce spent more than an hour soldering blind inside them to bring them back to life. Royce had one arm in one vent with a pair of pliers and the other arm in the other vent with a soldering iron. We just got them fixed and  hooked up when everyone ran out of time and had to leave. We left the Straight 8's at Richard's house and he is falling in love with them. Royce may not get them back until Richard has his Straight 8's built.

We were listening to the Paradigms for a while until the Straight 8's got fixed. We were too busy with other things to do serious listening.

Royce's wood work on the Straight 8's was magnificent. Sorry, I didn't get a picture of them. Royce says if you spike them to the floor and tilt them back a little bit they work much better.

Note: I think I left my 5K terminators in the McIntosh amp. I want them back a the next meeting.

We started to play with cables but never got serious.
The Decware Amp got a brief listen. The amp was not bad at all. However, there was not enough time to do a serious comparison.

We had some fun with the scope. If you held the scope probe up in the air you could see all sorts of noise. We could see fluorescent lights, distortion on the power grid etc.

Note: The September 2001 Audio Express has a great article by Chuck Hansen on line noise.

We also played quiz VoltSecond on attenuators for a while. It is apparent I'm going to have to paginate my Attenuator page so it prints out nicely. Richard had printed out all 30+ pages on a color printer and the tables and photos were split between pages. We came up with a couple sketches that would help explain the difference in attenuators better to newbies. Here they are:



Food: Diet Dr Pepper, Coke, Root Beer, Chili, Chips and music!

Amps:

Dan's Decware SE84CS Zen C Select
VoltSecond's Paramours
Richard's McIntosh MC225, 25 watts of push pull with 7591 tubes
Speakers:
Paradigm Studio 20 Speakers
Straight 8's
Preamps:
Royce's Foreplay (Purchased off E-Bay)
CD Player:
Royce's  AH! Njoe Tjoeb 99 CD player
Low level Interconnects:

        Goertz cables
        Cat 5 on Radio Shack RCAs

Speaker Interconnects:

Goertz cables
VoltSecond's 4-Braid Cat 5 interconnects
Phono Preamp:
Turntable:

Some of the Music Played:

Adiemus IV         The Eternal Knot
Beatles                #1
Elvis Presley        Such a Night (20 bit remaster)
Patricia Barber    Companion
Karrin Allyson     Ballads (Remembering John Coltrane)

Attendees:

Volt      S.
Richard R.
Royce   M.
Dan      A.
A few more that got away before I got their names.