About Me

I have been interested in audio and video equipment for over 40 years. It all started at a local youth club, where I used to keep the Collaro record player and a large Grampian valve amplifier working. I remember it used KT66/KT88 valves, which would have been around 1963.

From there, I started looking at radios that had gone faulty for neighbours. One of the brands I remember was Kolster-Brandes. Some of these sets used a lamp in series with the mains to reduce the voltage for the valve heaters and other circuits. My grandparents had a McMichael radio with a DC-energised speaker magnet — things were certainly different in those days!

Turntables and Loudspeakers

One of the turntables I owned was a Thorens TD-150 with the original Thorens arm. It weighed a ton and replaced a succession of Garrard SP25/AP76s which, to be honest, I thought were pretty poor.

I eventually replaced the Thorens arm with an SME 3009, which cost around £17 at the time. Unbelievable when you consider what they fetch now!

The Garrard 401 cost about the same as an AP76 — around £27. The 401 was supplied as a chassis, whereas the AP76 came complete with a plinth and was ready to use.

In the early 1970s, I walked into a Hi-Fi shop and heard a pair of Bose 901 speakers producing an unbelievable sound. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was playing, and I decided that I wanted a pair — until I saw the price.

So, yes, you guessed it: I decided to build a pair myself!

The cabinets were no problem. Finding drivers of good enough quality was another matter. You may well ask why I used EMI 5-inch drivers — and I still ask myself the same question! They weren't particularly good quality, but they were about the only suitable drivers available from Wilmslow Audio, or "Swift" as they were known back then.

Another pair of speakers followed, this time a transmission-line design using KEF B200s and a T15 tweeter. The T15 wasn't particularly good at low to mid frequencies, so I quickly changed the cabinet design to something along the lines of the Cambridge Audio R40, using B139, B110 and T27 drivers.

These sounded quite good until the manager where I worked challenged me to an A/B comparison against his Radfords. I still think mine sounded better!

My first "kit" speakers were a pair of Peerless 20.2 speaker kits. They were around 20 litres and used two drivers. I remember the bass being exceptional: rubber surround, large magnet and a heavy paper cone. Unfortunately, the tweeter was only a 2-inch paper-cone type, although it still sounded quite good for its time.

The Hi-Fi Fairs

A yearly pilgrimage to Harrogate during the 1970s was essential for the Hi-Fi audio fair at the Majestic Hotel. The real challenge was to see how many plastic bags full of brochures and leaflets you could collect from the exhibitors!

If only I'd kept them all.

The American loudspeakers always seemed to have the best rooms. JBL and Cerwin-Vega produced enormous dynamics, even if the sound wasn't always what you would call accurate. I sometimes think Cerwin-Vega must have been responsible for Michael Caine's famous line about blowing the doors off!

I can't remember which exhibitor it was, but I was completely knocked out by the sound of some Japanese records on the 3 Blind Mice label. They may have been jazz recordings, but they sounded so good that I bought several at the show.

Building Amplifiers

Motorola produced a booklet during the 1970s containing a range of amplifier circuit designs to promote their then-new range of power transistors, including the MJ802 and MJ4502. I built a pair of 60-watt amplifiers from one of these designs.

They sounded so good that, to my ears, they blew the Technics SU-8080 away. I actually built the Technics-based amplifier later in the 1970s. My Cambridge P110 also uses these types of devices.

Now, where can I get some MZ2361 diodes and MD8003 dual transistors?

Hitachi made a big impact during the 1970s with the introduction of their power MOSFETs, claiming that they sounded like valves and could be driven in a similar way.

The early circuits, however, sounded pretty horrid. The driver stage was being modulated by ripple and variations on the supply rails, producing considerable intermodulation. Hitachi subsequently modified the circuit, and variations of that approach went on to be used in many MOSFET amplifiers.

Ambit in Brentwood were among the first to import these devices and publish circuit details. They were primarily involved with radio and RF design, and I still have a couple of their old catalogues somewhere.

Some Memorable Hi-Fi

Just recently, I remembered that I had once made a list of all the old Hi-Fi equipment I had owned. This is what I can still remember:

So what have we learned from this?

1. A lot of money can be spent on hifi.

2. You forget things as you get older.

3. It's not the equipment that's important its the enjoyment of the music.

4. Thanks to eBay all this is accessible at a realistic prices.

And perhaps that's really what this site is about: not simply the equipment itself, but the memories, the technology, the engineering — and above all, the enjoyment of music.

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