Let's go back to the first post. The Bucknell prof is Eric. No problem missing names.
Thain in the tie-dyed shirt in third pic was our youngest member of SEPAAC and uses the oldest gear. He knows tubes. Glad to have him as a resource.
I've had the Lux tube amps since about 1983 and once I wore out the 8045G power tubes I parked them in their boxes waiting to convert them to KT88/6550 use. This took a number of years and the internet. With the web, an AAsylum member sent me a copy of the Luxman conversion document and I made the parts swaps but no joy. Balance and bias didn't work.
Talked to Thain about it and when he was over we looked at them, upside down, open and ON. 500V and he says do you have a jumper? I handed him the jumper, stepped way back and he proceeded to connect two spots in the amp. Voilą, they were up and running on some old tubes. Installed a wire and a new set of 6550s and I have something with these, Thanks Thain. And he did it just by looking. The conversion manual needed one more step added to the procedure. They are great amplifiers.
Thain has brought over refreshed tube gear to most of the events and he just wants to see how they sound on some of the other systems and of course show us how good the old gear really is once redone.
This gig was gonna be digital because Mark wanted to hear his new DAC, the Modi vs. an old CDP, a Rega as Glenn said, the Planet. Then Mark's laptop ran out of power and he didn't bring the power supply it was a short comparison.
I don't know why but folks bring over jazz records to these events. I enoyed the sound of my system so much yesterday, after everyone left I put on music for another 5 hours. But then I had changed a lot of things around in recent months, actually starting in about September, thinking summer, it's hot, let's put the tube amps away, but then realized it was nearly tube amp season so I started swapping the preamp and getting other parts right. Along with this was new stands for the DQ-10s and some more shelves. The room as Glenn said is full of gear.
The day before I had to repair a DQ-10 which lost low end making me think amp, just having put the Luxmans back in the system again from a month ago. So I looked at the amp then tried another DQ-10 on a different amp and it was the speaker. Got that fixed; a crimp connection in the crossover was intermittent, soldered a bridge in there, not going to happen again. Put the Luxman back together, moved gear around so Mark had a place to set up is laptop/DAC and was ready.
Someone says why don't you just get one system and be happy with it as he was questioning why we usually try different gear at our gigs. It is because we want to hear more than just a stack of one brand. There is lots of good/great audio gear and in the last few years we have listened to phono pres, cartridges, speakers, amps, preamps and such. It is just good to have a wider knowledgebase than that one stack of gear. I would hate to have just one stack and then 10 years later find out how much I was missing with some other item I could have tried. We all listen to different gear at the store, why not in the home setting with more listeners and some good discussion?
Anyway it was a good time had by all with some new faces added to the group to keep the group alive. We have had a few members move away and Seattle and China aren't Sunday afternoon driving distance. Looking forward to the next ones.
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