Let's keep in mind that the verb "career" very much resembles our actual careers:

Usually the direction is out of our control, too, though!

Tomciara brought up the subject of old equipment at [Link: remotecentral.com] and I thought I'd go off in that direction.

Somewhere I have a Ballantyne (was that a Y or an I?) VTVM with a scale that reads out the log of voltages. This log readout is a 6" meter movement and the dBs are displayed linearly!

The chassis of this thing is about 15" high, 8" wide, and 8" deep. It's exactly the same size and shape of the early HP products... I have an HP Audio Oscillator from that era, too, the one with the 6" DIAMETER ( ! ) dial!

And here's my first radio:

The oldest tool i own...and never use...is this panduit crimping tool. It was used to terminate cables for the Audio Ease system.

Not sure if this is the exact model but it looks just like it. The one i have is buried in the garage somewhere.

[Link: uk.rs-online.com]



The audio ease system...

I have a couple of old things laying around that I'll never get rid of.

The first is a 1923 Victrola Talking Machine that my father inherited from his father, and I inherited from him after he passed.  I still crank it up and play it now and again.

The second is a pair of Ohm Walsh speakers from the 70's that a customer gave to me years ago.  They are ugly, but they sound great.  One day when I finally get a cool little turntable, I'll use them more.

Ohm F’s Great Speakers.
Get a ballsy amp to rum them.

I have a wired remote for a VCR that I keep around just to amuse me at how far we have come!

Did not know 'career' was a verb. One origin meant 'wheeled vehicle'. 'Careen' uses the same definition- "move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction" but has a different origin.

Before I got into the kind of audio gear that consumers use, I worked at a music store with guitar amps and other items that began to show up early in the last century. I have one guitar amp that, as closely as I can tell, was made around 1937. It has a 6L6G output tube, which became available in the middle of that year and all of the other tubes were already in use. It has a field coil speaker and after installing a grounded power cord, different rectifier tube and new electrolytic caps, it still works great. It had a full set of KenRad tubes and there are no EIA codes on anything, so that means it was made before 1941, when those codes were implemented. It's a potent little amp- 12"w x 12"h x 8"d.

My Dad had a set of Ohm speakers. That was 20 years ago, and I thought they really sounded good. I wish they were still around!

That Audio Ease Box is giving me Crestron PVID flashbacks. Uhgh...

I thought 6L6s were universally used for higher power push-pull output circuits, as were their little brothers, the 6V6. When that kind of stuff was available, I didn't need that amount of power and didn't have the money to buy it anyway.

The best AM radio I ever had was a Philco, rescued from an outdoor storage yard the day after it rained. The wood cabinet was trash but the chassis was intact.

I was so old that none of the tubes were octals. It had an 80 rectifier and at least one 35 and 37. It was a TRF. How good was it? In Los Angeles, a 20 foot long-wire antenna pulled in WLS in Chicago, WWL in New Orleans, a station in Norman OK, KOMO in Seattle... Its power supply and cathode bypass capacitors were all contained in a cubic metal box at one end of the chassis. When one of them failed, it was impossible to suss out what the capacitance values had been.

A couple of the tubes had paper labels indicating that they were replacement tubes. They had been installed somewhere in the midwest in 1937, so were 25 years old at that time.


Yeah, well, if it wasn't obvious before, I'll tell ya: I'm a word guy. I have an etymology app on my phone's main page because I find words so interesting.

For instance, 30 years ago I learned that "carom" is related to "careen." My memory might be wrong, of course....

I've still got a Dwin HD700 with Transcanner complete! And a butt load of Phast/Panja gear.....shoot me now.

Don't get us started - we might lose Control

According to this link, the 37 was introduced in 1936-
[Link: r-type.org]

The guitar amp I referred to, which was made to be used for lap steel guitar, has an 80 rectifier, a 6Q7G for the input, a 6C8G (double diode-triode) used to combine the signal from the two input jacks and the 6L6G for the output- it's single-ended Class A, so it outputs about 6W. The 80, 6C8G and 6L6G came out in 1936, the 6Q7G came out in 1937.

The link I posted was on the Duncan Tube Site (you can just type TDSL into the search bar on your browser) has data for just about all tubes and when the links for the tube numbers show, you'll see National Tube Museum- those pages have a green background and at the end of the text, it shows when the tube was introduced. That site had the info I needed to get this amp to operate- the first tubes had been reversed before I bought it and it barely made a sound the first time I turned it on and once I checked the info for those tubes & put them in their correct positions, it came to life. The original filter caps are about 1-1/2" diameter, 5" tall, have a threaded base, use a lock nut to hold them in place/provide the ground reference and are stamped with 30uF. The 6C8G and 6Q7G have a second cathode at the top of the envelope and the 6C8G has an aluminum sleeve and cap to cover the cathode tip.

I have looked for over ten years and never found one like mine anywhere online. They all have different tubes and an octal jack and harness that allows removal of the chassis without the speaker- my speaker is hard-wired. I think the use of the field coil in the speaker as the power supply filter's choke is brilliant.

The guy who posted the ad for this amp on Craig's List said that it worked great, which I didn't believe and found to be impossible. It also had about 2" of the rubber insulation missing from the power cord, next to the plug, so my first thought was "Dude, if you plugged this in, the only thing that would have lit up is you".

[Link: plus.google.com]

[Link: plus.google.com]

[Link: plus.google.com]

6L6 was developed as an audio output tube and as a modulator for small AM transmitters. One cross-reference is KT-66 and a later version of the 6L6 with lightly less output is the 5881, which was used for applications where a more rugged tube was needed. I have read these were used in military aircraft amplifiers for intercoms and this model came out in 1954, around the time the B52 was introduced (slightly later). I have another guitar amp that was designed around the 5881- mine was built in Feb, 1958. I recently sold a Stromberg Carlson PA amp that was made in the early-'50s and I have a Magnatone amp from 1959- other than a solid state bass amp, mine are all pre-1960.

This was very common back then, before we had cost effective permanent magnets. Can you imagine what our installer life would be if we had to manage a field coil in a multi-room setting? But it would be a goldmine for the audiophiles who could fret about yet another detail.

[Think about this for a second -- in this configuration, the speaker's motor drive is modulated by the amplifier's B+ current draw -- louder begats louder, sort of a volume expander.]

An electronic turbocharger!

Part of the reason they used field coil magnets is that the materials for permanent magnets that wouldn't lose strength didn't come along until later, with Alnico.

The sag in B+ is called 'bloom' by some and it's an interesting phenomenon- hit a chord & you hear the sound and as it decays, it either maintains its volume level because the decay offsets the return of the B+ to normal or it can actually increase after some level of decay because the return to normal B+ takes longer than the decay rate.

As far as our lives, it means that all speakers would have a power cord but it wouldn't need to be powered by the amplifier, although this is where long cable runs from the preamp to the power amp was born so using active speakers would be great because equalization and level matching, as well as bi or tri-amping would be much more common. Personally, I wouldn't see that as a bad thing because passive crossovers are not great for fidelity.