Northern New England Tube Group June 2003 Gathering

Hosted by Gary Kaufman (that's me) in Amherst NH on June 14th, 2003

In attendance were Robert Chambers, Walter Clay, Carroll Conklin, John Eastman, Mark Hardy, Brian Hazel, Joerg Heyer, Jonathan Kranz, Davis Martin, Stephen Martin, James Melhuish, Steve Root, Ed Sawyer, Mark Schraut, and Tim Reese.

Some Group Photos...

Carroll Conklin brought a very impressive setup including a parallel single ended 6C33 stereo amp, Dual Vifa 8" with Accuton tweeters 2 way speakers.

Robert Chambers brought a Chokeless Monkey 2A3 Stereo Amplifier and Lowther PM6A A.T. Specials in Front Firing Fidelios

Schematics for the Chokeless monkey are posted here: Chokeless 2A3 Monkey and Chokeless 2A3 Monkey Power Supply


James Melhuish brought his Ultrapath 46 in a vintage chassis. The amp is direct-coupled with a 6AN4 driver tube. The 500V power supply and filament supply are the boxes on the left.

James runs a great website focusing on single ended drivers at Single Driver Website There are more photos of his audio creations posted there as well. The schematic is posted here: 46 Amp

Carroll Conklin's friend Tim Ryan of Sydney, BC, Canada adds: "I'm told this single vineyard end amp has an earthy, round, rich, full-bodied sound, crisp, good trailing edge, but is a bit more delicate than other more powerful blends favouring Cabernet over Merlot, such as from Chateau de Pushpull."

I showed off my new 211 amp with 866jr' rectifiers as well as how to curve trace 211's on a Systron Donner 6200B

Hey, my tube's bigger than your tube! (The larger than life triode actually belonged to Ed Sawyer).

Brian Hazel brought a very nice sounding 2A3 amp.

John Eastman brought his Mr. Igot Nomoney 6SN7 SRPP linestage and a pair of Infinite Baffle Utah speakers which left with the Martins.

Jonathan Kranz (pictured here with my wife who made a cameo appearance) brought a large box of tubes - causing the usual feeding frenzy.

Walter Clay arrived a few minutes late, as he finished soldering his 3A/167 linestage earlier the same morning. It featured Walter's typical superb parts selection and construction.

His description of the circuit follows:
"This one started out as a way to get more punch and to use the UTC LS-50 permalloy black crinkle outputs. Parafeed was therefore a given and the Magnequest plate chokes are under the removable steel top cover. I expect to build an unregulated three section choke input power supply so there are final filtering chokes and caps on the signal chassis. Parafeed caps are currently 5uf C-D paper in oil. Attenuators are Daven 100K and there is a Corning glass/tin oxide grid stopper (supposedly non-inductive in values above 280 ohms) on the grid pins. Cathode bias with two nicad C cells each side.... Fifty cent Grayhill selector switches..four dollars worth of ultra-mil-spec power umbilical connector....plumbing supply water line end cap star ground points....recycled black crinkle chassis...one dollar Lambda supply.... a hank of re-used Western Electric wire...AC filaments running right off the supply and the thing is frighteningly quiet...And, yes, the output transformers do sound great."

Also making a cameo appearance was my son, future solder slinger.
Mark Hardy's R/S 40-1354 ML TQWT's which wins my award for inexpensive speaker of the day. Truly impressive sounding imho. According to Mark, "If anyone's interested in more information, the plans can be found at TQWT on the page called "Projects and Proposals Built by Others". There are a couple of photos of "my" TQWT's (builder Mike Berg should get the credit!) on that page as well. The speakers I have currently have NO baffle step correction and NO treatments to the drivers."

And there was more, including several we never got time to listen to. We'll have to save those for a fall reunion...

(please bookmark http://www.the-planet.org/ which will always direct to my main page.

Back to Main Page