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Old 19th May 2020, 4:19 pm   #41
greg_simons
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Default Re: KEL80 EL34 Monoblock 80w amplifier

Ref post twenty
That's quite a dissertation david, and a good read, it does illustrate perfectly the sweat those old boys put into the quad/Williamson/ leak etc especially the transformers, not just a lump of iron and copper but a whole pile of maths trying to squeeze the best compromise possible from many factors all pulling in opposite directions.
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Old 19th May 2020, 5:40 pm   #42
Hartley118
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Default Re: KEL80 EL34 Monoblock 80w amplifier

.........but back in the day, they weren’t ‘old boys’, they were cutting edge innovators refusing to accept the design assumptions of their predecessors and forging a new quality standard in the process.

Martin
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Old 19th May 2020, 7:05 pm   #43
Radio Wrangler
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Default Re: KEL80 EL34 Monoblock 80w amplifier

Williamson, Walker, Bailey, Baxendall were the good ones. They wrote articles describing what they were up to and why they made certain choices. They didn't spill all their trade secrets, but they revealed enough for a young kid with enough curiosity to kill a cattery to wonder 'Why did they do it that way' and be able to work out the answers for himself. I came along somewhat after most of these developments, but I still went through the available info even though it was historical. It saved on having to wait for the next instalment.

What it also did was to hone a skill for looking at even partial descriptions and working out what people were up to. Sometimes it can be quite illuminating. But you learn things from it, and it all goes into the box of tricks you have to play with for your own designs.

Some thoughts about multi-phase switch mode power supplies came together in my head and fitted a problem in a completely different area, frequency synthesisers. I was on top of a rather nice horse at a fast canter on a track in Exmoor, on holiday at the crucial moment. On finishing fr the day, all I could find in the shops for writing materials were some damned expensive artist's pads, so those it had to be. Half a day's scribbling and I could get back to holidaying. It turned into a US patent "Noise-shaping fractional-N frequency synthesiser" which would be great if I could get it on a triple word score at scrabble. The 'cited by' list on google patents is terrifying.

Maybe the art lies not in learning new technologies, but in learning new ways to look at things?

Learning how everyone does a new technology doesn't let you leapfrog the leaders, or start a whole new technology. But that's what Williamson et al were doing back in the day, they were laying down the foundations of every decent valve amplifier. It was cutting edge back then.

David
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