The Audiophoolery Thread.

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

More phoolery - anybody else seen the valve power supplies for the Sony Pro Walkman? Available at your local auction site for a king's ransom...

Akio Morita, the charismatic founder of Sony, will be rotating in his grave.

Craig

[greg_simons]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

Akio Morita, the charismatic founder of Sony, will be rotating in his grave.

Craig

Mr Morita would indeed be spinning in his box, Sony never made any valve based products, they were the child of the new transistor age.
Greg.

[knobtwiddler]

And the valve-based Walkman PSU is being made in Japan!

[Cobaltblue]

Originally Posted by greg_simons

Mr Morita would indeed be spinning in his box, Sony never made any valve based products, they were the child of the new transistor age.
Greg.

I'm not sure about that there were still a few valve products including this magnificent beast https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_5001.html

Cheers

Mike T

[Craig Sawyers]

In Sony's earliest days following WW2 valves were the only show in town. But they were early adopters of transistors, and soon most or all Sony products were transistorised.

Craig

[Ted Kendall]

Sony were indeed in the vanguard of transistors - I think they claimed to have marketed the first transistor portable radio - but the tape recorders were valve based until around the mid-1960s. The 777 was the initial flagship transistor design, about 1964. In any case, both were appropriate technology, which this silly power supply in not.

[Craig Sawyers]

They even went to the US to negotiate a deal with Bell Labs to license the transistor - which Bell had the patent on at that time.

Craig

[lightning]

l can't believe the prices of those mains fuses. £8,000 for a fuse. l looked on the website and the fuses start at around £50.

They are colour coded depending on how many times they've been "treated" to improve "metal/molecular transfer"

The more times the fuse has been "treated" the less "bottlenecking" that occurs, presumably as the electrons queue up to get through the fuse.

The fuses are also directional and if you don't notice a difference you might have fitted it the wrong way round....on AC mains lol

[CambridgeWorks]

I Currently have on offer various glass and ceramic fuses, as little as £1 for 10x new 20mm types. Sorry, no gold plug fuses though.

The ones classed as A/S could I imagine be sold as Audio Standard?
Now there's a thought!

Rob

[Craig Sawyers]

If a fuse was directional, the electrons would have to have enough personality and intelligence to sense right from wrong way round.

"I don't like the look of that - go back guys. Oh blow me we're all being asked to try again. And again....this is boring, again and again we're being asked to shuffle back and forth"

Such anthropomorphic nonsense that would be.

Craig

[stuarth]

Since the speed of electron drift is literally the speed of a snail, the electrons will just move back and forth within the fuse, and very few will leave the fuse on each mains cycle. So when you buy a fuse, you’re buying a fuse full of electrons, and very expensive fuses just have better trained electrons than cheap fuses.

Quite what the training of the electrons does to improve the audio quality, I haven’t worked out yet.

You need to realise that a few of your highly trained electrons will leave the fuse on each half cycle and mix with the untrained masses, and on the next half cycle, you will get a few of these untrained electrons sneaking into your fuse. This will dilute the overall education level of those in the fuse. Thus you need to buy new fuses with fully trained electrons at regular intervals.

Stuart

[Craig Sawyers]

The problem is compounded by looking at the thermal behaviour of the electron gas. The electrons travel at an average of 1.56 x 10^6 m/s in copper at room temperature, or about 0.5% the speed of light. They do not travel very far - because the atoms are jiggling around a bit thermally and elastically scatter the thermal electrons after a few dozen atomic diameters. But there is a background of this high speed electron random motion going on independently of current flow.

So independent of the drift of electrons as a result of current, or shuffling back and forth by less than the diameter of a human hair, there is a background of exceptional high speed random motion and atomic scattering..

All of which is not even considered by purveyors of audiophile fuses; £8k for a fuse?

Craig

[lightning]

Of course having fitted £8,000 of fuse in the plug, you're going to have to consider the 20mm glass fuses that are probably in the amplifier as well.

lt could get expensive

[Cathovisor]

Originally Posted by emeritus

Back in the days before the BBC broadcast 24/7, they used to play a sequence of test tones after shutdown on FM, presumably to allow you to check for things like stereo balance.

Originally Posted by Cathovisor

It was for lines testing - known as "step tone".

Originally Posted by emeritus

Thanks for that info, I always did wonder what they were really for.

Revisiting this, you may find this of interest: courtesy of the BBC Eng Inf website, a document detailing the full tone sequence and what it was for.

EID Information Sheet 1605 - Stereophonic Broadcasting - R3 Test Tones (Dec 1973).pdf

[emeritus]

Thanks very much for the info! I would have heard them in the late 1970's using the Alba UA 700/UA800 amp and tuner I had bought from Henry's (or was it Laskey's?) in the Edgware Road.

[knobtwiddler]

Not really audiphoolery, but I know that there are one or two members here who worked at the company when these were made:

https://reverb.com/item/68691016-197...-herring-49488

Although difficult to justify on grounds of objective performance, bearing in mind its history, I don't regard the price as being that far off what it might achieve. And visiting musicians will always know that they are using the console that recorded the King -)

[lightning]

lt will likely sell to a museum, probably the best place for it as it's obviously a piece of history.

Either that, or an Elvis dan who has won the lottery!

[knobtwiddler]

I sincerely hope it doesn't go to a museum! Part of the appeal of that series of Neve is their inherent practicality when it comes to maintenance. Aside from being hard wearing, it contains very few components that can't be sourced today or replicated. The signal transformers are probably the only part that can't be remade easily, as although the modern replicas may be identical in spec, the audio world being what it is will argue that the OGs had some kind of mythical iron or suchlike in them. But transformer failure is very rare, and if you can afford such a desk, you can afford a few hundred quid for a replacement part.

The mythical Neve desk from 'Sound City' studios was bought by the wealthy musician Dave Grohl (shame his wallet didn't extend to rescuing the rooms, as *they* are the real irreplaceable items...). There are so few elite recording studios that have survived, so I suspect that the most likely course will be that this desk is bought by a wealthy musician for their own studio, to be used for their own projects. They won't blink at the price, and the dealer knows that.

[Cathovisor]

I remember the little custom plug-in modules used in Neve desks.

Another Neve item fabled for its sound is the stand-alone compressor/limiters in a 2U rack.

[Philips210]

Originally Posted by lightning

The fuses are also directional and if you don't notice a difference you might have fitted it the wrong way round....on AC mains lol

Yes, it's all so ridiculous you can't help laughing.
I wonder if Trading Standards have ever shown any interest.

Regards,
Symon