I’m trying to decide if this is a long story I am trying to make short or if it is a short story I am trying to make long. Well, it will be some kind of story of some length so bear with me.
Sunday night I went to bed and all was fine in my world. 3:00 AM in the morning rolls around and I find myself wide awake and in terrible pain due to one of my teeth. I get up and rummage around the medicine cabinet looking for a bottle of left over pain pills from my last disaster. I find them, take one, and go back to bed. Monday is Memorial Day so it is a holiday which means no doctors or dentists are going to be working. I suck it up, take some more pain pills as needed and plan on going to the dentist on Tuesday.
Before I head off to the dentist, I need to detour this story a little. Everybody who knows me knows that I am a died in the wool tube lover and I don’t like solid state. I have tried to cross back over a couple of times to solid state. The most recent time was when I tired of not being able to keep my Quicksilver MS-190 amps running and I sold them and bought a Pass Labs X-250 amp. This is a great big amp that weighs around 100 lbs and probably 50 of those pounds comes from the ridiculously thick audiophile-approved face plate with the Cyclops eyeball current meter. To make this portion of the story short, the X-250 sucked and it reinforced all of the reasons why I hate solid state so I sold it and bought a Jadis Defy 7MKII.
Now I need to get back to the beginning of the story about when I went to bed on Sunday night and all was fine in my world. That wasn’t quite true because on Saturday night when I was listening to my stereo I noticed some distortion coming from the left channel. I swapped leads from the preamp to the power amp and the distortion stayed in the left channel which told me the amp was the culprit. I then switched speaker leads from the amp to the speakers. Bingo. Now the distortion was in the right speaker so I know the left channel of the Jadis has a problem. I am hoping it is just needs a bias adjustment and not a new set of output tubes. I don’t feel like fooling it with it right now because setting the bias on the Jadis is a pain in the ass. You have to put the 100 lb amp on its side, remove the bottom cover, and fiddle-dick with 3 bias pots for each channel.
So now it’s Tuesday morning and I am ready to head to the dentist. I decide to pack up my broke-dick Teac A-7030 tape deck so I can drop it off at my local Greek repair shop. The A-7030 is cool because it can play back both 2 and 4 track tapes with the big reels and at 15 ips. Also, because the electronics are separate from the deck, the tape heads are brought out on the back to a pair of RCA jacks. As I drop off my tape deck, I eyeball up the inventory the guy has for sale which is mostly vintage receivers in really nice shape. I happen to spot a Phase Linear 400 series 2 amplifier and I kind of smiled because it reminded me of my friends Carver C-500 amp. The C-500 was one of the first amps Carver built after he left Phase Linear and started Carver and it was one of the last amps he built that used a real power supply as we know it. Shortly after, he went to the magnetic field amps. Anyway, I had many good memories of my friend’s C-500 as it really was a good sounding amp with outstanding bass.
So I leave the Greek electronic repair shop and I head to the dentist. I am really in pain and I am looking forward to my dentist fixing it. The dentist takes an X-Ray and gives me some real bad news. My number 31 molar that I previously had a root canal performed and oral surgery that cost me a fortune now had a fractured root. My dentist says that it can’t be fixed and the tooth has to come out. Bummer. He proceeds to give me 4 shots of Novocain which is always a fun time. Just as he was getting ready to pull it, I said, “Doc, you do remember I am on blood thinners right?” He replied, “Shit. No, I forgot.” So now he can’t pull my tooth until I have been off blood thinners for two days. So Doc writes me a prescription for pain pills and we set the appointment for Thursday to pull my tooth.
Fast forward to Thursday. I am on the way to the dentist and I call my Greek repair guy and he says my A-7030 is ready. I told him I was on my way to have a tooth pulled and I would stop by on my way back and pick it up unless my dentist killed me. So Doc shoots me full of Novocain, yanks out the tooth, sews it up, and I am on my way.
I arrive at the Greek electronics repair shop armed with both a 2 track 15 ips tape and a 4 track tape and I run the A-7030 through its paces and it is fine. I then go back and eyeball up the Phase Linear 400 Series 2 again. Knowing that I might need a back up amp for awhile if my Jadis needs new output tubes and I have to order them and wait for them to arrive, I decide to buy the Phase Linear 400. I arrived home and took both the amp and tape deck downstairs to my listening room and just left them. I was in pain and I just didn’t feel like messing with my stereo.
So Friday arrives (yesterday) and I am still in lots of pain and I have to take pain pills all day. I go to work and make it through the day somehow. After I get home, I went downstairs and hooked up the A-7030 and the Phase Linear 400 Series 2 amp and fired up the system. I put a CD on to let the system burn in for awhile. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much of anything because remember, I don’t like solid state. The last SS amp I had in my system was the Pass Labs X-250 and it sucked so hard it was pulling a vacuum in my room. The other thing that surprised me about the X-250 was I didn’t think it sounded very powerful.
So now it is later on Friday night and I head downstairs to do some serious listening. I’m thinking it might not last more than 5 minutes if I can’t stand this amp. I sure couldn’t stand the X-250. I have a 4 track tape cued up (Blood Sweat and Tears which is awesome), I have a 15 ips 2 track tape cued up on my Otari (a jazz tape I made from LPs which will blow your socks off and make your amps clip more than likely because it is so dynamic). I also have Steely Dan Gaucho cued up on my VPI TNT. I put on Gaucho first not knowing what to expect. Son of a bitch, it sounds pretty damn good. No, it sounds real damn good. Next comes my 15 ips tape which I know like the back of my hand. To say I was surprised at how good this sounded would be an understatement. All of the areas I thought it would fall flat on its SS face it didn’t. It sounded live, the instruments all had air and detail (if you don’t hear air coming off the cymbals in Sonny Rollins Way Out West, there is something very wrong with your stereo). I started playing LP after LP and was just amazed at the speed and drive of this amp not to mention all of the detail it portrayed in a tube type way. And this baby has some balls too. I just kept feeling that I was hearing things that I just wasn’t hearing with my Jadis which is blasphemy in my world. So I went to bed wondering if the pain pills were coloring my perceptions. Today is Saturday and it is the first day since Monday that I haven’t had to take a pain pill. I am going to go down tonight to my listening room and try round 2. We will see. I sure had fun last night even though I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Sunday night I went to bed and all was fine in my world. 3:00 AM in the morning rolls around and I find myself wide awake and in terrible pain due to one of my teeth. I get up and rummage around the medicine cabinet looking for a bottle of left over pain pills from my last disaster. I find them, take one, and go back to bed. Monday is Memorial Day so it is a holiday which means no doctors or dentists are going to be working. I suck it up, take some more pain pills as needed and plan on going to the dentist on Tuesday.
Before I head off to the dentist, I need to detour this story a little. Everybody who knows me knows that I am a died in the wool tube lover and I don’t like solid state. I have tried to cross back over a couple of times to solid state. The most recent time was when I tired of not being able to keep my Quicksilver MS-190 amps running and I sold them and bought a Pass Labs X-250 amp. This is a great big amp that weighs around 100 lbs and probably 50 of those pounds comes from the ridiculously thick audiophile-approved face plate with the Cyclops eyeball current meter. To make this portion of the story short, the X-250 sucked and it reinforced all of the reasons why I hate solid state so I sold it and bought a Jadis Defy 7MKII.
Now I need to get back to the beginning of the story about when I went to bed on Sunday night and all was fine in my world. That wasn’t quite true because on Saturday night when I was listening to my stereo I noticed some distortion coming from the left channel. I swapped leads from the preamp to the power amp and the distortion stayed in the left channel which told me the amp was the culprit. I then switched speaker leads from the amp to the speakers. Bingo. Now the distortion was in the right speaker so I know the left channel of the Jadis has a problem. I am hoping it is just needs a bias adjustment and not a new set of output tubes. I don’t feel like fooling it with it right now because setting the bias on the Jadis is a pain in the ass. You have to put the 100 lb amp on its side, remove the bottom cover, and fiddle-dick with 3 bias pots for each channel.
So now it’s Tuesday morning and I am ready to head to the dentist. I decide to pack up my broke-dick Teac A-7030 tape deck so I can drop it off at my local Greek repair shop. The A-7030 is cool because it can play back both 2 and 4 track tapes with the big reels and at 15 ips. Also, because the electronics are separate from the deck, the tape heads are brought out on the back to a pair of RCA jacks. As I drop off my tape deck, I eyeball up the inventory the guy has for sale which is mostly vintage receivers in really nice shape. I happen to spot a Phase Linear 400 series 2 amplifier and I kind of smiled because it reminded me of my friends Carver C-500 amp. The C-500 was one of the first amps Carver built after he left Phase Linear and started Carver and it was one of the last amps he built that used a real power supply as we know it. Shortly after, he went to the magnetic field amps. Anyway, I had many good memories of my friend’s C-500 as it really was a good sounding amp with outstanding bass.
So I leave the Greek electronic repair shop and I head to the dentist. I am really in pain and I am looking forward to my dentist fixing it. The dentist takes an X-Ray and gives me some real bad news. My number 31 molar that I previously had a root canal performed and oral surgery that cost me a fortune now had a fractured root. My dentist says that it can’t be fixed and the tooth has to come out. Bummer. He proceeds to give me 4 shots of Novocain which is always a fun time. Just as he was getting ready to pull it, I said, “Doc, you do remember I am on blood thinners right?” He replied, “Shit. No, I forgot.” So now he can’t pull my tooth until I have been off blood thinners for two days. So Doc writes me a prescription for pain pills and we set the appointment for Thursday to pull my tooth.
Fast forward to Thursday. I am on the way to the dentist and I call my Greek repair guy and he says my A-7030 is ready. I told him I was on my way to have a tooth pulled and I would stop by on my way back and pick it up unless my dentist killed me. So Doc shoots me full of Novocain, yanks out the tooth, sews it up, and I am on my way.
I arrive at the Greek electronics repair shop armed with both a 2 track 15 ips tape and a 4 track tape and I run the A-7030 through its paces and it is fine. I then go back and eyeball up the Phase Linear 400 Series 2 again. Knowing that I might need a back up amp for awhile if my Jadis needs new output tubes and I have to order them and wait for them to arrive, I decide to buy the Phase Linear 400. I arrived home and took both the amp and tape deck downstairs to my listening room and just left them. I was in pain and I just didn’t feel like messing with my stereo.
So Friday arrives (yesterday) and I am still in lots of pain and I have to take pain pills all day. I go to work and make it through the day somehow. After I get home, I went downstairs and hooked up the A-7030 and the Phase Linear 400 Series 2 amp and fired up the system. I put a CD on to let the system burn in for awhile. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much of anything because remember, I don’t like solid state. The last SS amp I had in my system was the Pass Labs X-250 and it sucked so hard it was pulling a vacuum in my room. The other thing that surprised me about the X-250 was I didn’t think it sounded very powerful.
So now it is later on Friday night and I head downstairs to do some serious listening. I’m thinking it might not last more than 5 minutes if I can’t stand this amp. I sure couldn’t stand the X-250. I have a 4 track tape cued up (Blood Sweat and Tears which is awesome), I have a 15 ips 2 track tape cued up on my Otari (a jazz tape I made from LPs which will blow your socks off and make your amps clip more than likely because it is so dynamic). I also have Steely Dan Gaucho cued up on my VPI TNT. I put on Gaucho first not knowing what to expect. Son of a bitch, it sounds pretty damn good. No, it sounds real damn good. Next comes my 15 ips tape which I know like the back of my hand. To say I was surprised at how good this sounded would be an understatement. All of the areas I thought it would fall flat on its SS face it didn’t. It sounded live, the instruments all had air and detail (if you don’t hear air coming off the cymbals in Sonny Rollins Way Out West, there is something very wrong with your stereo). I started playing LP after LP and was just amazed at the speed and drive of this amp not to mention all of the detail it portrayed in a tube type way. And this baby has some balls too. I just kept feeling that I was hearing things that I just wasn’t hearing with my Jadis which is blasphemy in my world. So I went to bed wondering if the pain pills were coloring my perceptions. Today is Saturday and it is the first day since Monday that I haven’t had to take a pain pill. I am going to go down tonight to my listening room and try round 2. We will see. I sure had fun last night even though I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
But glad to hear you finally got to see a dentist!
