Valley of the Sun
The 1980s was a decade when I needed three jobs to support my wife, infant daughter, and octogenarian dad. My primary job was to make and sell art, and I’m sure you know how that can go. Between exhibitions, I was forced to do construction work and to find, repair, and resell old tube amplifiers.
What I remember most from that period was how much I loved Phil Rizzuto and Yankee baseball on AM radio and how often I burned myself on the soldering iron.
Except for each brand’s unique wiring layout, chassis construction, and finish, the tube amps I repaired were mostly boring. Circuit-wise and sonics-wise, they were quite similar to each other and generally unremarkable. After fixing and auditioning scores of these crusty boxes, I realized that the better-sounding ones, the ones that were neither slow, dull, nor screechy, employed large, high-quality transformers, the simplest circuits, and tube rectifiers. The more tube amps I repaired, the less I admired mainstream (1950s and 1960s) home audio and the more I admired professional sound-reinforcement gear from companies like Altec, Ampex, IPC, and Bogen.
What really bugged me were the phono preamps of the time. Almost universally, they sounded opaque and undynamic. The only one I thought was all right was the Dynaco PAS-3X’s phono stage, which, with tweaks and modifications, anchored my personal hi-fi until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
At that point, as an experiment, I scratch-built RCA’s “Preamplifier for Magnetic Phonograph Pickup With RIAA Equalization” to see if I could do better than the Dynaco or Marantz preamps that passed through my workshop. The schematic for this passively equalized phono preamp was in the back of
