In 1995, as the compact disc enters its second decade of commercial reality, it's fair to say that the associated hardware has come of age, exorcising at last the digital gremlins of time-base jitter and quantization noise. Digital-processor maturation is particularly evident in the design of the all-critical D/A processor. The simplistic digital circuitry of yesterday has given way to considerable design sophistication that deals directly with jitter and low-level nonlinearities.
A.C. Wente of Bell Telephone Labs was apparently the first person to get the bright idea (in the 1930s) of measuring sound transmission in a small room. A loudspeaker at one point reproducing pure tones of constant power, and a microphone at another point measuring sound-pressure levels, gave him the means to assess the room's impact on sound quality. The measured frequency response was so ragged that I'm positive the venturesome Dr. Wente was duly shocked.
The Aleph Null, or 0, represents Nelson Pass's maiden product under the Pass Laboratories banner. When he left Threshold several years ago, Pass had the luxury of starting over with a clean slate, and decided immediately that he wanted to design a single-ended MOSFET amp. The result is aptly named after Georg Cantor's first transfinite number: Aleph Null, the gateway to higher-order infinities. Just as Cantor's transfinite mathematics stretched minds with its novel conceptual view of the infinite, the Pass Aleph 0 tantalizes the imagination with a new dimension in the future of solid-state amplification: a single-ended output stage.
Magnepan founder Jim Winey could be considered the patriarch of planar loudspeakers. His innovative leadership of and commitment to the technology over the past 20 years have propelled Magnepan to a position of preeminence in the speaker business. You won't find any hybrids rolling off the production line at Magnepan's corporate headquarters in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. The entire Magnepan line is devoted strictly to planars that use ribbon tweeters and quasi-ribbon midranges and woofersnot a stray dynamic woofer in the lot!
Neither its rather pedestrian name nor Manley Labs' own literature gives much of a clue as to the 175 monoblock's special pedigree. Where are the bands, the fanfare?! After all, the rolling-out of a 6L6based high-power audiophile-grade tube amplifier definitely qualifies in my book as a momentous occasion. Deplorably, such happenings are rare indeed; the 6L6 has been unjustly neglected in high-end circles.
John Stronczer, Bel Canto Design's technical spark plug, meets my definition of an electronics renaissance man, ranging as he does from designing single-ended amps that glow in the dark (the Orfeo) to digital processors (the Aida). Actually, digital circuitry is one of John's specialties, dating back to his days at Honeywell.
Thanks to Ben Peters, there's an electrostatic lifeline in Holland. Founded about 25 years ago, his company, Audiostatic, struggled through the 1980s, but with distribution by SOTA Industries, it's now on firm footing in the US. In fact, SOTA's Jack Shafton told me that all assembly and some manufacturing are now conducted in the US. My ES-100 samples came from the first US production run.
Lee de Forest filed for a US patent on his "Audion"—the first triode—on October 25, 1906, but never could explain why it worked (footnote 1). It was up to Armstrong and Langmuir, in their pioneering work, to place the hard-vacuum triode on firm scientific ground. When the US entered World War I in April 1917, the Army had to rely on French tubes. Six months later, Western Electric was mass-producing the VT-1 receiving tube and the VT-2 transmitting tube. However, it was only in the decade following World War I, as designers became conversant with the triode amplifier, that many of the crucial elements of tube amplification were nailed down. Technical issues such as coupling two gain stages and selection of optimal coupling impedance were already resolved by the mid-1920s. The triode ruled supreme until the tetrode came along in 1926, followed in 1929 by the pentode from Philips's research laboratories in Holland.
MACH 1 Acoustics? Cute name. Mach 1 is, of course, the speed of sound—the speed at which a loudspeaker's acoustic output is forever constrained to travel. Quite a fitting choice for Marc McCalmont, Marine and jet pilot turned speaker designer. Marc retired to Wilton, NH together with Melissa. (Oops, that should be MLSSA, the well-known acoustic analysis system—not Marc's girlfriend.)
Ron Cox, Zen master and good friend from Zuni, New Mexico, gingerly navigated the crowded streets of Amp Citythe essentially all-tube amp collection sprawled on my listening-room floor between the speakers. Ron had no trouble spotting the four chrome-and-black chassis of the JA 200s. He pointed a tentative finger: "Are those the Jedi?"