Art Dudley Listening

Among the many bits of audio lore that never have and probably never will be aired in public is the story of the amp that ignited the reviewer's curtains. (I assume that at least some of you hoped I was going to say "pants.") I can't tell it in any great detail, partly because the reviewer in question is a friend (though not a Stereophile colleague), and I'm not sure how much of the story he wants out there. In any event, my object here is to offer a long-overdue apology, to all concerned, for having laughed at that story over the years, because it has now happened to me—not the part about the curtains, but definitely the part about the burning amp.

Yesterday, at about 5:15pm, I went into my kitchen and turned on the oven to pre-heat it. Ten minutes later, my wife and I both commented aloud about a strange, plasticky smell in the house. Naturally, suspicion fell on the oven—which, it turned out, contained nothing untoward. But within a matter of seconds the intensity of the smell went from zero to 60, I could see a filmy haze in the air, the downstairs smoke detector went off, and the dog started barking. Notes of panic were audible in Janet's and my voices as we asked each other, "Where's it coming from?" Then, with that clarity of mind reserved for non-audiophiles, Janet asked, "Is it the hi-fi?"

I dashed to the living room, by now the obvious source of the stink, and directed my attention to an amp that was in for review and, too big and heavy for my equipment rack, sitting on the floor. The system wasn't playing music at the time, but everything in it was powered up for that eventuality. I saw a column of smoke rising from the ventilation louvers on the amp's top plate, and below those louvers a small flame: Something inside the amp was literally on fire, a fact that my mind absorbed with only the greatest reluctance.

I urged Janet to get herself and the dog outside, which she did; a minute later I followed, but only after pulling the amp's power cord and making sure that that extinguished the flame. It did. A few minutes later, I took a couple of deep breaths of fresh air, then went back inside to open every window in the house, turn on every fan I could find, and put the chicken in the oven: as the poet William Laird wrote, "men must eat, though angels be their guests." (footnote 1)

On my next trip inside, I realized that the acrid smell was so pervasive that there was no way to tell whether the powered-down amp was still contributing to it. Nevertheless, like shooing a rabid skunk away from an outdoor wedding, getting rid of the amp seemed a reasonable precaution, so with Janet's help I dragged it out the front door and onto the front step, where it sat for an hour and a half. During that time, we had our chicken dinner in the back yard. Whether despite or because of the smoke, mosquitos ate us alive.

I didn't get much sleep that night, owing to the lingering stink—which had reached almost every corner of our home—and to my lingering worries about potential carcinogens. In the morning I set about cleaning the house, which proved a lengthy task: three days of scrubbing walls, ceilings, hardwood floors, and hardwood furniture, often multiple times—even after four washings, the wall behind the amp continued to reek—plus laundering bedsheets, pillowcases, slipcovers, and clothes that had been neither shut away in a closed drawer nor hung in a closed closet. Rugs and upholstered furniture were sprinkled with baking soda and vacuumed multiple times, and windows and other glass surfaces were washed twice. The dog got a bath, which she appeared to enjoy.

I contacted the manufacturer, who was equal parts horrified and apologetic. He vowed that no such accident had ever before befallen one of his products, and I believe him: Especially in our Google-review age, things like that get out.

The amplifier in question is a solid-state product of moderate output power that had performed admirably for the two weeks before the day of the fire—and during use, its case was never more than warm to the touch. (The curtain-burning amp mentioned in my opening paragraph, which remains in production and is in fact a truly fine-sounding amp, runs notoriously hot.) As I write this, a postmortem has yet to be performed on the new amp's innards, but a glance through the now-sooty louvers suggests that the cause was a failed electrolytic capacitor.

If there were even the slightest chance that naming the manufacturer would spare someone else this inconvenience and potential danger, I would do so, but the law of averages suggests that the next time a modern electrolytic capacitor fails in such spectacular fashion, it will be in the power supply of a product from a different company. (For the cynics among our readers: The company in question is not, and never has been, an advertiser in Stereophile's pages.) I'll have no part in putting a manufacturer out of business, and his employees out of their jobs, because one cap among the hundreds he buys each year unforeseeably failed.

However, bending to demands from my family, I have declined a second review sample, a refusal that the manufacturer acknowledged with good grace.

I've also decided to alter my listening and reviewing habits. (I love writing about policies: they're easier to unpack than anything else, easier to lift, and it doesn't cost a dime to send them back from whence they came.)

No, you run it in
Mandolinist David Grisman has a lot of great stories about the times he traveled with and performed alongside his hero, mandolinist Bill Monroe (1911–1996), the father of bluegrass music. My favorite: One time, at a bluegrass festival, a young woman approached Monroe and asked if she could take his picture. He assented, and when she asked if he could step back a little, he graciously did so. But when, while framing the shot and fiddling with her camera, she asked him to step back a little farther, Monroe replied, "No, you step back!"

The burning amp in my living room had escaped my attention, presumably for at least a few critical minutes, because I'd left it powered up all afternoon, to ensure its optimal performance during an after-dinner listening session. The outcome was unexpected, but the lead-up was standard operating procedure. Special emphasis on was.

Beginning with the Amber Series 70 power amp and NAD 1020 preamp I owned in the early 1980s, I tended to leave solid-state amplification components powered up 24/7, except during electrical storms or protracted absences from home. I've been more circumspect with tube amplifiers, but I've also been known to power up tube preamps first thing in the morning and power them down only at bedtime—and I was never terribly concerned on the many occasions when I absentmindedly left them powered up overnight. (I broke that habit a little over 10 years ago, when I bought my first products from Shindo Laboratory, which use mostly hard-to-find, NOS tubes. I came to learn that those tubes are usually operated conservatively in terms of their plate voltages, and that Shindo's amps and preamps alike perform exceptionally well after a mere 20 minutes of warm-up.)

Elsewhere in this issue I review the Cary CAD-805RS monoblock amplifier, whose manufacturer recommends 100 hours of run-in time. Other manufacturers observe that similar or longer—sometimes much longer—periods of time are required for their products to sound their best. I've even encountered a manufacturer of cables—cables, for God's sake!—who says that his products require a minimum of 300 hours before they can be properly evaluated. Assuming one listens to one's playback system for three hours a day, seven days a week, that means one's presumably very expensive high-end cables won't sound good until more than three months after their purchase date. It makes the idea of a 10-day home trial sound a bit silly.

Although the unlucky manufacturer in this story made no such demands, I intend from now on to ignore admonitions to leave review samples powered up around the clock. If a manufacturer wants me to review a product that's incapable of sounding good without more than a month of steady use, he or she has two choices: run it in themselves—not an unreasonable request especially for paying customers and for products with five- and six-figure price tags—or don't send it at all.

Flatline resurrected
Long ago, in the Spring 1996 issue of Listener, I wrote about Flatline and SuperFlatline speaker cables from the then-newish Nordost Corporation (footnote 2). Flatline was made with four flat copper conductors per run, separated from each other and from the cable's adjacent run with clear Teflon, also pressed flat; SuperFlatline was doubled-up Flatline, with eight conductors per run, thus 16 conductors per channel.

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Footnote 1: "Traumerei at Ostendorff's," from The New Poetry: An Anthology, Harriet Monroe, ed. (MacMillan, 1917).

Footnote 2: Nordost, 93 Bartzak Drive, Holliston, MA 01746. Web: nordost.com.