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Dennis Had: It all started with a science project I did as a child, which was a single-ended audio amplifier. It was based on a 2A3 [tube] and had all of a couple of watts. It got the blue ribbon, and I was hooked forever.

After…

"Did we come from gorillas...like at the zoo? Or did we come from Adam and Eve?"

Uh-oh. I pretended not to hear and fished for another piece of white meat.

"Ask your Uncle George," his Mom said. "He'll know."

I glared at my sister. Was she nuts? But it was too late. A pair of curious,…

Following its 1/3-power, one-hour preconditioning test, the Graaf GM 200's tube cages and power transformer were too hot to touch. This is consistent with JS's findings. Since heat is the enemy of electronics, one wonders how this operating environment might affect the longevity of the tubes and the rest of the circuitry.

OTL amplifiers do not like low impedances, and although I got respectable power out of the GM 200 into 2 ohms (though at moderately high distortion), the amplifier shut down a number of times during testing, refusing to come back on…

My admiration for Arturo Delmoni's playing is well documented in my reviews of his earlier recordings (see Vol.11 No.6, Vol.12 No.10, and Vol.14 No.1),…

Widespread recognition for Steve Tibbetts' instrumental work is long overdue. A Man About a Horse is the guitarist-percussionist's 10th astonishing disc, if you include his two most recent releases, collaborations with Tibetan nun Choying Drolma and Norwegian hardanger fiddle player Knut Hamre. But it's been almost six years since Tibbetts' last solo…

"We realized that Conrad-Johnson is coming up on its 20th anniversary," he said. "So we thought we might produce something special to celebrate. This is a version of the preamplifier we use in our listening room at the factory---we never even thought about producing it because it…

Of course, very few people buy any product simply because it's well built. The only true justification for a $15,000 preamplifier is that it sounds great. Which the ART does. Kind of.

I don't mean that the ART sounds kind of good. My system has never sounded better than it has since I've had the Anniversary Reference Triode. Even though I've changed just about every other component in the system at one time or another, one thing has remained constant: The sound has been involving, rich in timbre and nuance, and staggeringly clear. What I'm…

But just because the ART offered such precise delineation of small details, don't assume that it slighted the big picture. It most certainly did not. Among the many jewels freshly rediscovered in my vinyl collection, Classic's reissue of Bart—k's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (RCA/Classic LSC-2374) stands out as most revelatory. Neither suite nor symphony, the work is more like a large-scale baroque set of variations on the same theme. It's scored for two separate string sections: the first consists of the first and second…

Wes Phillips talks with Lew Johnson about ART and engineering

Lew Johnson: The ART was not originally conceived as a product---it was a research tool we built for ourselves. We realized that much of what we had learned in building power amplifiers had implications for preamplifier design as well---we came to see that loop feedback is not innocuous, and that local feedback has its own drawbacks as well. We wanted to design a preamplifier that came as close to being a zero-feedback amplifier as possible.…