I awoke early this morning feeling very ill. Made up my mind that I wasn’t going in around 8:45 and called my manager. She informed me that I was the only one opening. Shit! I had to run in and open up and wait until someone could relieve me. Things went OK, John got there around 11:15ish and I went home. There’s something going around, some sort of stomach thing. I must have it, I’ve felt nauseous all day although I haven’t actually had any “roman moments” yet. With any luck I can go in tomorrow, we’ll see…
So what did I do today? The same thing anyone else would, I scavenged parts off of a dead amp. It was my dad’s, we cooked one day having it run 3 sets of speakers with their resistance based volume controls turned way down. In other words, we had the amp cranked way up and the speakers turned way down. All that energy got turned into heat. It worked until we shut it off, it never came back on. It looks like we burned part of the circuit board, so there was no repair possible. It looked like the heat was concentrated around a current sink, away from the outputs. So what’d I get? I know you’re dying to know… I got a big old power transformer, 4 large power supply caps, a really nice heatsink and 8 jfets or mosfets (haven’t looked up the part number yet). No, I don’t plan on making a solid state device, but they do make for great current inks or cathode followers, so they might come in handy.
I also got my new phono preamp today! It is easily the ugliest looking piece I’ve ever owned since it doesn’t come with a case. It’s just a circuit board… Still, it’s a pretty fancy thing, dual super low noise power supplies. That’s huge in a phono preamp because of the massive amount of amplification needed to hear the output from the cartridge. So how did I get such a fancy preamp for $150? The power supply is really simple, a pair of 9 volt batteries. Poof, there goes all the circuitry trying to use wall current to power a DC system. Anyway, it sounds great, quite a step up from what I had before, I have bass again! Plus it’s much cleaner and dynamic. Now I can sit down and really enjoy my records!
Isaac