Old school soundstream designer repairing?

[jol50]

Saw this on another board anyone know him...

soundstream repairs - DIYMA.com

[FireII]

I've been on that board for over 2 years and I've never heard him speak before. I know who Wade Stewart is, but like I said, I've never heard ace956 speak. Seems a little too out of character to me. I call B.S.

[1moreamp]

Well That is the name of the fella that did the engineering and if you like I will contact my two local friends here that worked with him and Stewart electronics to see if that is him for you. ... We have vays of finding out ziss sort of thing , you know...lol lol lol...


I emailed a ID request to someone that knows zee answer to dis question...I zink I have a picture of them all together many years ago...

[1moreamp]

Well Its Wade alright, and I trust my source without doubt, He worked with him for 10 years....hope this clears things up some......


He is on the up and up guys, its for real, its really him......

[jol50]

I think its great he is supporting some old school goodness. Was just hard to believe. I have a couple rub amps but they work fine. Always wondered if you could build a new D200/etc good old amp with HD parts, possibly a few improvements, but everyone seems to say there is little point.

[jol50]

Some quotes from a thread by him here:

Lucas596,
I’m not quite sure I’m a legend, but thanks anyway. I don’t know how much detail you want about the history, but here’s how it goes. In 1981 I owned Stewart Electronics and I designed and manufactured Professional Audio Equipment. In fact in 1994 we won a TEC award from the Audio Engineering Society for one of our power amplifiers, an award only given a few time in the history of the AES.
I was approached by Soundstream to manufacture there amplifiers, originally designed by Nelson Pass. After those initial amps I started designing all of their amps and crossovers. All of the amplifiers used Darlington pairs as output transistors, driver and output transistors in the same case. They are physically connected together, this makes the amplifiers sound much warmer. Years earlier I designed a line of guitar amps using Darlington’s and guitarists were constantly mistaking them for tube amps because of there warmth. The next series of REFERENCE and CLASS A’s we added the Thermal Roll Back and a few other new features but they still only drove 4 & 2 ohms.
Then I noticed that other companies were offering hi-voltage and hi-current models. So I designed the next rev’s with a hi-power / hi-current switch. This allowed them to drive 4/2 ohms in hi-voltage and 2/1 ohms in hi-current. I realized at that time that Car Audio guy’s needed to drive lots of subs that’s when I started designing amp that would, and actually did, drive loads as low as1/8th ohm per channel, ¼ ohm bridged. Basically I designed the amplifier section to withstand all that the power supply could deliver, that way the supply would sag but the amp wouldn’t blow, and YES every amplifier that left my factory met power specs and then some. Products built after 1997 I’m not sure about.
As far as the amps not designed or built by me from 1998 on, I thought it was the kiss of death for Soundstream. All new amps would only drive 4 & 2 ohms. Making them just a me-too product in a market full of me-too products. Actually I recently approached the new Soundstream company with ideas about resurrecting some of the older designs and introducing new technology, but they don’t seem to be interested. Maybe some other company may be interested in my ideas.
I hope this is enough info, if there is anything else you want to know just ask. I’ll be here.

bkjay,
The rubicon amps were the first amps not designed by me. I have never actually tested or listened to one of them. The biggest difference between them and the reference series I quess would be the fact that they would only drive 4 or 2 ohms and the reference at the time would drive down to 1/8th ohm. They still used Darlington's like the reference series which was a good thing, but they were a different model transistor.
Sorry, but that's all I know about any other differences. Anything else you want to know just let me know
Wade

lucas596, i'm glad you like my stuff. my two main goals in design were sound quality and dependability. instead of designing the amp first then designing the rest of the amplifier. I design the power supply first with in limits. then I design the amplifier section to withstand everything the power supply can deliver and then some. anyway i'm sorry i wasn't araound earlier but in the future i'll be here.

turbo5upra, I designed the davinci as well as the continuum for that other person that posted to your question. Actually the davinci was so complicated and versatile that I thought of it as a work of art. So when designing the front panel I decided it just had to be Gold. yeah i remember working on that one, we couldnt think of anything else to put on it, LOL.

turbo5upra, I have been digging arund and found out that the first rubicons were copies of amps i designed for soundstream just before they took over there own design and manufacturing.

He has fatpro.com

[damage]

I dunno. The Soundstreams run and sound ok. But I never really felt quite right with them. Almost like using someone else's computer. And I tried almost every model from D60 - Rubicon 700.

It seems like to me that in the last few years of rotating amps, I've been happiest with the old Zapco Competitions on the mids and highs, and Punch 150/HD and Coustic 360 on the subs. Though I must say, the G&S Competition C2000 (not the PPI models but the next series) was the best damn 400 watt sub amp I've used sounding just right in my small Eclipse. My Punch 150 25 to Life was just waayyy too much.

[jol50]

Funny he says softer sounding, to me they were harder though I had the most experience with the D series. They sounded more cold and precise, near German in a way though many new amps also do. So they worked well on highs and mids, not as nice full range on say a hatch box, and so-so on subs. We used to run LP on lows and sometimes mids, SS on highs sometimes mids, lol, it sounded best. The LP had far more bass, and back then many people didn't run EQs, that was around late 80s mostly the xx02 LP amps. Also if you needed over 200w there was no SS there. Both amps worked well and were expensive, just worked better for different uses. RF punch were great amps back then too, though they sounded quite colored at times with a loudness curve, but it was good when you had limited EQ back then. I have a rub302 the early one, I've only ran it on a single 12 and it has all its 300rms I can tell you it blew off a couple other amps I also ran. Too bad the single 12s sounded like crap no matter what amp was on them, I hate small sealed with nominal subs.

I have a bunch of old amps to try its going to be confusing. How do you compare a D100, a HK CA260, alpine 3555, Rub 302, alpine v12 t757/407, alp 1002(but its kinda big), alp F345, mtx USA BT754, and some newer amps too. Been running class D on subs, but might try some old school since the 15s should not take that much to get them going.

[a.wayne]

Originally Posted by damage

I dunno. The Soundstreams run and sound ok. But I never really felt quite right with them. Almost like using someone else's computer. And I tried almost every model from D60 - Rubicon 700.

It seems like to me that in the last few years of rotating amps, I've been happiest with the old Zapco Competitions on the mids and highs, and Punch 150/HD and Coustic 360 on the subs. Though I must say, the G&S Competition C2000 (not the PPI models but the next series) was the best damn 400 watt sub amp I've used sounding just right in my small Eclipse. My Punch 150 25 to Life was just waayyy too much.

I would disagree !

Being one of the first Soundstream dealers on the east coast ,
the Soundstreams from 84-90 would tear into any Zapco and or Fosgate stuff.

Zapco was very good stuff , but the class -a soundstreams( 84-89) were the best sounding audio car amplifiers period. The Zapco was as good in the bass as the D-series and it was not unusual for our reference systems to have a Tri or bi-amp system with Soundstream class-A on the mid/highs , zapco or a d200 on the bass . I would agree the soundstream stuff in the 90's was "OK" and nothing like there previous stuff , we did the comparison just to make sure and the setup was compared in an IASCA winning soundstream car @ the time .. IMO and those of others present the class-a stuff from the 80's was better .

For some reason the D60 was never at the same level as the others and we never really carried or used them with the rare exception of being the tweeter amp on a tri-sytem

The Fosgates were also good sounding units , but had horrible reliability and as they were the original big guys on the block we used to use a lot of them in the 70's , but you always had to have a spare unit as they would fail repeatedly .

The soundstream pre -tuner-cassette player was also reference stuff and had absolutely the best pre-amp in the business in contrast to the tuner which was absolutely worst .

We used to team in our reference setup a nakamichi dragon - Soundstream pre/tuner - a Dx-3 xover .

Last but not least from that era was Audiomobile , good stuff .......


Ohhh back then the business was different , you actually had to know what you were doing , this was when sound quality mattered, not like the 90's when it was who had the biggest ear drums and the mixed in politics of Iasca...

[jol50]

We also only used the D60 on tweeters, but it worked very well on them even six of them at once. Tended to use x02 LP xovers cascaded.

Heck once I ran a Punch 45 on 10s IB, lol, guy didn't have cash for another amp but wanted the 10s put in and larger amp on highs. I said it will work just will not pound like it could....dang thing was awesome considering the little amp it was. It went louder than a stock system playing nice deep bass.

I got a D100 the other day, my memory is getting bad that thing is tiny! No wonder we mostly used the 200s. It is significantly smaller than the 1002 LPs I have, and IIRC the SS always did run hot too, compared to others, maybe that is one reason why. But except for tweeters we never used under 150w amps for high end systems.