But people back then had only high sensitivity speakers so power was no problem...
So first everyone complains of the lower frequency range of germanium transistors that needs huge compensation capacitors to even achieve the necessary audio bandwidth, then someone remembers Boucherot cells...If a circuit can't react or oscillate at a high frequency it doesn't need high frequency ringing dampers...Most cheap germanium amplifiers on batteries would use the speaker in series with the final stage driver collector to help achieving a better frequency response and distortions using the imaginary part of the speaker's impedance...That's how "stupid" engineers were back then... dream world...
Fixing stuff most of my short sh...ty life i've seen less old equipment breaking in weird patterns than new one.I have no evidence of modern designers being smarter than the old ones .Most old designs had to get the needed result with 4...10 cheap shitty components and many did it better than today's circuits based off a hundred fail safe components while there was no simulator back then.A few months ago i fixed a 50 years old 1kW motor speed regulator using some old thyristors and about 10 other components that Google wouldn't even be able to find in online catalogues.That machine worked continuously for 30 years 24/7 in a nespaper printing factory.The main culprit...a 60 years old capacitor...no active power component busted just one fried pcb track and a small silicon transistor made in the 70's.Its feedback was a second coil inside the motor...So they built the motor to match the regulator's specifications...
I wonder how much complex speaker filters have you seen in old radios working for 60 years...Most of the speakers were open baffle speakers.How complex reactive behavior do you get from an open baffle system? I'm really curious.I told a few times alredy that old times speakers were almost exclusively high efficiency speakers in need for a watt or two to get loud enough.What a Zobel(Boucherot) network is doing is Power factor correction.What's the need for PFC with a high SPL dipole speaker you "real world" man?
Fixing stuff most of my short sh...ty life i've seen less old equipment breaking in weird patterns than new one.I have no evidence of modern designers being smarter than the old ones .Most old designs had to get the needed result with 4...10 cheap shitty components and many did it better than today's circuits based off a hundred fail safe components while there was no simulator back then.A few months ago i fixed a 50 years old 1kW motor speed regulator using some old thyristors and about 10 other components that Google wouldn't even be able to find in online catalogues.That machine worked continuously for 30 years 24/7 in a nespaper printing factory.The main culprit...a 60 years old capacitor...no active power component busted just one fried pcb track and a small silicon transistor made in the 70's.Its feedback was a second coil inside the motor...So they built the motor to match the regulator's specifications...
I wonder how much complex speaker filters have you seen in old radios working for 60 years...Most of the speakers were open baffle speakers.How complex reactive behavior do you get from an open baffle system? I'm really curious.I told a few times alredy that old times speakers were almost exclusively high efficiency speakers in need for a watt or two to get loud enough.What a Zobel(Boucherot) network is doing is Power factor correction.What's the need for PFC with a high SPL dipole speaker you "real world" man?
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Wishful thinking.
a short will destroy transistors with or without a large coupling cap
that doesn´t make them less necessary
same thing, but plain large heatsinks work fine ... IF they are used
??????????????
See above.
that does not make them stronger
Boy, you are quite the Technophobe.
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[slapping my forehead] Of course! that´s why you are obsessed with obsolete for almost 60 years Germanium!!!
Well you modern man...do you know what this is or ...was?
Attachments
Never had that occasion...but it was fun to see these antique toys work with a reverse engineered controller made after looking into a 1000 pages service manual for a damn small table where the controller signals were defined as my 70 years old boss at the time wouldn't even consider worth buying a 5k bucks controller to fix 300k worth of lasers because he hired me for 400 bucks/ month to build chillers thinking i'm no better than his 60 years old mechanic manually cuting steel,brass, copper and aluminium all day long.It happened that i was the only guy able to read the service manual of those toys while two of my older coleagues were physics engineers with some serious theoretical knowledge in lasers, but no english or electronics skills...Before that job i was fixing and callibrating uv-vis and far infrared spectrometers, but because i never attended a university every single new hiring department would consider i'm bluffing about my past experience looking to impress.I stil look to impress, but don't judge me too harshly...it became a way of life after 50 job interviews and still never found the time and money to attend a university cause the engineering courses were damn expensive and take a lot of time to read when nobody is lecturing them to you while the books written in a special language for dumb guys like me and open case lasers in an abandoned facility waiting for a picture were really hard to find. Last time i played dungeons and dragons i found some weird pcb's with some sort of weird names on them like Bomem, but I couldn't find a single electronics engineer to tell who Bomem was.Fortunately 14 years ago there was a wikipedia article explaining who they were.In the mean time they were bought by ABB and all old refferences before 1970 deleted althoughthat wiki article said in 2008 that Bomem was the oldest electric company in the world based in 1800's even before Edison .When i want to embarass an old electronics engineer showing off with his well rounded knowledge about anything ever made in the Universe I only ask if he ever applied for a job at Bomem assuming he never needed too much Google being so wise...If I never asked you that then you have my consideration, I'm all ears and I don't care about your age in assesing if you deserve my attention.Nobody asks Death when he sees it : how old are you kitty?
Yes, I've frequently seen designs like these. Anyway, the speaker tied to the supply line, in connection with the output electrolytics, doesn't do anything other than just bootstrap the driver section. In the meantime engineers have learned that it's better to avoid DC current through a speaker voice coil and to design a bootstrap circuit the way it is common since decades - or to provide a CCS.
Best regards!
Well Nelson Pass himself in his 2021 interview claims he's basically the only guy on Earth to apply dc current to speakers in order to lower speakers distortions...
I signaled that being a false claim in the NP corner and all i could get were some laughs from some NP fan...well the only fan i could be in this life was the one hit by the **** while turning at high speed...
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/germanium-investigations.348948/page-27#post-6912487I'm still waiting for NP to tell a single word about Peter Quilter and QSC design simplicity, but i don't think he's going to do it any soon.
I thing Rutgers who's site and SSA 30 and SSA40 projects completly dissapeared would be of greater help for teaching true simplicity and bringing up back QSC simple phylosophy instead of promoting expensive j-fet transistors that you can safely buy from only one place at very "simple" prices...Guys like me , born and lived under the iron curtain would always look for the cheapest and safest ways of getting things done, but that is hard to teach people that could buy bananas and chocolate all the years long not just for two weeks around Christmas enjoying them at a candle's light after a meal cooked on a can full of surgical spirit when the communist party took the decision to pay all country's debts to IMF in "just" 20 years and shutting down natural gas and electricity for 16...20 hours /day...Still they gave you the electricity when the TV station would start telling the comunist party realizations so that you could use your damn tube TV set to listen to the same b...t for 4 hours each day.
It's weird to see the inverse propaganda in today's western society we too easterners could get a grip on finally , where only 24 k gold plated full of a 100 transistors amplifiers and praised in marketing magazines that ask for about 40k bucks for one positive review, can sound well...
Though being of lowish values in the application we're discussing here, hence not that significant, I also can't believe that DC through a VC may improve a speaker's properties. Quite the contrary: DC biases the VC mechanically and results in a decrease of excursion in the same direction, i. e. leads to less power capability and/or increases 2nd order distortions.
It's about the same, well, snake oil as »charge coupled« film foil or metallized film capacitors that is advocated elsewhere.
Best regards!
It's about the same, well, snake oil as »charge coupled« film foil or metallized film capacitors that is advocated elsewhere.
Best regards!
He might have a point if he shows real distortion measurement there, but i'm not a speaker expert.What's weird is that he's advertising H2 generating products sounding better, tells at some point that speakers produce mostly H2 then he claims reducing speaker's THD through DC bias...omitting that THD in speaker's would be mostly H2...Kinda weird logic.
It's not weird, but shows that he isn't after true HiFi reproduction, but a FX device instead.
Best regards!
Best regards!
Personally i have no problem with FX products manipulating sound one way or another to make audio listening pleasing...It's a whole world outhere full of different pairs of ears...I'm an active proponent of using professional compressors after a cheap phono preamp and some other intentionally degenerating sound equipment myself at least for fun ...It's just that not many people in the so called high end audio world is looking at recording industry or the stage reproduction industry methods of achieving the sound they strive to reproduce ...They claim to make the ultimate digital or analogue reproduction system of a recording heavily compressed through tape and tsl-4 valve compressor, mixed in the best case on neve eq's full of bc184 and old timer electrolitic capacitors that arrived to you as a vinyl copy of a 90's poor quality digital translation of a copy of an old master tape that dissapeared in some big shot collection , but if you tell them that you'd preffer to listen that same piece on the same monitors and amplifiers used in the recording studio in the 60's or 70's not too many really get the point ...Most of the original recording accuracy is completely lost already through the chain to its final consumer of 50 years later while we strive to perfectly reproduce them or on the contrary to mask their defficiencies entirely useg the poor recording reproduction on a "high endish " masking setup to shut the mouth of any other competitor...whilewe don't even know how good the original recording was and how it would sound to 70's people ears on the equipment circulating back then.
Peter Gabriel , way before aquiring and destroying SSL legacy was i think the first to make a recording studio with normal windows and doors and less antiresonating wall padings and no bass traps replicating the usual people listening room in order to make recordings good enough for the usual consummer .He understood back then that most of us will never know how an original recording would sound in the recording studio so there's no point in having a perfect recording that nobody can listen on the usual consummer formats and equipment. Advertising the best or highend equipment able to reproduce a 5th hand recording sounds moot at best.
Hi fi reproduction should be the standard while everything else should probably be traded as one of a thousand flavors as there's no best artist or recording either.
If we can build a hi-fi equipment using germanium transistors in 2022 that might be a good question honestly.I think that yes, it is possible by all means just by adding some modern op-amps.Other than that i wouldn't dare to say that gemanium amps can't sound great .
Peter Gabriel , way before aquiring and destroying SSL legacy was i think the first to make a recording studio with normal windows and doors and less antiresonating wall padings and no bass traps replicating the usual people listening room in order to make recordings good enough for the usual consummer .He understood back then that most of us will never know how an original recording would sound in the recording studio so there's no point in having a perfect recording that nobody can listen on the usual consummer formats and equipment. Advertising the best or highend equipment able to reproduce a 5th hand recording sounds moot at best.
Hi fi reproduction should be the standard while everything else should probably be traded as one of a thousand flavors as there's no best artist or recording either.
If we can build a hi-fi equipment using germanium transistors in 2022 that might be a good question honestly.I think that yes, it is possible by all means just by adding some modern op-amps.Other than that i wouldn't dare to say that gemanium amps can't sound great .
By the way...if germanium doesn"t like the heat you shouldn't allow it to get hot...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5907168
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5907168
Who is T.H.E.Y. ? Which studio equipment are you talking about here? Companders were used to reduce noise in tape recordings. " mixed in the best case on neve eq's full of bc184 and old timer electrolitic capacitors" No. Where? None of the music I listened to used any of these you dream of. "a vinyl copy of a 90's poor quality digital translation of a copy of an old master tape that dissapeared in some big shot collection ,", you simply dream of your own tiny town events being applicable worldwide. I can assure you that the world is slightly bigger than the events in your town.
BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAAA HAAA HAAA HAAAAaaaa
You almost got me there! Seriously? At a temperature that is 70 TIMES lower than room temperature, you got only that? The thermally induced noise is... temperature dependent, and seeing noise level that you could expect from two or more BF862 at room temperature here is outright hilarious. Wait, wait, and it was "30Hz" 😀 :LD 😀
Not 0.3Hz, or 0.003Hz!
You are aware that common commercially available HF transistors are used for low noise at a much lower frequency than 30Hz, is that right? Even the BF862 and the bipolars were used at liquid nitrogen temperature detectors. Here I see BF862 at 1.5nV/rtHz at 300K, at 30Hz, 3 other sub-20-cent transistors perform at similar levels of noise at 30Hz. ROOM TEMPERATURE!
But, you know, 'the engineers of old that spent a lot of time reading and doing math by hand, without any "sYmulators", those knew how to calulate he noise.' I hope you can do it as well.
SOLID block of text, saving even the single space after a dot, forget dividing it into paragraphs.
Molly Bloom at her best 🙂
Some interesting points highlighted.
Won´t comment on fear of using words which might be taken as unkind, so I´m leaving here, this thread is going nowhere.
Oh well.
One of these days I’d like to see a germanium transistor thread actually resulting in somebody building something, turning it on, and getting sound. There’s one over in I & A that started recently and shows a bit of promise, but not holding my breath.
Yes, I'll start with a dissected old portable radio some day and investigate in designing suitable transformers for hopefully following other Ge amps. Anyway, for good reasons I'll restrict on low output power up to five watts, as I've yet learned the delicate behaviour of Ge power transistors in my youth.
Best regards!
Best regards!