George,
I'm very sad to hear about this. You have been an inspiration to my interest in the tube world, and I think your many projects have been remarkably completed and beautifully documented. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge so freely.
I have been very impressed with your cathode follower power amp using the 6EM7 some years back, a brilliant design and an innovative use of high power sweep tubes.
Good luck with retirement, I hope you remain interested in electronics. You are very, very good at it.
Hugh Dean
Melbourne, Australia
I'm very sad to hear about this. You have been an inspiration to my interest in the tube world, and I think your many projects have been remarkably completed and beautifully documented. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge so freely.
I have been very impressed with your cathode follower power amp using the 6EM7 some years back, a brilliant design and an innovative use of high power sweep tubes.
Good luck with retirement, I hope you remain interested in electronics. You are very, very good at it.
Hugh Dean
Melbourne, Australia
My wife is the other half of the two person corporation known as Tubelab Inc. She has been in favor of closing down for several years since the last reasonably profitable year was 2017. Two recent events have strongly reinforced her position.
One of her relatives had a two person corporation dealing with rental properties when she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last year. Her death left a tangled mess of legal issues since her husband did not have full knowledge of all the properties that were in her name before the corporation was formed. Sherri has not been involved with Tubelab Inc since we left Florida in 2014. She would have no idea how to even fill board orders and has no desire to learn.
I placed a significant portion of my earnings into retirement accounts (401K and IRA) over my 41 years of working for Motorola. This should provide us with enough income to live through retirement if there are no serious setbacks. I had assumed that those accounts would be protected from seizure in a civil suit as they were when we lived in Florida. A recent frivolous lawsuit over a dog bite alerted us to the fact that all of your retirement accounts, your primary residence, and even your social security check are fair game in a civil suit in this state. An elderly woman living alone in an old house she owned was left homeless and broke by some crafty lawyers. This action has left me no option other than to eliminate my involvement in the sale of items related to playing with potentially deadly amounts of electricity.
Electronics has been my life ever since the paper clip met the wall outlet at about age 4. Building stuff with vacuum tubes came shortly after that since they were readily available in the form of discarded electronics. This hobby led me to a job on the assembly line testing and tuning HT-220 walkie talkies at Motorola at age 20 which morphed into an engineering career and two engineering degrees at Motorola's expense. Electronics is still a big part of my life and probably always will be. Fortunately electronics is a rather wide and constantly expanding field with lots of interesting opportunities without deadly levels of electricity. My entire engineering career involved 28 volts or less.
I never had a 200 board sales year but I did hit 194 once with an average of 137 per year and a low of 48. The people on this forum do a pretty good job of helping each other sort out the common stuff. I get involved when I see someone being led astray or something unique happens like the guy whose board played but caps kept exploding. It turned out to be a dead short in a brand new Hammond power transformer between the 5 volt and 6.3 volt windings. This puts B+ on the heaters but oddly blew no tubes. The little mylar bypass cap had a rough time though. Later on there was another user with a similar shorted Hammond.
What gets me is the PM's and emails asking me to troubleshoot electronics or recommend some speakers or electronics that I have never seen. I have purchased exactly one new set of speakers in my entire life, the Yamaha NS-10M Studio monitors that I still have. They were purchased when I did have a DIY home recording studio. All of my audio electronics has been DIY or repaired discards, except for a Technics TT that I bought in the 80's and still use.
This forum was supposed to be a paid for forum for the purpose of promoting and selling Tubelab products. It has morphed into a DIY build and support forum with no self promotion involved. I do not actively promote or recommend my stuff here or anywhere on diyAudio. I have also not paid for this forum in a long time either, If Jason and team choses to keep this forum here, I will continue to visit it and provide assistance as needed. If it goes away, I'm OK with that too. I will still frequent diyAudio as time permits.
The web site has not been updated in a long time either. The current hosting company is relatively cheap at $129 per year and it is paid up until mid 2024.
Ouch. Yeah. That seems like wise risk management on your part. The odds of getting sued to that extent are probably minuscule, but obviously not zero. The cost is astronomical. So at some point Risk*Cost > ComfortLevel.
That's what happens when you have skills...
I'm happy to go through your website and print the pages to a .pdf file (or whatever makes sense) and put them in a Github repository along with the build guides and zipped Gerber files. I'll create a "here's how you go from zip file to PCB" guide so people can help themselves. It's not a big page so it would not take me long. I would need a little bit of involvement from you directly to get the build guides, Gerber files, high-res photos, etc. but that should be pretty manageable. It would be pretty close to hands-off for you if you want it to be.
If this has your interest just toss me a PM or email (add @neurochrome.com to my ID here). Just give me a heads-up a few months before the hosting expires.
... or you can let it drift into the ether and be accessible through he Internet Archive / Wayback Machine.
No pressure. I'm just making myself available to help.
Tom
Not disappearing from DIY or diyAudio, just not selling boards anymore. This could be a good thing for some of you since I will make the board designs and Gerber files available somehow and there are lots of boards that never got to be a Tubelab product that are useful to someone.
I took a van load of Tubelab stuff to the Dayton Hamfest and sold a lot of it. Gone is the original "Industrial" SSE amp and the deadly 845SE amp and a lot of tubes and transformers. I do have more and they will be seen on the Swap Meet section here once I make up my mind just what I want to do next. I have more tubes and parts than I can possibly use in whatever time I have left in this world. I will keep enough for several more years though and will continue to play with them.
I have talked about building a 1 Kilowatt vacuum tube amp, and have collected enough of the parts to build one or maybe even two of them. I have also seen the audio power meter on my 8903A read well over 500 watts on a single channel UNSET board. Do I really need a 1 KW tube amp? No. Do I want to build one? Maybe. Will I? I don't know.
I have also talked about building a vacuum tube music synthesizer. I have also breadboarded and tested some of the circuitry. Again the same questions and answers apply. So, the obvious decision is which is more important to me. I'm leaning toward the synthesizer since it's really a new direction for me.
I have been tinkering with synth stuff ever since I saw ELP in concert back in 1971. The song Lucky Man just seem to create a resonance in my bedroom which was a converted garage when cranked through my DIY home stereo which ran 4 X metal 6L6 tubes per channel through a pair of DIY 4 X 12 inch guitar cabinets. I ordered the PAIA 2700 DIY synthesizer kit when it first came out and have been making synth stuff ever since, but all of it has been solid state or digital.
Do I "test" stuff? Of course. Do I want to be responsible for showing someone how to burn down their house or fry themselves? No. There is a fine line out there somewhere. I need to stay on the conservative side of it........did I just say that?
I grew up in Miami Florida when air conditioning was not available. Shoes and shirts have always been optional in my world except when absolutely required...ALLWAYS wear a shirt at the kitchen table!!
Strange, I did shove my first communion gold chain into the wall outlet, but that convinced me to stay away from electricity and I eventually became a software developer.
Github is a great resource (MSFT notwithstanding): you can even host a website for free from there. Look for instructions on how to set this up.
Thanks for the S.S.E., and all the chats (may these continue!), George. Time to make some music I guess, or whatever you feel like.
All the best.
It even looks like you might be able to host a WordPress site on Github: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/wordpress-github-integration
It could be a bit of work to get it going but it could be an option. It would be easier if Github allowed access to the WP database and such.
Tom
It could be a bit of work to get it going but it could be an option. It would be easier if Github allowed access to the WP database and such.
Tom
I had worked my way up the food chain at Motorola from assembly line tech to product hardware design engineer when I ran into the "you need an engineering degree" roadblock. One of my bosses even arranged for Motorola to pay for it. I asked what kind of "engineering" qualified for tuition reimbursement, and since we had just designed the first police walkie talkie with a microprocessor in it, we agreed that a "computer engineering" degree would be a good fit. CE is basically a watered down EE degree with things like "C," Pascal, and computer architecture substituted for Thermodynamics and Fields and Waves. This was the late 80's and early 90's so I learned on Borland Turbo C and MS Dos / Windows 3.2 running on an Intel 80386 machine overclocked to the point where the white paint peeled off the 386 chip, so I glued on a heat sink (about 40 MHz).
This experience convinced me to avoid software engineering. During my CE degree progress, I had invented a language that my teachers and I called C--. It was C with all the stuff I didn't understand left out. Today we call that an Arduino sketch, and indeed the Arduino environment lines up well with my programming skill as it exists today 30 years since I graduated.
I do have a GitHub account but have never posted any content. I mainly use it to keep up with the latest tech in (mostly digital) music generation. Be wary of software that runs on a PC found on GitHub. I always test anything I download on a non-networked dedicated "canary in the coal mine" machine to see what happens, then scan it thoroughly after it has run for a few days. So far the only serious infection that I have caught came into this machine through some malvertizing bundled in with the Yahoo mail reader. Neither Norton or McAfee could find or fix it, but Malwarebytes did.
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George- Best wishes to you in your retirement. I'll always remember your experience getting shocked from your aluminized cover on a Frijid Pink LP. I have a copy of that album, (Defrosted?), think of TubeLabs every time I see it.
Here's a few photos of some of the TubeLab amps I own/owned. I enjoyed building them as much as listening to them.
Here's a few photos of some of the TubeLab amps I own/owned. I enjoyed building them as much as listening to them.
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Ah, ah, good times! Us software monkeys can do a lot of damage with a few keystrokes. But we often fix it with a few keystrokes too.
A friend of mine managed to order a 500K units product run of some electronic device with a design fault in it. He got fired. (We all know it should be impossible in a modern and well-run electronics design process, but wild times happen in mundane places.)
I once fixed software that took down a major online retailer for 3 hours, and I got promoted for it.
But I now love electronics as a hobby.
I bet if I had gone EE, I would love SE as a hobby.
It wasn't Frijid Pink. It was Steppenwolf the Second (the one with Magic Carpet Ride). This is the actual record that I had back in 1969 that obviously conducts electricity quite well. I shot this picture after finishing my "wall of sound" and unboxing my records that have been stored for nearly 10 years.
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I’m glad you will continue to be here on DIYAudio to share your knowledge and experience with us. It’s hard to make money in this area and people don’t appreciate all the work that goes into doing what you have been doing.
lawyers can really suck the life out of people! Don’t worry, they will meet karma one day!
lawyers can really suck the life out of people! Don’t worry, they will meet karma one day!
Well, having done the diyaudio thing, more time for the Tubelab transceiver, then. The last broadband tube rig was, what ... the Signal/Ones .... ?
I view the boards as more of a convenience to the builder, the real intellectual property is the written knowledge / discourse you contribute to the forum. Maybe I see things with rose tint glasses, but if you release the boards into public domain, Tubelab lives on, but you're shed of the headaches.
Business has not been a lot of fun since 2008 or so, so I don't blame you a bit about wanting out of it to do something else. (edit: or nothing else ). I wanted to get to Dayton this year for the first time in a long time, but alas, it was not to be.
73,
Win W5JAG
I view the boards as more of a convenience to the builder, the real intellectual property is the written knowledge / discourse you contribute to the forum. Maybe I see things with rose tint glasses, but if you release the boards into public domain, Tubelab lives on, but you're shed of the headaches.
Business has not been a lot of fun since 2008 or so, so I don't blame you a bit about wanting out of it to do something else. (edit: or nothing else ). I wanted to get to Dayton this year for the first time in a long time, but alas, it was not to be.
73,
Win W5JAG
I will sign up for the job.I just wanna know ONE thing:
WHO the F*** is gonna "blow stuff up" for us?
George.......it's been a nice run...many people building great sounding amplifiers and learning lots. My TSE is still my favorite amp.
It's completely understandable when the venture is losing $$ and there are concerns of legal liability......just the way things are these days unforch.
You've spanned from heathkit days to disposable audio on a phone with earbuds. I have no doubt you'll still be here creating something unusual, people will just have to go back to point-to-point wiring ;-).
I've wandered around from tubes to speakers a few of Nelson's designs to class D....it's all fun.
It's completely understandable when the venture is losing $$ and there are concerns of legal liability......just the way things are these days unforch.
You've spanned from heathkit days to disposable audio on a phone with earbuds. I have no doubt you'll still be here creating something unusual, people will just have to go back to point-to-point wiring ;-).
I've wandered around from tubes to speakers a few of Nelson's designs to class D....it's all fun.
It all comes down to how to monetise this niche, I guess. Stephe, over on the main pages, has done a great job using YouTube, and appealing to the group that are buying cheap tube products from China. She also has her own products, but the revenue is the advertising linked to YouTube and subscriptions I expect.
Once upon a time a PCB was a way to preserve a design and monetise it, but now with online PCB suppliers it is trivial and astoundingly cheap to replicate PCBs.
I think one option might have been to develop some hardware in parallel - for example a monogrammed top plate for $50 - or struck up a deal with a transformer supplier, but it is a brutal world for an entrepreneur, and not for the first time, listening to your tales, am I glad to be living in Europe with free healthcare and minimal litigation.
I think you story is a common story across so many creative areas. In this new world where we no longer save up and spend money on things like newspapers and music, there is no money in those areas anymore, and we end up being poorer, because the talented people have to look for other vocations. I think we see that a bit in the way we are losing bands capable of filling stadiums, where a comprehensive back catalogue is part of the story.
Yet again I am glad I am old, and have lived through the greatest years! (I would even be a bit older, truth be told, and have been 18 in 1970, to really appreciate the whole 70's decade, and topped it off at the end of the decade with a ratty E-type Jag for peanuts).
Once upon a time a PCB was a way to preserve a design and monetise it, but now with online PCB suppliers it is trivial and astoundingly cheap to replicate PCBs.
I think one option might have been to develop some hardware in parallel - for example a monogrammed top plate for $50 - or struck up a deal with a transformer supplier, but it is a brutal world for an entrepreneur, and not for the first time, listening to your tales, am I glad to be living in Europe with free healthcare and minimal litigation.
I think you story is a common story across so many creative areas. In this new world where we no longer save up and spend money on things like newspapers and music, there is no money in those areas anymore, and we end up being poorer, because the talented people have to look for other vocations. I think we see that a bit in the way we are losing bands capable of filling stadiums, where a comprehensive back catalogue is part of the story.
Yet again I am glad I am old, and have lived through the greatest years! (I would even be a bit older, truth be told, and have been 18 in 1970, to really appreciate the whole 70's decade, and topped it off at the end of the decade with a ratty E-type Jag for peanuts).
Some of the early STEPPENWOLF songs are very surprisingly well recorded.
I never bought the LPs since I was much too cool and knowing to admit how much I liked them so I have only heard them on CD. The bass is very well done and powerful. Magic Carpet Ride is fun to play to folks who had dismissed the song like I did for all of the wrong reasons.
All who hear it are glad they got to reassess their opinion.
John Kay is one of the great voices in rock and roll. When so many of the others were approaching fasletto Kay sings with baritone power; phrasing that fits the song.
Just had to throw that in.
Glad to hear you will have more time for yourself without worryning about a business and even worse absurd harvesters - that is what they call it when they fleece somone - harvesting. A bizarre perversion of production.
I never bought the LPs since I was much too cool and knowing to admit how much I liked them so I have only heard them on CD. The bass is very well done and powerful. Magic Carpet Ride is fun to play to folks who had dismissed the song like I did for all of the wrong reasons.
All who hear it are glad they got to reassess their opinion.
John Kay is one of the great voices in rock and roll. When so many of the others were approaching fasletto Kay sings with baritone power; phrasing that fits the song.
Just had to throw that in.
Glad to hear you will have more time for yourself without worryning about a business and even worse absurd harvesters - that is what they call it when they fleece somone - harvesting. A bizarre perversion of production.