I confess I read Stereophile, and in the issue that came yesterday there is coverage of Burning Amp 2010 by JV Serene Highness - er - Jason Victor Serinus. I was glad to see it, but he had a little attitude showing in spots. Oh well, he gave props to the Main Guys who have done so much for us DIY types.
almost blah ( copy & read - just in case of copyleft blah)
Burning Amp (comp.os.ms-windows.misc | Google Groups
vwhr), North America’s largest annual
gathering devoted to DIY audio, welcomed
a record number of attendees last
year. Held October 30, 2010 in a series
of rooms at San Francisco’s sprawling
Fort Mason complex, the event drew at
least 160 attendees for a full day of door
prizes, auditions of homemade components,
and presentations by DIY mentors
Nelson Pass, Siegfried Linkwitz, and
Kirkwood Rough (of Linear Systems).
While most present were from the
Bay Area, others had traveled from
Poland, Serbia, and Australia. The sole
Australian, 34-year-old Jason Donald,
began the DIYAudio.com forum 12
years ago, to facilitate communication
among DIYers who share the mantra
“I can build that for less.”
The website now has 150,000
members, receives 5 million
page views each month, and
publishes a monthly newsletter.
Donald, seen in the photo
between Burning Amp organizers
Vladimir Simovich and
Mark Cronander, currently
oversees a team of 12 moderators,
who manage DIYAudio’s
1000 posts per day.
Cronander explained that
Burning Amp provides a rare
opportunity for DIYers to
socialize and exchange ideas
with no screens between
them. Indeed, while it was
possible to listen to some of
the equipment on display
while some 130 people sat
in silence across the hall, listening
to talks, later in the
afternoon music took second
place to gab. I was able
to duck out of the presentations—
Nelson Pass’s “Amped
Up and Openly Baffl ed,”
Kirkwood Rough’s “The
Watt Sucking Fireball Amp
No.5,” and Siegfried Linkwitz’s
“What Are the On-axis
and Off-axis Frequency-Response
Requirements for
Stereo Loudspeakers?”—long
enough to hear some gear.
My fi rst delights were the
fabulous soundstage and timbrally
perfect higher frequencies
produced by Bill Berndt’s
turntable—assembled for
fellow Bay Area Audiophile
Society member Peter Truce
from parts found on eBay—6L
phono stage, EF86 linestage,
and 6V6 push-pull amplifi
er. Berndt is a student in
Ed Yang’s equipment-building
classes at San Francisco’s
Randall Museum, and Truce is a music
lover who can’t resist customizing
equipment.
Noting Randy Bankert’s Sonist
Loudspeakers, which I’ve enjoyed at
audio shows when paired with Glow
and deHavilland electronics, and a
modifi ed Glow amp, I sat in awe in a
room dominated by Linkwitz’s openbaffl
ed loudspeakers. Available in kit
form from Wood Artistry, these moderately
sized speakers created perhaps the
most dynamic-sounding presentation
from CD I have ever heard. The music
was an obscure Swedish recording
aul Mägi and the Uppsala Chamber
Orchestra performing Shostakovich’s
Symphony 15. The bass impact, soundstage
immensity, and dynamic gradations
produced by these small speakers
in a very large, totally untreated space
was what I would expect only from
Wilson Audio’s Alexandria X-2s or
similar giants. A Marantz CD player
and a 12-channel ATI amp were used:
each woofer, midrange driver, and pairof tweeters had its own channel
of amplifi cation. Linkwitz
assured me that the amp rarely
peaked above 20Wpc.
In one corner of a third
room, Demian Martin and Ray
Burnham demonstrated their
bargain-of-the-year Auraliti
music server to Mark Brasfi
eld, who is developing his
own powered speaker based
on National Semiconductor’s
LME parts. Available in kit
form as well as completely
assembled, the Auraliti’s superior
organizing abilities attracted
lots of questions but
few listeners. Too late did the
team realize that removing the
server’s cover or encasing it in
clear plastic, thus revealing its
innards, is the bottom line for
the DIY crowd.
Opposite them, the legendary
John Curl was engaged in
rapt conversation with Kirkwood
Rough as they tested
diodes on a Quantech Semiconductor
Noise Tester, no
longer manufactured and
now very rare. Rough’s latest
Watt Sucking Fireball Amp,
poetically named No.5, produces
200Wpc. Between designing
and modifying amps
according to customer whim,
Rough, in signature T-shirt,
peered out from behind his
thick lenses and declared,
“Customer whims are many
and plentiful.”
After Nelson Pass’s talk,
in which he said something
like, “We at Pass Labs have a
rule that your speaker cables
should never cost more than
your amps,” I invited him to
lug his amps over to my place
and hear what they sound like
with the very expensive Nordost Odin
cables. This, however, was a DIY fest,
where spending less for more is an
axiom. Pass’s display included what he
called “the cheapest possible system” he
could build using open-baffl ed speakers.
A fi nal room displayed the fruits
of Bryan Levin and Ti Kan’s labors:
Levin’s circuit boards for headphone
amps, their jointly designed digital
volume control, and Ti Kan’s analog
power amp. Levin has been involved
with DIY since the age of 10, while Ti
Kan came onboard at the ripe old age
of 13. “These are the fi rst DIY controlparts for audio on the market,” Levin
declared. “You can’t buy equipment
that performs at this level, because it
would cost too much. Instead, you buy
our stuff, and choose the other components
or upgrade existing gear to
achieve this level of quality. You can
also fi x your own gear, like in the ’50s,
when it was still possible to fi x your
own car.” I wasn’t transfi xed by the
quality of the system’s highs, as heard
through Sennheiser HD 800 headphones,
but almost anything, including
Fort Mason’s untreated power, could
have been the culprit.
Just before the feeding frenzy, aka
raffl ing off of free DIY parts, which
some buyers actually use and others
sell on eBay, I skipped the opportunity
to hear yet more Diana Krall in Pass’s
room to instead make the acquaintance
of another Nelson. Hoping to begin
his study of electrical engineering next
year, at MIT or Cooper Union, Nelson
Brock is a true child of Burning
Amp. First bitten by the DIY bug three
years ago, when his father brought the
14-year-old to the annual fest, Brock
built his fi rst component from parts
donated by Nelson Pass. On display
was what he believes is the fi rst DIY
Pass amp based on Pass’s suggestion to
incorporate Elna Silmic capacitors. The
project brought to mind what John Curl
once told me: One of the secrets of the
sound of his legendary phono preamp
was the ability of his late partner, Carl
Thompson, to identify the sonic signature
of individual caps and resistors, and
to mix and match rare parts to achieve
the optimal sound quality. ■
Burning Amp (comp.os.ms-windows.misc | Google Groups
vwhr), North America’s largest annual
gathering devoted to DIY audio, welcomed
a record number of attendees last
year. Held October 30, 2010 in a series
of rooms at San Francisco’s sprawling
Fort Mason complex, the event drew at
least 160 attendees for a full day of door
prizes, auditions of homemade components,
and presentations by DIY mentors
Nelson Pass, Siegfried Linkwitz, and
Kirkwood Rough (of Linear Systems).
While most present were from the
Bay Area, others had traveled from
Poland, Serbia, and Australia. The sole
Australian, 34-year-old Jason Donald,
began the DIYAudio.com forum 12
years ago, to facilitate communication
among DIYers who share the mantra
“I can build that for less.”
The website now has 150,000
members, receives 5 million
page views each month, and
publishes a monthly newsletter.
Donald, seen in the photo
between Burning Amp organizers
Vladimir Simovich and
Mark Cronander, currently
oversees a team of 12 moderators,
who manage DIYAudio’s
1000 posts per day.
Cronander explained that
Burning Amp provides a rare
opportunity for DIYers to
socialize and exchange ideas
with no screens between
them. Indeed, while it was
possible to listen to some of
the equipment on display
while some 130 people sat
in silence across the hall, listening
to talks, later in the
afternoon music took second
place to gab. I was able
to duck out of the presentations—
Nelson Pass’s “Amped
Up and Openly Baffl ed,”
Kirkwood Rough’s “The
Watt Sucking Fireball Amp
No.5,” and Siegfried Linkwitz’s
“What Are the On-axis
and Off-axis Frequency-Response
Requirements for
Stereo Loudspeakers?”—long
enough to hear some gear.
My fi rst delights were the
fabulous soundstage and timbrally
perfect higher frequencies
produced by Bill Berndt’s
turntable—assembled for
fellow Bay Area Audiophile
Society member Peter Truce
from parts found on eBay—6L
phono stage, EF86 linestage,
and 6V6 push-pull amplifi
er. Berndt is a student in
Ed Yang’s equipment-building
classes at San Francisco’s
Randall Museum, and Truce is a music
lover who can’t resist customizing
equipment.
Noting Randy Bankert’s Sonist
Loudspeakers, which I’ve enjoyed at
audio shows when paired with Glow
and deHavilland electronics, and a
modifi ed Glow amp, I sat in awe in a
room dominated by Linkwitz’s openbaffl
ed loudspeakers. Available in kit
form from Wood Artistry, these moderately
sized speakers created perhaps the
most dynamic-sounding presentation
from CD I have ever heard. The music
was an obscure Swedish recording
aul Mägi and the Uppsala ChamberOrchestra performing Shostakovich’s
Symphony 15. The bass impact, soundstage
immensity, and dynamic gradations
produced by these small speakers
in a very large, totally untreated space
was what I would expect only from
Wilson Audio’s Alexandria X-2s or
similar giants. A Marantz CD player
and a 12-channel ATI amp were used:
each woofer, midrange driver, and pairof tweeters had its own channel
of amplifi cation. Linkwitz
assured me that the amp rarely
peaked above 20Wpc.
In one corner of a third
room, Demian Martin and Ray
Burnham demonstrated their
bargain-of-the-year Auraliti
music server to Mark Brasfi
eld, who is developing his
own powered speaker based
on National Semiconductor’s
LME parts. Available in kit
form as well as completely
assembled, the Auraliti’s superior
organizing abilities attracted
lots of questions but
few listeners. Too late did the
team realize that removing the
server’s cover or encasing it in
clear plastic, thus revealing its
innards, is the bottom line for
the DIY crowd.
Opposite them, the legendary
John Curl was engaged in
rapt conversation with Kirkwood
Rough as they tested
diodes on a Quantech Semiconductor
Noise Tester, no
longer manufactured and
now very rare. Rough’s latest
Watt Sucking Fireball Amp,
poetically named No.5, produces
200Wpc. Between designing
and modifying amps
according to customer whim,
Rough, in signature T-shirt,
peered out from behind his
thick lenses and declared,
“Customer whims are many
and plentiful.”
After Nelson Pass’s talk,
in which he said something
like, “We at Pass Labs have a
rule that your speaker cables
should never cost more than
your amps,” I invited him to
lug his amps over to my place
and hear what they sound like
with the very expensive Nordost Odin
cables. This, however, was a DIY fest,
where spending less for more is an
axiom. Pass’s display included what he
called “the cheapest possible system” he
could build using open-baffl ed speakers.
A fi nal room displayed the fruits
of Bryan Levin and Ti Kan’s labors:
Levin’s circuit boards for headphone
amps, their jointly designed digital
volume control, and Ti Kan’s analog
power amp. Levin has been involved
with DIY since the age of 10, while Ti
Kan came onboard at the ripe old age
of 13. “These are the fi rst DIY controlparts for audio on the market,” Levin
declared. “You can’t buy equipment
that performs at this level, because it
would cost too much. Instead, you buy
our stuff, and choose the other components
or upgrade existing gear to
achieve this level of quality. You can
also fi x your own gear, like in the ’50s,
when it was still possible to fi x your
own car.” I wasn’t transfi xed by the
quality of the system’s highs, as heard
through Sennheiser HD 800 headphones,
but almost anything, including
Fort Mason’s untreated power, could
have been the culprit.
Just before the feeding frenzy, aka
raffl ing off of free DIY parts, which
some buyers actually use and others
sell on eBay, I skipped the opportunity
to hear yet more Diana Krall in Pass’s
room to instead make the acquaintance
of another Nelson. Hoping to begin
his study of electrical engineering next
year, at MIT or Cooper Union, Nelson
Brock is a true child of Burning
Amp. First bitten by the DIY bug three
years ago, when his father brought the
14-year-old to the annual fest, Brock
built his fi rst component from parts
donated by Nelson Pass. On display
was what he believes is the fi rst DIY
Pass amp based on Pass’s suggestion to
incorporate Elna Silmic capacitors. The
project brought to mind what John Curl
once told me: One of the secrets of the
sound of his legendary phono preamp
was the ability of his late partner, Carl
Thompson, to identify the sonic signature
of individual caps and resistors, and
to mix and match rare parts to achieve
the optimal sound quality. ■
Don't... staying healthy isn't easy with that job. That guy you cited obviously failedoh boy ......... one day I'll be audio journalist
sorry - I didn't expressed adequately .......
what I meant is - FiFi journalist ...... so there is no chance that you can find your self in that breed .....
btw. what I found as really disgusting in FiFi periodic is universal praxis that every second piece under evaluation represents real break-trough and Mana from Heaven ....
with that tempo we need to be out of Universe , keeping with that amount of progress ......
but not - we are still there , with some gadgets even 3 (or more ) decades old , holding just well .....
what I meant is - FiFi journalist ...... so there is no chance that you can find your self in that breed .....
btw. what I found as really disgusting in FiFi periodic is universal praxis that every second piece under evaluation represents real break-trough and Mana from Heaven ....
with that tempo we need to be out of Universe , keeping with that amount of progress ......
but not - we are still there , with some gadgets even 3 (or more ) decades old , holding just well .....
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Example of attitude - dis all the attendees plus Nelson in only part of one sentence.
I also found it mildly amusing that Mr. Linkwitz's Orions were new to him, and such a revelation, considering that he pointedly bugged out on the session where Mr. Linkwitz explained the psycho-acoustic principles behind them.
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he obviously don't need that ( or anything else , in area of social culture ) - he owns "expensive cables" ........
anyway - if I go further with every wrong detail ( technical or social) , it will be almost endless nitpicking .......
I wander if he knows his way around the shoe laces...
nothing wrong with that ........
anyway - we are always lacking in proper Off Topic threads .......
btw. where is Jaccovitty when one needs him .......
Juma,
I would guess that the writer probably wears loafers, thus he isn't confused by such mundane things as tying ones shoes.
Zen Mod,
Perhaps Jacco is wisely staying away. That way he doesn't utter anything that might get him "Sin Bin" time?!
Peace,
Dave
Juma,
...
Perhaps Jacco is wisely staying away. That way he doesn't utter anything that might get him "Sin Bin" time?!
Peace,
Dave
naah
he's probably somewhere , heating Mother Earth even more with mighty Diesels .
(he's probably wasting few Nordost Dreks through auspuff , each month ..... perfectly happy doing that )
don't write twice about Sin Bin ....... that's challenge for my Dutchie
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