Badassbob

I had an MC-10L...my first foray into tubes. After I bought a few other tube products, it made its way onto Craigslist rather quick. Ive rolled =C= EL34s, 6CA7EH, and 6P3S-E....decent amp, but you can do better for the money.

I have 4 Duets...well, 4 Duet receivers with 1 Duet remote. From what I understand, Squeezebox Server supports up to 4 devices. My whole music library is FLAC, as Im a sucker for convenience. About a year ago, an eBay seller was selling new Duet receivers for $99 each, so I picked up 3 of them. Its pretty cool being able to sync up all of my stereos and have whole house audio. The Duet is probably one of my favorite audio purchases.

My Fortes are in a less than ideal environment (the basement) without any sort of room treatment, and I get tons of bass from my 3W 6B4G SET. As a matter of fact, I get deeper and more detailed bass from my SET than I did from my old 52W EL34 amp. Something definitely is amiss. Have you had a look at your crossovers and made sure nothing was wired incorrectly? If you arent the original owner, theres a good chance somebody was dabbling in the crossovers and didnt wire something correctly.

Tubes...so sweet you could roast marshmallows on em [<)]

I need to get around to servicing my RTR. I was given an Akai GX-265D a year ago by a coworker. Its direct drive, but all the sound that comes out of it is scratchy and distorted.

I have the new mids and Ti tweets in my Fortes along with BEC XOs. The mids IMO were a more noticeable upgrade than the Ti tweets, but both are very worthwhile. SET12 is right, the mids do sound cramped on the first listen, but once youre 10 hours into them, youll fall in love. Ive noticed quite a bit of bounceback and cranking guitar solos and the likewith the stock mids, but now its non-existent.

If his reaction is anything like mine was after the cap upgrade, people will be telling him "your face is gonna get stuck like that".

Does the terminal cup have a date printed on it? As far as I know, '85 was the only year with the round terminal cup...'86 to '89 had the square cup.

Definitely recap those...it made all the difference in the world with mine. You have the newer Fortes, mine have the round terminal cups. $150 is a great deal even if people did spill the bong water on them. Mine have the full Crites treatments, mids, titanium tweets, and XOs. Now theyre a totally different animal (for the better!)

He does do some good work. Id like to try one of his other designs someday. Im having too much fun with the 6B4G SE right now to worry about anotherproject though lol.

I use patio cord found at Home Depot. I think a 50 footer is ~$7 or so, terminated with bananas.

I have a Trends TA-10.1 sitting on my desk, its been torn apart the past year or so. Its another project thatll be done someday lol. Im replacing the stock tank caps with Russian PIOs, replacing the electrolytics with Elnas, new binding posts, new RCA jacks, and a new enclosure. Its one fine sounding amp...used it with my Fortes for a short time.

It wasnt too hard to build the amp...for a first time project, it came out excellent IMO. Currently, Im not using my media server as a DVR, but may do so in the future. All of my machines are some form of Linux, and generally it can take a little bit to get driver support on newer TV cards. Right now, Im running 2x 500GB RAID 1 arrays and 2x 1TB non-RAID on Ubuntu Server 8.04.

Heres some pics I took during the progress of the amp. This was with the base I made...Im not a very good woodworker. This is the one my friend made, all oak. I hit it with a couple coats of stain and some Feed N Wax. It almost matches my Oiled Oak Fortes. Ive owned the speakers now for 2 years. My first forray with Klipsch was with their computer speakers. Ive only been into the hifi hobby for about 5 years, having owned various Klipsch bookshelf models, Paradigm Titan Monitors, New Large Advents, and other larger bookshelf speakers. As far as amps, Ive owned a vintage Kenwood KR9400, a few Chinese tube amps, Adcom, and NAD. This is my only tube amp as of now. I sold my Yaqin MC-10L yesterday. The amp you see above didnt set me back too much. Over at DIY Tube they have a whole writeup about this amp. I only have ~$600 into it, and it sounds by far better than anything else Ive owned. Its my very first SET, and I can only imagine what something better sounds like. I didnt have much electronics experience, save for soldering. With the build manual at DIY Tube, it went rather flawless. The building experience was awesome. I think Im going to roll my own amps from here on out! I run a 3TB music/movie server at my house. Its all tied together by 3 Squeezebox Duets and 3 softmodded Xboxes. All of my music is in FLAC format, and all of my DVDs are 1:1 rips with full menus intact. Im a sucker for convenience.

I just dropped a little coin over the past couple weeks lol. I built my first amp, the Get*SET*Go, using James OPTs, K40Y-9s, and NOS Sylvy 6SL7GT driving a pair of Sovtek 6B4Gs. Its the one in my avatar. I have since replaced the green switch with a dimmer red switch.