Parrot

This is an Eico group that just started. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eico/

Insurance: It is important to make sure you are covered for actual replacement value, and even better if particularly rare pieces are itemized with photos and descriptions. Otherwise the insurance company can say about your $1 million painting, well, that picture of yours had about $10 worth of paint in it, and $50 invested in the frame. That's $60, but it was old and beat-up, so we'll give you $30 for your loss.

The seller should be a good shipper with his experience. But make sure you have him double-box. Worth an extra several dollars or Euros to prevent damage. If he doesn't plan to take the tubes out, make sure he stuffs tissue paper around them to protect them. You'll love the amp.

$540. Congrats, Wolfram, if that was you. Otherwise, congrats to whomever.

As far as a CD player goes, get a Sony SACD machine. They also play CDs. You can get a close-out/clearance/open box unit at Best Buy in the $115-$149 range. Then you can also buy SACD titles at your convenience.

Is the clock built-in? Speaker sure is pretty!

The next paragraph of the same article: ***Still, as Charlie Kittleson explains, "To many music lovers, tube amps add more realism, excitement, and dimension to prerecorded sound. Solid-state amps can sound two-dimensional and are typically harsh and less musical." According to tube loyalists, Kittleson says, "tubes color the sound warm; solid-state colors it cold and brittle. People buy these huge 500-watt solid-state amps, and they wind up pacing around their apartments or their New York townhouses, feeling something is missing in the music. Then they go over to somebody's house and listen to a little tube amp, and they're sold. And it's not just because tubes glow in the dark or look cool, although that's part of it too."*** This message has been edited by paulparrot on 09-09-2002 at 06:03 AM

Dave, That's not applicable at all here.

DocJ, Don't sweat it. Your attitude on money is a perfectly legitimate one. We all like to talk about bargains, the $300 La Scalas and so forth, but they certainly are worth every bit of $2000 as well. Not everybody likes to spend the time to find a bargain. If the time one spends looking at eBay for months, or going to hundreds of garage sales is figured in as time one could have been making money, then it's by far more cost effective just to pay the bucks in the first place and get something good. Most people here consider their equipment time as their free time, and something to do for fun, so we're not really looking at it like time is money, but that is a valid viewpoint. We just hope you do get a good example of this amp here. All the best.

$307! on the HF-14 pair. You can never go by what an auction is at until the end, because this kind of stuff frequently doubles or triples in the last couple of minutes. Tom, I emailed my friend. He hasn't kept in touch with anyone--been way too long. He recalls the transformers being their strong point, but that they often went bad. But he is probably talking about those in later products, I would guess.

Is there anything about this loom construction that makes the initial design any more difficult? I wonder why other manufacturer's didn't do the same thing? Or did some? I sometimes see pictures of do it yourself projects with extremely neat wiring and lots of right angles.

A friend of mine worked there in the late 1960s, but all he did was pack orders.

I wonder what it is about the nature of people that they argue with each other when they have similar interests. You would think that we would battle with people who don't like tubes, or who don't like Klipsch, rather than argue with someone else who likes tubes and likes Klipsch, just different models. Of course it's by no means limited to this board, or to audio. You know, it's like one Corvette collector saying his '67 blows away the other's '97, or whatever. Whereas it would seem more likely a Corvette collector would be arguing with someone who hated Chevys. Anyway, the confrontations are witty enough, so I sure as heck don't mind.

The only consolation is that if we had all known about the auction, they'd have gone for a lot more money.

Tom, A pair of HF-14 amps would not be good for you unless you had a preamp with them. If you plugged a CD player directly into them, you'd have the full power of the amp, 12-14 watts, coming at you. And unless you were playing a really low-level CD or on inefficient speakers, you'd be in pain. If you have Klipschorns or something like that, you'd run out of the room with your hands over your ears. You'd have to have a preamp in order to control the volume. A common cause of noise or static in integrated amps would be dirt in the volume control pot or the treble or bass pots, and that *might* be easily fixed with contact cleaner. But since the HF-14s don't have these pots, they're only power amps, it's got to be something else. I'd get the ones up for auction only if you were willing to pay to have someone fix them for you. (Clipped & Shorn probably got away without a preamp because his tuner doesn't have the high output of a CD player.) This message has been edited by paulparrot on 09-01-2002 at 09:16 AM

It may be more complicated than finding transformers with similar specs. It may be finding transformers with similar specs that have aged for 40+ years. Somebody can shoot me down if I'm wrong, but I would think the sound of the transformers changes after decades of use. Maybe good units sound better now than they did around 1959. This message has been edited by paulparrot on 08-31-2002 at 07:36 AM

I couldn't resist. You know it wasn't going to go at bargain rates anyway. Several months ago there was an unassembled kit of the monoblock Eico HF-60. In the original box and everything. Went for $1000. Pretty wild considering the original price was $72.95. I hope the eventual buyer buys new caps rather than put in ones 40 or so years old.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1377345412This will go for a pretty penny.

Excellent analogies there, Clipped. You nailed it.

Mike, Redbook just refers to normal, standard CDs. To anyone concerned about whether SACD will make it into the homes of the larger buying public, it has a better chance than vinyl.

Kelly, Have you heard any modded SACD players, with aftermarket attention to the specifics you mentioned? If so, what did you think?

Andy, It's very much like what Paul Klipsch said about his speakers: If you don't like what's coming out, you wouldn't like what's going in. (Sorry for the paraphrase; I don't remember the quote exactly.) If the original tape has any problems, you're going to hear them on the SACD. It's not going to improve a bad source. I have no idea what your titles are like because I haven't heard them, so I am speaking generally. Just remember, you can't blame the medium for the limitations of the recording any more than you can blame a camera if the girl in a photo looks ugly. Sony, at least, transfers their master tapes to SACD flat, with no EQ boosting. On the one comparison you made where the CD was a little brighter, that was probably EQ'd in for the CD to make it sound more appealing for the masses. So, a few things to listen for when comparing SACD to CD: 1) Better placement of instruments in orchestral recordings. Instead of the violas being vaguely over there, they are *there*--that is, you can hear them where they should be in relation to the other instruments. 2) Better decay of instruments, more natural. Also the attack is better. 3) Resolution, especially of low level content, is way superior. 4) Overall musical feel. Don't even think about it, just see if you are more taken away by the music. 5) You may be expecting too much because of the audiophile tendency to exaggerate. Don't expect to be blown away, or knocked senseless, or have your jaw hit the floor, or be dazed, etc. Just expect to hear what you would hear listening to an open reel master tape played back in the studio--essentially that is what you will be hearing. There are a few people who hate SACD for reasons I have not been able to fathom. But you're never going to get complete agreement about anything, even whether or not it's raining out. Most of the arguments around SACD are not whether or not it is superior to CD, but whether or not it is superior to vinyl. Like a lot of people, I think SACD gives you the best of both worlds, that is, analog sound with digital convenience. If you like rock, 22 Rolling Stones releases on ABKCO are coming out on Tuesday on SACD/CD hybrids. You could give one of them a try. They'll cost all of $12.99 at BestBuy and places like that.

This is really cool. I never saw one of these before, just drawings in sales literature and ads. Looks like it must have been a lot of work to cut the horns so neatly. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1373637658

In order to come to any agreement about sound quality, there has to at least be agreement about measuring it against a reference of some kind. Otherwise what one person says sounds one percent better may in fact be describing the same difference that someone else is saying is a thousand percent better. Then you have to agree on what the best reference will be: Is it going to be live instruments, say, a piano and cello in your living room, or is it going to be some master tape played back on XYZ equipment? Then you need to assign this best reference a number. Are you going to have a 10-point spread from the best to whatever you decide is the worst case, or are you going to have a 100-point spread, or what? And what's the worst reference going to be? And it's meaningless to say on a scale of 1 to 100, this is a 200. That'd be like saying listening to this record sounds twice as good as hearing the singer who recorded it actually singing live in my living room. And how does anyone measure enjoyment, which is what we all agree it is really about? What does it mean to say you like a record by one artist ten times better than some other record? And does listening to your favorite record through an amp that you're not crazy about make you hate the record? Instead of numbers you could have as reference something people might be familiar with on this group. Like the difference between this amp and this amp are like the difference between hearing a Klipschorn and a La Scala. Or the difference between this interconnect and that interconnect is like the difference between moving an inch away from the sweet spot, or whatever. It all comes down to the vagueness of language and the natural tendency to exaggerate in describing something one likes. "That movie blew me away!" "My jaw dropped to the floor when I heard . . ." "I could have died and went to heaven when I heard that speaker." Someone more conservative might say, "That was nice." Now of course it's pretty nonsensical to say this amp is a 4.87 on a scale of 10, while this amp is a 4.88. But I still think it is better than to have no reference at all, when you might say the distance between two cities is "some fair amount" and takes "a lot of time" to travel.

Fascinating post as usual, HDBRbuilder. The most unusual thing you didn't mention about the wood Lignum Vitae is that it is so dense that it sinks in water. I've got a 5-inch sample here and it is neat to pick up, it's so heavy. I just checked on the internet: Lignum Vitae has a specific gravity of 1.37. Anything greater than 1.0 will sink in pure water.