Mike Sanders of Quicksilver Audio...

[Deang]

...is really cool.

I had one of my amps out today taking a look underneath trying to figure out if there was anything in there that could be upgraded when I get some extra money. It didn't take long to figure out that the parts that are in there are really good. The only thing I could really think of was maybe uprading the rectifier with a HEXFRED.

I decided to give him a call and I just asked him, "If YOU were going to do something to these amps to raise the bar a little, what would YOU do?"

"Nothing", he says. "The parts are great, the transformers are great, it's clean -- I really can't think of anything I would want to do."

After 20 minutes of chatting he loosened up a little and says, "Well, you know -- I did replace the one power supply cap, the one next to the choke -- with a 750 MFD, and it did tighten up the bass somewhat. What's in there now? A 300? Yeah, you could do that -- that would be good."

He told me what I needed to do, and it looks like I'm going to have a really BIG ugly blue cap for each amp to go along with the smaller ugly blue caps.

He didn't like the HEXFRED idea, saying he considered them unreliable over time. I also got a really good lesson on how a cathode auto-biasing circuit works -- for all the good it did -- as I only understood about 1/2 of what he said.

A great guy who obviously knows his stuff and still loves doing it.

[NOSValves]

Dean,

You didn't write all this down or have the wife do the short hand deal shame on you. Stiffing up the PS filter caps is almost always a good thing !

Craig

[artto]

Yeah, Mike Sanders is cool. He has worked with closely with Klipsch for many years. A Klipschorn owner himself of over 20 years. The quicksilver's are probably my first choice when & if I need to replace my Lux MB3045's. Mike told me he "always liked the sound of the MB3045".