A Bodger's Tale

[SteveTheShadow]

The year is 2002 and my Linn Pretek/Powertek amplifier combo, fed by LP12/Akito/K18 into Index III on Ku Stone stands cabled with Linn K20 cable, is searing my eardrums AGAIN!
Oh yes, the Flat Earth has me in its grip something terrible. I've spent thousands by now, rejected the Naim Nait 2 for the more powerful Pretek/Powertek but the basic sound remains; a strident, overpowering racket. I'm being beaten around the head with a sonic hammer. My musical tastes have been forcibly narrowed to the point of stupidity, right down to a few well recorded smooth jazz albums on GRP records and a couple of other records by Lee Ritenour, Earl Klugh, or Joe Cocker with The Crusaders.

I have well over five hundred albums in my collection and four hundred and eighty of them are virtually unlistenable, such is the raw icy blast coming from the speakers. I'm trapped, pissed off with the whole scene and it is going to take substantial amounts of cash to break free of this mess. But I love my music. I know that it is there in the grooves of my LPs, surely this isn't all there is!


Dammit...this can't be it!

[SteveTheShadow]

Fast forward to 2005 and I've managed to spend my way out of the flat earth hell and have a nice little system, comprising Roksan Radius 5 turntable/Nima arm/ Ortofon MC cart, Pro-ject Tube Box phono stage, Musical Fidelity X-A1 amp, Sony CD player and a set of KEF Q55 floorstanders. This little lot plays my LPs and CDs with an ease of presentation that to my flat earth terrorised ears is frankly revelatory. A bit of boom at the very bottom end, but after the shrillness of the flat earth, I didn’t care.

I'd begun to read Hi-Fi world and Hi-Fi News and Ken Kessler and Noel Keywood's obvious love of valve amplification started to arouse my curiosity. This was the time when HFW included a DIY supplement every month. In there was a valve phono stage kit by World Audio Designs called the Phono II and I ended up sending for one. Building it was fun and the sound with the optional MC step-up transformers installed was excellent.

My interest in valve amplification was now well and truly piqued. A new outfit called Icon Audio had started up in Leicester and their EL34 based Stereo 40 was getting decent reviews from both Keywood and Kessler. I rang David Shaw, designer and proprietor of Icon Audio one Sunday afternoon and had a long conversation with him about the merits of valves, the simplicity of the circuitry and lots of other stuff about hi fi in general. The upshot was that the following weekend my wife and I drove down to Leicester and visited Mr Shaw at his home workshop. His place looked like Doc's shed in Back to the Future; tubes all over the place, scopes, and other Dr Who equipment which I didn't recognise.
He ushered us into his listening room, which was much tidier and played us the Stereo 40 amplifier, through some speakers of his own design, which he was hoping to put into production. These were simple affairs, nicely veneered in cherry wood and were, he said, designed to be more efficient and easy to drive, which was according to him, the chief requirement if valve amps were to be able to their job properly.

"Walk On By" by Dionne Warwick was cued up on his CD player and he hit the play button. Both my wife's and my own jaws hit the floor in unison. Needless to say, one Icon Audio Stereo 40, push-pull El34 amplifier for the princely sum of £669 ended up in the boot of the car and we headed north. Little did I know then, what terrible a darkness was on its way; an awful, awful time....

[zebbo]

Keep it coming!

[SteveTheShadow]

My teaching career had been meteoric. After being made redundant from BT in 1993 and training as a primary school teacher, I had qualified with a 2:1 in 1997 and went on to teach infants up to 7 years. I'd loved the job and had gotten right up with best Key Stage One SAT results in my Local Education Authority for four years on the bounce and by 2003 had become an Assistant Head Teacher at a leading Beacon Primary school.
My mentor, head teacher retired and a new broom arrived. Things went rapidly downhill, because after having come from an industrial background where me and the lads installed exchange equipment, had a laugh and went to the pub, I had failed to understand how to play office politics. Indeed it never reared its head until then.

After one particularly fraught feedback session from a lesson observation, I walked. Unprofessional behaviour on my part but by then they had me not knowing which way was up or what planet I was on. Driving home, approaching a sharp left hand bend, bounded on the offside by a stone retaining wall with an earth bank behind it, a thought came into my head about what would happen if I just carried straight on into the wall and who would either care or miss me.

I backed out of the suicidal idiocy at the last second, slammed the brakes on and heaved the car around the bend. Pulling into a layby a couple of hundred yards from the bend, I turned the engine off and broke down completely. It was a good two hours before I started up the car and made my way towards home. The doctor's surgery came up on the right, I turned into the car park, went into the building, walked up to the receptionist and asked, could I see a doctor....now.... please. She took one look at me and I was into my GP's office inside five minutes. To cut a long story short, I was diagnosed with severe depression, signed off work for six months. The depression was bad enough, but then crept up the anxiety. I was scared literally of my own shadow, I cowered when the postie came, in case he might deliver some nasty surprise. I jumped at any knock on the door, my mind was taken over by an almost constant terror that something awful might happen and that if it did, I wouldn't be able to cope. I was booked into psychotherapy sessions and gradually became a bit more able to function.The depression was replaced by a near constant low level of unease, but it was a ruddy sight better than the black hole I had been in and I was grateful for that.

Once my mind was safely on its journey towards healing. I was advised by my therapist and GP to find some kind of hobby; something that would fully occupy my thinking and that is where I began my bodging career. I joined the World Audio Design forum as "The Shadow" because that's what I regarded myself as - nothing more than a shadow of what I had been; half in and half out of living. It seemed an appropriate handle at the time.

It was there in the summer of 2005 that I met Nick (Lurcher) Steve Shiels, Paul Barker, James Doddington and a number of other people who knew about valve amplification and were free with their advice and encouragement. Steve Shiels had organised a DIY meet at Eggborough Power Station Social Club (the forerunner to the Owston meets) and I went along and met these people and marvelled at their amp and speaker creations, made some lifelong friends and soon after, with their help and advice, began bodging. These guys know, because I've related this story to them before, that they, particularly they, and bodging of course, saved my sanity. I don't know what would have become of me had I not joined that now defunct WAD forum.

So now that's over with I can start the chronicle of my bodging career properly. The rest of this, what will be a very long write-up, I hope, has been put into context and now you know why the shadow bit is in my handle.

[davjam13]

carry on I'm listening!

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Brilliant stuff, hopefully starts a trend of people giving *their* story of their journey be it hi-fi or music.

[guydarryl]

Bloody hell. Awful times, but well done for getting through them.

I can understand your feelings, to an extent, as I seem to have a similar background. Ex industry (R and D), trained as teacher, couldn't completely adjust to the politics. Really couldn't (and still can't) get my head around really long meetings with people waffling/making a career out of making bland inane speeches. In industry, particularly shift change over meetings on production plants it was very much a matter of: this is the problem: this is what we need to do - sorted in five minutes.
Like you (I think), it really helps to have a supportive wife.

Sorry to ramble on - all that really needs to be said is well done, I am quite in awe of what you achieve.

[SteveTheShadow]

Cheers Guy. Yes, supportive wives are worth their wait in gold.

So after seeing at Eggborough, the stuff people were building at the time, I began to look askance at my Icon Audio EL34 push pull amp. No EL34s at Eggborough, instead there were valves I had never heard of: valves such as 300B, 2A3, 45, 211, 212E, 845, PX4, PX25, 71A, 26 - not an ECC81, 82 or 83 to be seen. Also, all the amps used single ended triode operation, none of them could muster more than 10 Watts, yet through the exotic high efficiency full range, single driver speakers on show, these low powered amps were producing music, the like of which I'd never heard. It was as far away from the godawful Flat Earth as it was possible to get, and I was instantly hooked.

One guy, Paul Barker, was showing an amplifier based on a huge 212E transmitting valve, that required a high voltage supply of around 1200V DC. I was petrified and fascinated at the same time. The sound coming from it was utterly stunning and showed me that what I had thought was hi-fi was actually a complete load of horse shit. My own hi-fi world was upended that afternoon.

So what to build then?
It was via the WAD forum, that I discovered a guy named Simon, who lived around 10 miles away. Simon had built a direct coupled 2A3 amplifier called the Shishido Loftin-White. He'd got it as a parts list and circuit diagram from a guy in Scotland, by the name of Philip Ramsay, proprietor of Bluebell Audio. http://www.bluebellaudio.com.
I paid Simon a visit to listen to the amp he'd built and it sounded excellent through his pair of Fostex Horn speakers. He'd ditched a Naim amp for this 3W creation and I decided then to build a Shishido Loftin White of my own.
Below is a schematic:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/wenchieh/2A3_s ... ishido.jpg

Philip at Bluebell was really helpful and after selling me the parts, was always available to talk me step by step through the build, from how to mark, drill and punch a chassis to wiring up the circuit itself.

I built the amp and it worked first time. The first tune to come out of an amp I'd built myself was "What Do You Want" by Adam Faith. Then the rectifier valve blew up. "Yeah, mine did that too" said Simon
One far more GZ34 rectifier later and we were in business.

[wiicrackpot]

Wow...great valve journey and glad you followed the light and came out of that dark period,
''haste ye back'' with more of your tales, i am all ears.

[Fretless]

Gripping stuff Steve, literally a journey from shadows to light.

Thanks for this.