A Bodger's Tale

[SteveTheShadow]

Yes, it's been one hell of a long recovery session. The depression turned to Generalised Anxiety Disorder, but recently I discovered mindfulness based cognitive therapy courtesy of Mark Williams of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and I've been helped enormously by the writings of Eckhart Tolle and Jon Kabat Zinn.
I've been meditating twice daily for a year now and am at last starting to get some concrete results. The intrusive thoughts still occur albeit far less often, but most importantly, the way I react to them when they occur, has changed. I no longer resist them and want them out of my life, rather I simply accept the the "is-ness" of things, observe the thoughts dispassionately whilst grounding myself on the movements of my breath, in and out, and sure enough, the thoughts hang around for a minute or two, then disappear of their own accord. I'm no longer trapped in the future, worrying about things or back in time regretting past actions, but most of the time dwell in the here and now, which is basically where life happens, there is no other time life can happen.

[Fretless]

I can relate to some of your experiences having been in therapy for trauma-related depression. Most important for me was the acceptance of myself as being good enough as I am.

Music has always been my emotional safety-zone. Listening , playing, messing about with instruments and HiFi.

[SteveTheShadow]

Yes, music is always available to take you out of your head and to better places, if only for a short while. It's a great extension of meditation practice for me these days. Acceptance of "what is" both out there and within myself, has been the best teacher for me over the past twelve months or so.

After having built the 2A3 Loftin White amplifier, I was happy for six months or so, but started to get itchy fingers, bought a copy of "Valve Amplifiers" by Morgan Jones and started to learn what the basic building blocks of valve amps were, and how to put together a series of stages of amplification. It was then that I learned that it was not just a question of gain. A couple of the guys on the WAD forums started to say to me that the 12AX7 input driver stage of my beloved Loftin White amp was causing slewing distortion, whatever that was. Yes it had a gain of 70 and could provide more than enough voltage swing to drive a 2A3 valve to full power. BUT there was something called "Miller capacitance" involved with valves.
Basically there is capacitance between all adjacent bits of metal in a valve and the important bit of capacitance is that between the grid and the anode. When an AC signal is applied to the grid of a valve, its grid to anode capacitance becomes multiplied by the gain of the valve plus 1. The incoming AC signal has to be able to charge and discharge this capacitance fast enough to properly reproduce the highest frequency of interest, in the case of audio, 20KHz. In fact it is best to have the clean charge/discharge rate much higher than this if the high frequencies are to be unsullied. It only takes a couple of hundred picofarads before the problems start.

To charge and discharge this capacitance requires work to be done, which requires current. Although the 12AX7 will swing big voltage it will only swing a couple of milliamps of current - insufficient to charge/discarge the Miller capacitance of the power valve fast enough for its effects to stay out of the audio band. The effects of insufficient current drive is known as slewing distortion and basically causes a blurring together of high frequency transients. This is one of the causes of the nice cuddly sound, some valve amps make, that and crappy output transformers.

So armed with this knowledge I was able to set about improving the standard of my 2A3 amp builds, but self build speakers were about to make a re-appearance in my audio world.

[CN211276]

This takes me back to the time when i was the line manager of someone suffering from depression. He was like two different people and i had to obtain advice from occupational health. In the end he was not able to keep the job, although when functioning was very capable. I feel for anyone with a similar condition.

[SteveTheShadow]

This takes me back to the time when i was the line manager of someone suffering from depression. He was like two different people and i had to obtain advice from occupational health. In the end he was not able to keep the job, although when functioning was very capable. I feel for anyone with a similar condition.

Aye, it wrecks working lives, and relationships, and living with someone with depression/anxiety takes a special kind of person.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Life is having something worth living for.

[_D_S_J_R_]

Steve, thanks so much for sharing... I can identify with some of it, but this thread is about you and your journey. More please if you can find more tales to tell.

[wiicrackpot]

This takes me back to the time when i was the line manager of someone suffering from depression. He was like two different people and i had to obtain advice from occupational health. In the end he was not able to keep the job, although when functioning was very capable. I feel for anyone with a similar condition.

Aye, it wrecks working lives, and relationships, and living with someone with depression/anxiety takes a special kind of person.

I was gonna shout out for Mrs Shadow in my original post for walking that journey with you but thought i'd keep it brief.

More please, very informative and easy to understand even to a non techie guy,

[SteveTheShadow]

So after having learned a bit more about single ended 2A3 amplifiers, there was no stopping me.

Feverish building activity ensued which saw my knowledge increase exponentially and I ended up building a set of 2A3 monoblock amplifiers with seperate power supply and even a valve phono stage which was a copy of the 1950s RCA "Orthophonic" magnetic phonograph preamplifier. http://slideplayer.com/slide/1677061/7/ ... ghted..jpg

The 2A3 monoblocks didn't suffer from slewing distortion of course.

[SteveTheShadow]

Now we had a problem: the 2A3 direct heated power triode, in single ended configuration will only put out 3W and it became apparent very quickly that my 'bought' KEFs were not a good match. The amps I'd built were OK at lowish volumes but at what one could call 'normal' listening levels, they were a dead loss. So I was forced to rekindle my interest in self-build speakers. These needed to be efficient.

Below is a pic of the first single driver speaker I created:


It's a Fostex FE108EZ full range driver, with Planet10 phase plug. The cabinet was a quadratic taper Voigt pipe, venting through a port on the underside. The very low bass was supported by a pair of Ruark active subs; one in each corner. This is the original design that led to "The Metronome" tapered quarter wave resonator speaker developed between myself, Scott Lindgren and Dave Dlugos.

The last "Metronome" I had at home was a five foot tall cabinet with Fostex FF225WK supplemented with a Monacor ribbon supertweeter. This speaker now lives at a fellow enthusiast's home in Chesterfield. He currently runs the speakers with a Transcendent Sound, "Son of Beast" output transformerless valve amp. Loves them to bits.

As with all my speakers, the Metronome is designed to work, backed up to the wall. The cooperative Metronome designs, Scott, David D and I did, are all open source and have proven to be quite successful over the past 13 years they have been in existence.

Around 10 years ago, a guy in the USA started a subsidiary of his Yarborough Designs company to build the FE108EZ design to order. http://rhythmicraft.com/metronome.html He's still going now.