Bottleneck Meet - March 2014

It had been almost two years since we had last met so I think we all very pleased to meet up again.

On the left is Roscoe's amp. Then a few digital amps, a CD player and some sort of DAC. I am not sure what was what so if you know what was there, let me know and I will update this.

I was busy sitting on the sofa relaxing.

Roscoe's push pull amp. It uses 6L6's as outputs and type 77 as the input.  The 77 has a top cap but it is connected to the grid so quite safe for vomiting cats.

Roscoe had used an old Phase Linear chassis and was in the VU meters to work. This was a very fine amp indeed and had real grip in the bass. It blew away the digital amps and reminded me of Doug Piccard's push pull monster amps that he brought to our first meets a decade ago.

Another view of the other stuff.

Don brought along his Crack and we listened to it through a pair of Sennheiser 650's that formerly belonged to Doc B. They are the Eargasmic cord and sounded much better than another pair of cans that only cost about $100. I can't remember what they were.

We also tried a tricked out Smack but somehow after a brief listen, I marginally preferred the Crack. Perhaps I would have changed my mind if both systems were fully warmed up. My contribution for the day was an ODAC fed by the USB port on my netbook running JRiver. This ODAC seems to keep improving and I have used it a lot for over a year. 

Tony positions his cardboard box with a Dayton 8" full range driver. 

Tony connect the driver. A smart phone provided the light.

Now if you don't look too closely, this setup really looks impressive. Actually the speakers sounded surprisingly good driven by Roscoe's amp and a Dave Slagle autoformer volume control. There was a mid range peak that could be cured by a notch filter. Roscoe also has a pair that he uses in an open baffle with 18" drivers for the bass. 

Steve's MLTLs with Mark Audio CHR-70's. They sounded very good but could not deliver as much oomph as the Daytons.

Don also brought along his guitar amp and played for a while. Unfortunately I was in the kitchen listening to the Crack and the headphones at the time so I missed out.