Cactus Tube Dudes of Arizona

Cactus Bottleheads

Get together.

Here is Bruce's system we were listening to.
Bruce's 811s are in the back ground. I'm trying to talk him into C4S's the cathode follower that drives the 811.
Bruce's passive preamp is built in an old Dynaco Pas chassis (not visible here.)
The big cans to the right of the Dynaco preamp chassis (Bruce's Phono amp) are the B+ caps for his phono amplifier!
(Please pardon the sloppy paste of two pictures into one wide one.)

Here is a close up of the Bruce's Phono amp and deadly cap bank to the right. The lag bolts epoxied to washers are used as equipment spikes:

Bruce's Lowthers had good bass and a good stereo image. Driver?
We are going to have to put Ed's horns side by side with these speakers some time soon.

This is one of  FOUR tube caddy's that the Rev has. Wow. Talk about breaking one of those "thou shalt not covet" rules!

Notice the drool stains on these! The second from the left is one of a pair of unopened Cunningham 2A3s!

All of these 2A3's sounded good in this Paramour/ Lowther system.

Tube Used	Hum	VoltSecond's notes:
Valve Art 2A3 Biplate	1 mV	Not too Shabby!
Sovtec 2A3 Monoplate	2 mV	Volt liked these a bit better than the Valve Art again.
AVVT 2A3 Cobalt Mesh Plates	9 mV left/ 11 mV Right	No sign of harshness with the Lowthers. We seem to recall reading that the AVVT likes high bias current. The Paramour runs 50 mA, not very high. Again, the lows were better than the Sovtec.
Cunningham 2A3 Monoplate	2 mV	This was the best. Tight and liquid at the same time.
Raytheon Box Biplate	1 mV	The Rev liked these in my hot rod'ed Paramour. They had a bit better top end than the Sovtecs. (1)

(1) We had an arc with one of these. No damage to the Paramour that we heard or saw. Funny, when the Valve Arts were put back in, that channel read 0 mV hum!? They wouldn't let me try to arc the other channel to see if it would go to 0 mV ;-(

---

This is Rev Clark's Take on the party

There wasn't time to any exhaustive A:B:C of anything. As I said, the evidence is anecdotal. Voltsecond brought 2A3s: AVVT cobalt meshplates, Svetlanas and Valve Arts. I schlepped over my remaining stash of 2A3s, having converted to the Church of 45 in 1999. So mine were stone cold, not having been run in 18 months. Variously, there were Ken-Rad and Tung-Sol twin plates, the redoubtable Raytheon small box twin plates, National Union single plates and a bevy of Cunningham single plates.

We listened to Voltsecond's which are current usage and up to speed. Mine are stone cold, not having been run for 18 months or so and would ordinarily need 6 - 8 hours of warm up to shine. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ask Voltsecond what he thought.

Bruce's Lowther's were very nice, featuring bass plus the usual Lowther speed in the mid and upper ranges. Good speakers to audition parafeed amps on, they leave few secrets untold. My guess is PM2As, though I was so busy listening, I forgot to ask. Bruce can confirm.

Voltsecond brought his homebrew CAT 5 speaker cables which show promise. They have 32 x 24 ga. worth of teflon per channel to break in, not to speak of the wire. With only 16 hours on them they were a little top end-challenged, but will mature with use. Teflon sounds pretty nasty until it breaks in.

So, not a lot new, but interesting stuff, nonetheless, and nonstop palaver. A good time.

Peter C

Amps:

Bruce's 811 SET Amp now with SV572-10's , 6GL7 driver, Polypropylene in oil B+ capacitors, mysterious external
power supply, solid copper chassis, triple regulated filament supply.

VoltSecond's Paramours

Bruce's high impedance passive
VoltSecond's Chaperone

Low level Interconnects:

Bruce's homemade interconnects, Bottlehead magnet wire spiral rapped on cotton cord.
Flat low level preamp to power amp.

Two Parallel Silver Sonic T-14 (Better highs than the Cat 5)
VoltSecond's 4-Braid Cat 5 interconnects (Better Bass than the Silver Sonic) (Rev Clark says the Teflon needs about 100 hours more break in.)

Turntable: Modified AR, Grado Phono Cartridge.

Some of the Music Played:
Patricia Barber                   Companion
Shirley Horne                      Close Enough For Love

Attendance was down because of the upcoming 4th of July holiday, vacations and the meeting being on Sunday. This worked out great for me, I got to spend 2 minutes in the sweet spot for every change we did.

Attendees:

Bruce   A.
Peter   C.
Volt     S.
P.K.    A.