Cactus Tube Dudes of Arizona

Field Trip Apache Reclamation.

Exit from I17 North on 7th ST., hit the brakes right after you go under the bridge and turn on to Apache. The adventure begins:

You can shop from Isle 12 for Green Bins of Survival Supplies.

Or you can tackle Isle 13.

They have opened the Tube Room and I personally picked up 14 good working (but very dirty) 12AT7s. The brands I kept were GE, Ken-Rad (1 pair, barely into the green) and RCA 12AT7s. I left the Sylvanias and unbranded ones. 1 out of 3 were weak or dead. If you beg, they'll let you use the B&K 707 tube tester. No pictures of the tube room. I was too busy elbowing everybody to get the to tubes I wanted.

Now to go outside an be a man (a dusty dirty man but a man never the less.)

One man's junk is another man's chassis for a tube amp.

The treasure chest.

Why it was a treasure chest: 3 mF 450V caps in good condition and 12 foot runs of 00 and 0000 wiring for speakers. Hey, Our member, Mr. X., asked permission before he touched the insides just like the sign says and got read the riot act by another employee anyway.

Another Treasure Chest. See that blue thing? That is a foot and a half tall 450V capacitor in a magnet charger with too many zeros in front of the "uF" to count. There were about 2 dozen of those caps in there. Talk about severe duty. Getting charged up all the way and dumped into a short. I wonder if they had a catch diode on the caps to make them last a little longer. The caps were dated 1995 on the side of the caps.

How about winding a 0.01 Hz subwoofer on a man size piece of recycled iron!

Big Scores for the group:
00 wire for speakers
0000 wire for speakers
1 inch diameter wire (over the copper) heavily stranded amazingly flexible wire for a Horn subwoofer.
Tubes, Capacitors, Hardware, signal wire, magnet wire and Ferrite Toroids

One of the members tried them out and reported back that he liked them! Here is his report:

>From: Boyd B
>
>Hello Group!
Those of you who were not present last saturday for the Apache Reclamation field trip missed a fun day.  The jewel of the day may have been found in the mud in the outside yard, more specifically an epoxy encased toroid.  Volt located these, and when he approached me that morning in the back yard he said  "if these are what I think they are..."  Several of us purchased some, and because I've had some time to do some toroid testing Volt asked me if I would report my impressions.
>
>My experience with the toroids is on interconnect lines only, I started by installing a pair of the toroids on the preamp out lines and was a bit startled to hear a difference.  More subtleties in background sounds were evident as  were more textures and purity to vocals. The depth of the soundstage becomes more defined.  I then added toroids to every interconnect in the signal path,  each providing an incremental improvement in the above.  Your mileage may vary, but on my system this proved to be more than a subtle change.    Noise reduction is the scheme here, the following info is from Volt covering specs on the beasts and best applications...
>
>cheers,
>Boyd

H1D is a common mode choke ferrite, Ur = 7500m (Now obsolete)

On our toroid, 1T = 9.5 uH. 10T = 0.95 mH  20T = 3.8 mH. All inductances +/- 25% at low AC drive levels and go up with higher drive until saturation is hit. This part won't take much DC. Probably less than 100 mA on 10 turns.

So what does this mean in English?

This is a good core to put over your low level phono to turntable connections. The hum ground goes on the outside, the signal lines all go
through the hole in the center. I have two similar cores on my phono interconnect. Both left and right go through both cores one time. If I
could fit it, I'd consider two cores on left and two different cores on right.

This is a good core to wrap your interconnects through a 3-6 times.

This is a good core to use to make a power cord.
 

Amps:

Speakers:

Preamps:

CD Player:

Low level Interconnects:

Speaker Interconnects:

Turntable:

Some of the Vinyl  Played:

Attendees:

Volt         S.
Boyd        B.
Dan         A.
Peter       C.
Bruce       A.
Bill           E