Stuart Ferrel was next up with his chromed monoblocks.  Each used two 300B tubes for output and a CV378 for rectification.  One of the songs he played was by Johnny Hodges.  Yeah, it was a very old recording on vinyl but man, there are just too many "oldies but goodies" vinyl records out there.  i somehow got distracted and missed the remainder of Stuart's demo :-( 

 

Andy Fuchs came in next to discus his OTL 1/4 watt per channel $2,000 tube amplifier.  i personally gave this unit a listen before the show using Grado headphones.  Ya know, headphones definitely have their advantages my friends.  Of course you probably already know this.  With it's glossy black chassis and chromed top-plate it was one classy looking unit.  Could be the nirvana you headphone dudes are looking for.

 

Komuro took some time to carefully set up his very powerful dual 845 push-push output tube monoblock amplifiers (50 wpc.).  JC gave a great introduction about his first meeting Komuro.  It was all at the store called Fi at 30 Watts Street many years ago where JC, Herb Reichert, Gordon Rankin, and Don Garber hung around making their audio works of art at the time.  Unfortunately, the general public "audiophile" (is there such a thing) doesn't know how Komuro really was a great catalyst in helping raise the quality (and awareness) of SE amplifiers which we now see in America.  As Komuro began his demo, the song "Downtown" began to play and the crowd loved it!  i began to think that so far there really has not been any "audiophile" music played during the show.  No Blue Raincoat or purist recordings.  Sure there was a lot of great music played, but no audiophile music.  You just gotta love these tube dudes!  In fact Komuro's next record played was from the great band the Ventures!  Now THIS is living!  Maybe it is high time we all relax about this "purist recorded" super duper high sound quality thing and just enjoy the music.  Komuro surely won over the audience with his musical selections.  Need we say more?

 

Following this big crowd pleaser was the great Mike LeFevre of Magnequest fame who used great creation by Dr. Bottlehead.  Of course all the people on the rec.audio.tube newsgroup knows Mike as well.  Mike, teamed up with Dr. Bottlehead, were showing this new 2A3 amplifier called the Paraglow monoblock (2-3 wpc).  This is basically a parallel feed version of Dr. Bottlehead's Afterglow using Magnequest Permalloy parafeed output transformers ($1,150).

 

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