The Tube Preamp Cookbook Allen Wright
Welcome to Vacuum State This High End Hi-Fi company was founded in Australia in 1982 by its managing director Allen Wright (1947-2011). Since 2005 Vacuum State is located in Schaffhausen, Switzerland.
You are reading the older HTML site Positive Feedback ISSUE 9 october/november 2003 Positive Feedback Online Interviews: Allen Wright of Vacuum State Electronics by David W. Robinson (Photographs and image processing by Robinson) On October 4, 2003, Allen Wright took some time out from VSAC 2003 to talk with Ye Olde Editor about his work in fine audio. An edited transcript of the conversation follows Robinson: Allen, do you remember who it was who introduced us?
Harvey Rosenberg! Chudi jo khanki haathon mein mp3 free download. Harvey was the one who said, 'You have to read this guy Allen Wrights cookbooks. He has these great books!' I would like to know if you could spend some time telling our readers how you got into fine electronics and audio. Wright: I love music.
I think that is the bottom line. I built myself a record player at 14 or so from two old radios and a turntable. I didnt really think too much more about audio as a profession.
I grew up in New Zealand & went to University in Auckland. Then I moved up and built myself a high-fi system. It was the first solid state thing I did. I was interested in high tech at the time and I built that. I was working in the industry in electronics in measuring instruments and so on.
I finally ended up with a job at Hewlett Packard, which taught me the real high precision aspect. Still, high-fi really wasnt anywhere in my life. With musicsure, I had a sysytem and loved music and bought a lot of records. My previous job before HP had been with an company where this guy had built a very, very high tech AM radio tuner, and he was another technician in this place.
We talked about it. In high school I had built ham radio stuff. I figured that I knew radio and radio receivers and that technology.
He said that this was a tube tuner that he had made. He said you could not do it in solid state.
This was a challenge! With the resources of the Hewlett Packard service center with all their test instruments, I built a solid state AM tuner that did manage to do better than his tube AM tuner. This was just a hobby or challenge. I did that in the evening and built the thing using HP's equipment like that. We finished it off and it looked OK and we took it around to a couple of shops and everybody was stunned and we got orders.
Suddenly, we were in the high-fi manufacturing business. My then wifeex-wife nowwas taught how to solder, and she built them at home while looking after the babies. I would test them and calibrate them at night and sold them. Sirine whelen rakitan. This was our ongoing business. When the marriage broke up I just sort of changed my whole lifestyle. Before working at HP I worked at a high-fi shop which got me turned onto high-fi. This was just a regular store that was importing Luxman amplifiers from Japan but it was a big store for Australia.
They sold a lot of tube amps, and I built up things for them, and so on. It got me fired up and interested.
This high end tuner was going on and on as a businessand then I sold it. Some guy wanted to pay an insane amount of money for it as a business because he needed something as a startup so I thought 'OK!' Then someone gave me a contract to design an amplifier which I designed and they manufactured it. This would be '73-74. It was fascinating to me. Robinson: So in the early '70s you made a transition into building amplifiers.
Where did you go from there? Wright: I ended up setting up a shop which was a high-end service shop. We also had some stuff on demo and we sold a few things we built. In and around that time, I met a guy whose name was Rowan McComb who was an Englishman who lives in Australia. He is known in my books as 'the guru.' That is the absolute word for him. Some people have accused me of saying that I am 'the guru,' but this is not the truth.
This guy is 'the guru.' I heard this guys high-fi system.
I had been working in and around high-fi for about five years by then. When I heard his system at his place I could not believe it.
It was just something else. It took ages to even realize what was happening, and it was just fantastic. It was just fantastic!
He built stuff in wooden boxes and it was absolutely non-commercial. I saw the possibilities and I made a deal with him and said, 'Can we put your designs into production?'
This is the guy that placed me over the edge, and he was well over the edge himself. He pushed me beautifully over the edge! He gave me some chicken tracks on paper which were the schematics and everything of his amps. I put them onto circuit boards, got them looking & working in a way that we could sell them, and then they became a production item, both pre-amps and power amps. This was never big-time, but it moved along; he got a bit of money out of it, and I got money out of it.