Beauty and the Beast of friction
Where's the beef? On my "receiving inspection" bench.
I purchased a very near mint, A- condition JBL/Urei 6230 power amp today. My friend Joe the Liquidator had gotten it in an industrial equipment surplussing auction.
It had done its duty in a laboratory at a major university, UC Santa Barbara, Ca. where the environmental air quality system
had allowed nary a dust mote nor coating of fine funk despoil the amp. Inside and out, totally squeaky.
I've not seen any used gear, outside the various, sundry, and far-flung labs I've had the pleasure of working in. Most were not quite so clean, some very much so. Sadly, its contamination has begun here at my place. Garden variety crud is on the attack. What can I do? No clean room in this year's budget.
But seriously folks, I will do some tests tonight and if it passes soon put it in a good system. But even if dead as a dormouse it could be an awesome prop.
On a totally well not absolutely unrelated note, our shop at the time ca. 1982 inherited the maintenance of a new weather measurement system. It was a SOTA "Doppler Acoustic Sounding System", DASS, made by Space Data Corp. capable of precision measurement of wind directions and velocities to a height of 1500'. Here's where the connection comes in... The antenna was an acoustic, cassegrain type reflector system in a sound damped aluminum tube ~3' Dia. x ~5' tall. At the prime focus sat an Altec 4" phenolic diaphram driver and a short horn. It was pinged with a one second, fast rise time modulated pulse by way of a Crown DC300A in bridged mono mode. Peak power said to be around 1500W. The return signal was handled with the DSP of the era. Processing by way of a Data General Nova 3 "midicomputer" (not the musical synthesis midi, but the skirt midi).
Much more like Super POS Steaming Dogpile Computer, being quite that hideous. Anything to do with software was proprietary, top-secret ridiculous hush-hush. Made it a real dream:banghead: to troubleshoot, as did not have a right to know squat about it. Plenty of friction in the house thanks to all that.
Just pointing out examples of nontraditional usage of amps and drivers. Sorry it wound up a bit garrulous. -D-E-
