Lance Cochrane Black Krinkle Finish

It's like the furniture in your living room. You walk by the chairs and such every day and almost forget they're there. You don't completely forget, you know where to sit and all that but you don't really look at them, not really. It was about 25 years ago that I gave the guy at the radio station one of my amplifiers. I owed him. They had a contest every night where they gave away show tickets. They didn't have any limit how many you could win, not like now, so I'd win a few times a week. The Wife and I went to a lot of shows and I gave away a lot of tickets. I had the phone at work set up on speed dial and as soon as the contest came on I'd hit the speed dial, hand the phone to one of my workers, give them the answer and watch them win. This was before the internet or smart phones or any of that. You actually had to know the answer. The guys at the radio station knew my voice. I'd say anything and they knew who it was. So I went in there and handed the main guy an amplifier. Here, I owe you. It was maybe a year later that I found out that the amp was sitting on a shelf in his office. It was, as he said, sculpture. He would forget it was there until co-workers would comment on it. He needed a preamp to make it work. I thought he knew that. He was so non-HiFi that when the subject came up he said, yeah, I need a mixer or whatever it is. So I took him a preamp that I had sitting around. Sheesh, sculpture. In a way, he was right. There's a definite sculpture component to audio, much more so now than 25 years ago. It's hard to miss when you get the Audiogon updates with the over the top offerings glowing and glittering. Back then we had Audiomart. Little typed listings in a little folded newsletter thing with no pictures. It was an East Coast rag so all the East Coast guys got it in the mail first. We West Coast guys got it after the hot offerings were long gone. Sure, you could pay extra for First Class and get it more quickly. Big deal, the East Coast guys could do the same thing. Either way we were shut out. Anyway, after I took the guy in the radio station the preamp he hooked the amp up in the studio. It's still there. That's how it should be. A lot of guys in the audio community are amp of the month types. Buy it, get disappointed, move it, buy something else. That's partly why Audiogon exists. I like to make units that pretty much stay in the same living room for many years. This particular unit has been sitting on the shelf for too long. I noticed that I'd been walking by it and not seeing it there. Like the furniture in my living room. Like sculpture. So I picked it up and put it back in the system. Amplifiers should look nice. They should be sculpture. That should not be their main function though. It's Basketball season and there are some good games on. I turned the sound down on the TV, let the game continue and played some Sly and Robbie through the amp while watching the game. Yes, just like we used to do in the '60's. I noticed after a little bit that I wasn't watching the game. I was listening to Sly and Robbie. It wasn't a particularly good Sly and Robbie CD either. It didn't have to be. I've got some Subdudes on right now. Keep that audiophile stuff, give me some music. Now I build these for fun. There's no real reason to do it. There's certainly no money in it. If the parts were free, and they're not, the sales price divided by the time to scratch build one of these by hand and properly tune it yields some pretty poor wage results. It's a cool thing to do though. Every one is individual. It's like they talk to you when you're tuning them as some like a little more voltage here and a bias change there. They know what they like. This one is push pull at about 30 watts a side, 5881 outputs. A pair of 6SN7 and a single 6CG7. Yes, that's a big oil cap on the end of the chassis next to the Collins filter reactor. Don't make the mistake of thinking the technical details tell you much. That's an old HiFi conundrum. The first transistor units measured exceptionally well and the text describing them was wonderful. They sounded lousy though. You can take great components even now and make a sub-optimum unit. Happens all the time. As a lot of Professional Audio writers, gifted though they may be, do purvey what frequently in retrospect is clearly fiction, one should possibly consider an audio rule that I formulated quite some years ago. "Never believe what you hear you'll hear. Only believe what you hear, Hear?" It's a simple enough rule. After you get your shiny new unit home and plug it in, after the purple prose fades into history, after the unit becomes the type of sculpture in your living room that you don't really look at, you'll still listen to it. That's what it's for after all. We all have to make decisions in life. It's important to make the right ones. Particularly about audio, you know? The best buy in HiFi. Get it or regret it. Domestic sales only please. No International shipping.