Lance Cochrane Blue Light 6BQ5

A fellow I've done some work for before just brought over four amplifiers for me to redo.
Three of them are old Harman Kardon Citation II. Those are 65 pound monsters with superb transformers and awful circuitry. I've done this for him before, pull all the old circuitry out and make the unit into something wonderful. In the meanwhile, I have all these big units sitting around. I need some shelf space so I'm not tripping over things. With that in mind I'm going to be posting a few things well under value just to buy a little space around here.

I hear often from people who have bought my units how they surpass other pieces. I've heard tales of Decware, MFA, Bel Canto,Leblen, BAT, VAC, Korneff, what have you
falling by the wayside from buyers that simply preferred my equipment. While I've
only heard a few of those fine Marques in my own living room, rest assured that I do not build to compete with any of them. That has never been something that I endeavored to do.

I build amplifiers to sound right. That's all. It has to sound right in my living room or it doesn't see the light of day. Every once in a while I get some exotic unit over here from a well heeled friend. It always amazes me how often that after the first blush of looking at a fancy faceplate wears off and I listen to the unit, it just doesn't sound as it should.

We've all experienced that. That's why so many units go up for sale on this site after all. You get the pretty picture, get the unit home, plug it in, and wonder at yourself that you've again bought another lovely looking unit that leaves you back on the internet, looking again.

That's something of the soul of this hobby. The dissatisfaction factor is high among audiophiles. Some are just restless and would not be happy with anything. There's nothing that can be done for those types. For the rest of us though, I like to thing that an undercurrent of sanity does run beneath the surface.

I don't build for Audiophiles. I build for myself. I build because it's fun. I do end up with too many units as a result though and that's why this listing is up. There are no circuit boards
in the unit. I never use them. It's all hard wired by hand. My hands. I don't pay anyone
to build these for me. I do it all myself. There's nothing mass produced about it at all.
That's why there will never be a lot of them around. After I get a unit up and running,
then it needs to be tuned. I tune them by hand, first getting the voltages where I want
them, then by ear. Every amp is different. Different transformers, different chassis,
different everything. Only one thing is the same, me. You can tell when it's tuned right
too. It just falls into a zone. It's obvious.

To me, an amplifier has to be able to stop you dead in your tracks from time to time. It has to be able to get your guests to look around and ask if they really heard what they think they heard. It has to be able to do that at moderate to low volume. If it can't grab your attention away from what you're doing or from what's going on in the room it's not one of my amplifiers. It's got to rivet you. It has to or I don't need it. It's really fun to get that wow reaction.

This amplifier is dead quiet.Graveyard at Midnight type of quiet. That's not such a big deal if you're driving inefficient speakers but it's a very big deal if your speakers are 95dbw or higher.With efficient speakers you need lots of quiet.

This is a 6BQ5 push pull unit. Let's say 18 watts a side. It's a basic amplifier.
You need a preamp to use it unless you're a minimalist and run an iPod directly
into it. You can do that you know. Some do. I've had reports from customers that are very happy with that sort of arrangement. Some Audiophiles feel that they need components all over, lots and lots of components with expensive cables and gizmos that do this and that. You know the type. You may even be one of them.

I prefer what to me is a more rational approach.

It's all in the circuit. There are things you really don't need though. That bias adjust in the early Marantz always seemed to lead to nervous fiddling. I'd rather listen to music than worry constantly about checking the bias which always seemed to be off a little this way or that. That's one of the reasons I use cathode bias. No adjustments any time. You don't need that silliness with matched output tubes either. Four 6BQ5 and a pair of 12AU7. That's all that's required. Those are included incidentally but if you're a tube roller, plug in what you like. No worrying about adjustments because that's taken care of for you. All my amps are like that.

For that matter, there's the auto-balance phase inverter. It keeps the feed to the output tubes equal which assures pinpoint imaging and solid bass. It does that even as the tubes age and change over time. All my amplifiers do that as well.

That's only part of the reason that you rarely see my amps on the used market. The sound is the reason people keep them. Used, they don't go cheap and that's if you're lucky enough to find one. This is brand new.


The rest is up to you.

The best buy in HiFi.

Get it or regret it.

Lance Cochrane





P.S. The quoted shipping is for domestic shipping only. Other countries will have a higher rate.