Keta:

My affair with tubes started when I was about 10 years old. I had a phonograph (one of those cheap things kids have). I used to play records on it all the time, and when the needle wore down, I just stacked pennies on the tone arm till the needle stayed in the groove. Then one Christmas my parents gave me a 'nicer' phonograph. I played it, but I still preferred the sound of my old phonograph. The new one just didn't sound 'right' to me.

A few years later I discovered why. The older phonograph had a vacuum tube amplifier, and the new phonograph had a solid state one!

As I grew older, I had a lot of amplifiers, tube and solid state. I always preferred the sound of the tube amps. They sounded more 'like music' to me.

I attended college, majoring in electronic engineering. After bumping around for awhile (never leave a 22 year old kid to his own devices) I started working for Altec Lansing, while they were still headquartered in California. There, I was exposed to the whole spectrum of sound equipment, from speakers to electronics, and such esoteric things as transformers and microphones. I got to see first hand the various technologies involved. My job was to design automated testing equipment for use on the production lines, so I had to learn the engineering principles behind all things audio.

It is here that I was exposed to horn speakers. I actually wound my own diaphrams for use in my horn speakers, and learned all the things that make a good verses bad horn. The horn speakers I bought while I was there I still have, and are now my main left and right front speakers in my home theater setup.

I found my horn speakers worked especially well for home theater because they were literally speakers intended for use in movie theaters! I did a great amount of modification and tweaking to them to tame some of their bad personality traits, and to make the most of their strengths. All these things I learned to do from the engineers at Altec Lansing.

It was about this time I also came to realize the symbiotic relationship of horn speakers and tube amplifiers.

Later, I was introduced to single-ended triode tube amplification. I found that this was an ideal solution for driving high frequency horn speakers because of the pure class "A" nature of their output stage.

So that is the story of my life with tubes and horn loudspeakers