Ty Ford wrote:
I think initially, transformers were used to make impedance ins and outs mo=
re compatible. They also have been used to ignore noise and/or block it. Th=
e iron or nickel in the core does have an audible effect. Also, the winding=
s. The last time I talked to Mark Fouxman at SAMAR audio in Utah, he had ju=
st finished building transformer winding rigs to make the wire lay down in =
layers a lot more precisely. I think he said that this also meant that fewe=
r circuit compensations had to be made due to variations caused by less pre=
cise windings.
Yes, for years a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to make
transformers cleaner and less colored. Jensen spent an enormous amount
of effort working out winding mechanisms to get interwinding capacitance
on high impedance transformers way down. Samar has much of the opposite
problem where they are trying to make transformers with crazy low source
impedances. It's nontrivial, and in the past people have made a lot of
compromises by using lower ratio and less efficient transformers than
would have been optimal, in order to get lower distortion.
But, now we have a lot of people who want transformer coloration as an
effect, and there are a lot of people spending a lot of money on vintage
transformers which were considered kind of lousy-sounding when they were
new.
I wound up making a gadget with a special transformer that is very colored
but has a coloration which is constant with level, for people who want to
specifically use the smearing and blending of older transformers but want
more control. The idea is kind of a silly one, but I figure I can't stop
people from doing it and so I might as well help them do it in a controlled
manner where they get the artifacts they want without the ones they don't.
You can see some propaganda at
http://kludgeaudio.com/500/transwarmer.html
if you're curious. It does what it claims it does, but whether that is
something you want or not is your judgement call.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."