[Ian Iveson]

John Byrns wrote

For what reasons do you perceive PP to be preferable in
this
application?

In particular, why, after converting from balanced to SE,
you decided on PP for the output stages?

Two main reasons. First to eliminate DC from the output
transformer so
that it can be smaller and have better performance.

OK, although the "and" could be misleading.

Second to achieve
the output power level I desired with a small tube that is
used at other
locations in the mixer, reducing the number of required
tube types to
two.

Hmm, OK. Personally I prefer valves to be different,
otherwise I'm tempted to swap them about and likely to
forget where they've been.

I have been dipping into the thread occasionally hoping
to
find the bit where voicing is discussed. I wonder by what
process an agreement about desired quality of sound can
be
reached remotely with a prospective end user who wants
"something special"

Anyway, I'm impressed with your simple approach,

I have been worrying that my approach is overly complex,
there are much
simpler approaches, look at a few remote mixers from the
1950s for ideas.

I'd be interested to know exactly how you've arranged for
the pan pots and, if you have approximated to a virtual
earth
bus, how you've done that too. I appreciate that,
considering these are the crux of the biscuit, you may not
want to say, in the current phoney crypto-competitive
climate.

and the way
you have stuck to the brief without contracting
Recalcitrant
Engineers' Syndrome.

What pray tell is "Recalcitrant Engineers' Syndrome", I
have never heard
of that before?

Not sure I have either, come to think of it. I thought I was
continuing an idea elsewhere in this group but it was
rec.audio.uk, where someone posited an audio engineer
syndrome, and I argued that the problem is widespread
amongst all species of engineer. I hoped you might recognise
it just from those three words.

Some examples. The software engineer who hates spending all
his time on the GUI aspects of an application program
because he can't get inside the heads of what he regards as
stupid users who will abuse his beautiful algorithms because
if they need a GUI then they will only be capable of
producing trash. The pattern maker who insists on perfection
even though the customer doesn't care as long as the
castings are cheap. The mixer designer who believes it is
he, rather than the client, who should specify the product,
and who spends so much time trying to foist his own ideas of
perfection on the customer that the mixer never gets built.

In every case the engineer may be quite right, but fails to
see that right isn't the whole story. The world is full of
perfectly presented gobbledegook enabled by GUIs; roughly
fettled castings abound; landfills are crammed with
naively-specified products that turn out to be useless for
their intended purpose.

Nevertheless, the world progresses: a fact that the RES
victim cannot see.

Maybe the root of the syndrome is that engineering, with its
concentration on the physical and the absolute, is
attractive as a refuge for social inadequates and political
malcontents. The cause is the stricken engineers' inability
to appreciate any consideration that cannot be reduced to
engineering parameters. Social considerations such as
marketing and accounting become meaningless and stupid
obstacles.

I could go on, obviously, and on.


Perhaps your experience of designing
valve circuits has made you more wary of added
complexity.

A circuit should not be so simple it can't do the job
properly, nor
should it be more complex than is needed to do the job. A
lot of people
seem to pursue complexity for complexities sake.

Unlikely as a conscious strategy, would have thought. Much
equipment these days is capable of higher performance and
reliability than in the days when they were of simpler
construction. However, an engineer needing to make work for
himself, or to aspire to grandeur, would have a tendency to
overstate the need for complicated solutions that only he
can accomplish. The danger is that an RES sufferer has no
way of seeing where complexity is socially necessary, and so
put it somewhere else by mistake.

The world *is* complex. "KISS" is merely an appeal to
naivety.

Ian