[Patrick Turner]

wrote:

I don't hate the Japanese at all, I admire their industriousness,
ingenuity and determination as well as their racial cohesion. I think
FDR deliberately provoked them to attack Pearl Harbor and knew it was
coming and said nothing. I think he should have been machine gunned
down in his wheelchair. That said, we whipped their asses but good,
totally subjugated them.

Some of the old timers really hated the Japs forevermore and of the
small percentage still alive some still do. Most got over it once the
war was won and won decicively. A lot of the WWII career men served in
Japan with US forces and came to greatly respect them. My own
grandfather on my father's side would not ride in a Japanese car nor
use a Japanese camera even though he spent the war stateside on his
fat ass as a USAAF glider supply procurement officer. That meant
toward the end of his life he spent ****loads on Leica and Linhof
cameras despite the fact they were the enemy too. One learned not to
bring that up around the house at an early age.

I have, to the point, used Kikusui, Iwatsu, Meguro and Yokohama test
equipment extensively. Most of it was and is well made though not so
well made as the better HP and Tektronix stuff. The best electronic
test equipment overall is HP and Tektronix, US made, though there are
individual bits of German and British kit that do certain things
better. I would also recommend Japanese or German analog scopes over
vintage Tek not because they are better, they are not, but because Tek
no longer supports their analog scopes and they are built very largely
of unobtainable mechanical and semiconductoor parts.

You are spending a lot of time and energy on re-inventing the wheel
when you should just either buy a HP tube machine or buy another cheap
solid state one and build a buffer for it to zap proof it. This shows
technical competence but poor business skills. You are a smart guy
with a lot of energy and could make a lot of money and improve a lot
of other people's lives if you used good business judgment and paid
other people to do stuff on the principle of division of labor.
Winding your own transformers is a good example, that's women's work.
Low paid women's work at that, and I don't mean that as a pejorative.
The most skilled winders are women that probably gat $12 to $15 an
hour in 2009 US dollars in places like Southern California and
Massachusetts.

I run my business on a shoestring budget because product demand for tube
gear is low. There ain't funds to buy expensive gear and when I have
bought some its always been second hand, and usually solid state based
and fragile when working around tubes.

I recently obtained a couple of hundred transformers of good quality
from a guy who was doing similar work to me but who wants to ease into
retirement. I've advertised them and nobody wants to buy any.

So when I retire in 10 years these all go to the dumper bin for
re-cycling.

The prices people are willing to pay for tube gear is extremely low and
it prohibits me training a team and getting up to speed with mass
production in a little factory without compromising my idea of what
makes a decent tube amp.

It wouldn't matter if I was Superman, you cannot make a huge sum of
money without high capital investment and a big team who all share the
work. Halcro of South Austrlalia seemed to do OK but I have never had
the opportunity to audit their accounts books, and just how successful
they have been is a moot point.

So when someong gives me a couple of Kikusui oscillators and just after
I blow the crap out of a bum Topward **** thing, then I am either going
to buy a new function gene or addapt the Kikusui and make a few mods to
extend its test signal bandwidth.
I chose the latter, and it didn't take too long to achieve.

Australia once had a considerable local tranny winding industry and you
could buy a range of PT, OPT and chokes wound in Oz across the counter
and in various grades. Demand in a country like Oz whose population is
like Carlifornia's isn't high. Not enough to support more than a husband
and wife team in a cottage.

Its normal for me work making amplifiers for far less than they pay the
women of Sth Carlifornia or Masschusetts. People say I ought to be
professional, and I say no, I cannot just add a zero on my prices to
make my gear professionally priced.

But I am a good tradesman.

I'm having the life I can have, with a lot to occupy my time
constructively without chasing pie in the sky and dreaming stupidly
about getting rich, and just how I'd be happy being rich I don't know. I
prefer the torture of riding bicycles up steep hills right here rather
than going to France and riding up their hills instead of ours. I have
no desire to be sitting in Paris cafes sipping coffee and wondering why
the **** I spent all the money on travel to gork at people gorking back
at me wondering why I am over in their country. Many people don't like
my frugal attitude. But I see the reasons why I don't like the
activities of the rich so clearly. I see the sham of modern
materialistic existance. Its prevented me marrying many shielas because
they wanted their silly dreams financed. I spoke to Angelina Jollie and
Elle McPherson last week and offered them a job of being a wife as well
as winding my transformers for me and doing gardening work between slack
times and doing a nice 100km ride on a bicycle on sundays but they both
said all I offered was OK but that they couldn't handle being up the
ladder to clean the leaves from gutters and clipping the hedge.

Them's the brakes, eh....


Patrick Turner.

[Patrick Turner]

wrote:


You are spending a lot of time and energy on re-inventing the wheel
when you should just either buy a HP tube machine or buy another cheap
solid state one and build a buffer for it to zap proof it. This shows
technical competence but poor business skills. You are a smart guy
with a lot of energy and could make a lot of money and improve a lot
of other people's lives if you used good business judgment and paid
other people to do stuff on the principle of division of labor.
Winding your own transformers is a good example, that's women's work.
Low paid women's work at that, and I don't mean that as a pejorative.
The most skilled winders are women that probably gat $12 to $15 an
hour in 2009 US dollars in places like Southern California and
Massachusetts.

I run my business on a shoestring budget because product demand for tube
gear is low. There ain't funds to buy expensive gear and when I have
bought some its always been second hand, and usually solid state based
and fragile when working around tubes.

I recently obtained a couple of hundred transformers of good quality
from a guy who was doing similar work to me but who wants to ease into
retirement. I've advertised them and nobody wants to buy any.

So when I retire in 10 years these all go to the dumper bin for
re-cycling.

The prices people are willing to pay for tube gear is extremely low and
it prohibits me training a team and getting up to speed with mass
production in a little factory without compromising my idea of what
makes a decent tube amp.


I see VAC are asking US$9,000 for their preamp which is an obvious
cosmetic ripoff of a Kerr-McCosh of 1962.

I must raise my hat to VAC and their pricing mechanisms. With such high
prices, someone might buy something from me.

The local high end saloon down the street sells about a quarter
million dollars of Audio Research gear a year. For years they sent all
repairs to a guy named Steve Siegel who ran a half assed car audio
repair shop but he told them to F themselves and now everything goes
back to Minneapolis even for a twenty cent resistor. And I'm in a
fairly backward city.

I reckon the repair activity back at the ARC factory must be struggling
to get through the workload of returns. I've seen the ARC and had to fix
'em myself, and the best way to fix a VT100 is to rip out the whole
internal guts and start all over again.
The box and the transformers are nice though.

Maybe when ARC join the crowd hustling the Chinese to make their costly
items for them that the quality will finally hit rock bottom.


THere is money, just not around where you are at. You have to focus
on business where the business is and in high end audio it's Japan,
Singapore, Hong Kong, the West End of London, the US East and West
Coasts. What there is in Australia is probably around Sydney, I'd
guess.

Hi-end is mainly in Melbourne. But I get 500 hits a day at my web-site,
and only very few sales.

The people with money need to be able to spend on an expensive
brandnames to feel good. I do *NOT* offeranyone that expererience. What
I do offer is good tradesmanship, and only tiny % of audio listeners
realise what the heck I am on about.

I don't have the spare couple of million bucks to make myself known
widely and to bribe magazines for rave reviews.



eBay always has HP oscillators for under US $50 and I see them for
ten dollars at hamfests.

Not many HP anything here in Oz at hamfests, and I can do slightly
better than HP for an oscillator.

Patrick Turner.

[Phil Allison]

** Oh dear.

Full on, red neck ****tards are alive and well in the good ol' US of A.

This raving looney maniac IS a member of the Klan too.





...... Phil