back in june 2009 benjamin hughes keys/singer/young mad scientist answered to my invite for someone to learn and help out at ekadek. already hes making really cool shit. and i can tell he’s great for business. his first project is this small 50s tape machine suitcase studio/live miking mixing rig. it features 4 neve/API (2 stage) mic/di preamps and a speaker/headphone monitoring amp. the left hand unit is a 6 mono 2 stereo input channel stereo mixer with 3 sets of outputs. ben loves making things. he’s also been design/developizing the circuitry boards for our new product. the gyro-stereo-teneightor 3 band + filters eq. just crash testing this week in session. so far so beaut.
gyro teneightor 3 band filtering EQ prototype chassis. crash testing
local jazz legend NATHAN HAINES has long time been a friend of ekadek. so even though i don’t work on alot of domestic music equipment, i did make him a stereo system … which i think he loves. here’s his testimony. “My brief for Ekadek was simple – I wanted to play my jazz vinyl at home on a system that would replicate the listening pleasure afforded those when the records were new…in other words a valve amp with matched vintage speakers. After some searching Greg came up with the chassis of a mid 60′s Lafayette amp (with pre), then went about ordering parts from the US and getting the amp going perfect again. He also sourced a pair of Celestion Ditton 15 speakers from the 60′s at a very reasonable price. After buying an early 70′s Luxman turntable to match , I was understandably excited when he arrived at my house with the equipment in tow – another example of how Greg looks after his customers and really cares about the outcome of his work. I was astonished at the sound from the system – literally never before had I heard my vinyl sounding so translucent, real and defined – and this is with records I have owned for over 20 years! At home listening to records, I have never been happier” Nathan Haines.
here’s the newest all transistor no chip off the old ekadek block. just soaking up some studio ambiance before jetting away to sunny canada. it has dual quarto transistor amp feedback/gain controlled stages followed by the super fat super clean neve 535 dual line amplifier. microphone input or an instrument direct input. good for +24dbm. low low noise. phantom power. mic pad. phase reverse. full floating balanced output.
this small chunky control room monitor console is built for extreme flexibility and control and accuracy. it uses a neveish transistor control room amplifier with stereo/reverse/mono/soloL/soloR/spk A.B.C.switch/VU meters with adjustable calibration and a best quality headphone amplifier. fed from a 4 X stereo input listen select switch – mix/daw/aux1/aux2. the ‘mix’ selection to monitor an outboard summing mixer of 4 ( easily eight) stereo inputs fed from a multitrack soundcard. the passive mixer circuit and mix preamp could be housed in an outboard unit along with a power supply and all the input/output terminations . the mixed stereo signal flys back to the fenkner chunk pair of stepped level controls and feeds a neve 535 line output stage and a germanium output stage and mixes the two for double slamming sidechain action . a double power hunk’o'chunk. stop me! the final output signal would feed the mix output sockets as well as the ‘mix’ listen select position. other features are to be switched inserts across the mix preamp and the line outputs for external processors. there’s a pair of mic/di amps in the rack unit too , just to make it a complete studio in a chunk. they have outputs that can be routed permanently to a pair of soundcard inputs as well as having independent level/panned/(or muted) outputs – lets call them mixer inputs 17-18 … punching direct into the multitrack sum for zero-latency monitoring. thus the system is uber functional. the most versatile chunk of gutsy electronics ever. the rack unit is something like this. the bride of chunky.
i’m not kidding. they a complex multisexual beast. does it all. simpler versions can easily be quoted of course. these other two fenkners have control room functions and mic/di amps. valve ones. pultec MB1 style amplifiers.
this is the driver attached to the plate with the soldered cylinder brass cone connector. and detail of the barcus berry pickup bud being held tight against the plate with a small piece of soft steel .
this is the remote damper actuating mechanism that i have . its quite a thing well made. the dc motor drives the screw so that the block moves along it. the direction of the screw/block is determined by which button is pressed on the remote. it just changes the polarity feeding the motor. the block would be attached to an folding arm mech which brings a big polystyrene baffle closer or further from the plate. when the block has shifted to either end .. it operates a motor cut off switch so nothing gets damaged. the blue potentiometer attached to the motor gearing adjusts a sense voltage back into the remote so as to indicate a reverb seconds time on the 16 led display.
so my first compile of sounds ‘plated’ up to their eyeballs. plate testing2.mp3 3meg the plate fx comes and goes thruout. sometimes hard panned. sometimes mixed up front alone and sometimes mixed in the back. ive left some tails hanging and have some beats banging. i havent eqed the reverb send or return and havent laboured over this demo. so its rough and naked and natural with no beauty mix treatments.
ive changed the pick up set-up so that a very high gain fet (field effect transistor) amp is in the path. it just seems easier than buiding an expensive 4 valve amp with more gain than my in stock devices. the fet amp is small and simple and sounds dam nice actually. it seems to couple to the pickup just right with a very acceptable noise floor. next to do is to fine tune the plate tension to suit and organize the damping mech. not easy. then to create a crate for the whole thing to live in.
- new driver
this strange little thing is a new reverb plate driver element. essentially its a speaker magnet and voice coil assembled with a double inverted spider (which holds the voice coil in the magnet gap) and without the normal basket frame and paper/poly speaker cone. a naked motor to vibrate the sprung steel plate.
old broken driver
this is the old blown up dilapidated one. see the handmade brass cone with the little nut retainer on the top … thats the kind of thing i need to make next for the new driver element. shaped from thin brass sheet and soldered.
vortex reverb
i have two types of pickup device ready to go. a barcus berry hotstuff – hotpoint – hot&hard(?) … and a PZM contact mic. these plates are close now. ive yet to make any driver or pickup amps yet of course. for the get going i’ll use my vortex spring reverb – chassis. its got the right kind of amps to fire up the plate. just for the meantime. im thinking of making the amps into old radios (with internal speakers). so for to allow double life as occassional penthouse apt salon/saloon valve mojo playback unit. or room reverb amp. or office ipod playback amp.
heres some details of my newest obsession. a pair of old plate reverb frames were to either come to me, or left to rust utterly. they need complete rebuilding. starting with the spring wire tensioner bolt arrangements. they are all rusted and weak. the plate verb sound is all about the plate being tensioned just right. so that the transducers can do their business. ive found some new spring wire and the hardened tags are being made. spring steel needs special tools. guilotines and hi speed diamond drills. i have made new tensioner adjustment bolts myself though. its quite a large project. the plate drivers have to made custom and the pickup devices to be sorted. there are driver amplifiers and pickup amps to make. and i have to work on them to sell now. or i fear they would probable get chucked out in the way-future for whatever dam reason. so my obsessive compulsive gear junkie tweaking and geeking brain gets another good smacking. i will make some sound tests of the plates once they work. in the meantime please enjoy a smidgen of lulus latest number entitled microphone
at last the frame paint is dry enough to soak test this beast. so close to delivery. i’m rapt with the sound of this klangenschmitt. really fat clean bottom end. so powerful with so much headroom. the functionality is extreme with busses and inserts everywhere. 99% integrated circuit-free for that super expanded fabulous unsubdued sound. the small angled rack will be tony’s outboard machine. i actually had made 66% of that rack’o'gear for diogo in portugal. the deal came full back round south – all good for diogo tho. and tony and ekadek. its a dam gutsy processor, with a tube mic amp and tube limiter amp, a transistor 3 way sweeping/filtering eq, a small shure mixer, and a stereo germanium line amplifier.
heres some pictures of a 2003 custom build that came home with a small but annoying intermittant issue. actually worked out to be oxide/fungus between two signal weilding steel tags. just needed a clean and tighten. couldn’t we all just. the guts of this machine was made in the early 1960s. not too bad. of course i completely ‘ruined’ the once perfectly functional 1/4″ full track tape recorder by badbinning the tape transport and hacking into its multitude of preamplifiers with an hammond organ spring tank. the rola pro77 was ideal. the little speaker power amp can dish it to the spring exciter and the tape replay amp can pick up the reverberating reflections of spring steelnes . the line input/mic channel … well is still the line input/mic channel. the old ‘line input / tape replay’ switch becomes a dry/wet function and ive put a ‘dry to mix in’ control into the reverb pickup amp. there’s also a kill switch ‘dead or alive’ .on the reverb spring drive. theres alot going on with all the preamp modifications. all manner of gain changing and tape eq circuit taming . the result is big fat ultra juicey verb. and you can effect the reverb time by dampening and freaking with the spring.at the top there. sugalicks runs this one. i was thinking that any old 3 head tape recorder amplifier channel could do this … so if youve got one spare laying around. get in touch . the tanks themselves are quite cheap and we can talk fair and square about a reasonable mod-freaking-experimenting fee for me and my kids. they kids help alot and need to be compensated.
anyways ….the klangenschmitt gogo2 mixer is almost completely freaking finished . just waiting for some paint to dry. its very cool – sounds amazing and looks utterly mad :/
today i needed to veer off track to prepare final fitment for the new made meter bridge attachmentisation to the control panel. its gone to the painters now for a transformer grey coating. the meters & the spare are old masters instruments sydney vus. seventy mm cut out. fast like bullets. its an awesome looking thing. with just right angles and fatness shape. it looks like a hot rod air scoop. dam expensive.
