an artist client wanted my old leak 20 system. bad. and ive had it sitting upright whilst fixing the preamp . and ive grown accustomed to the new vibe. the power amp has a custom dual trafo power supply right at the bottom there. and the amp chassis … with the original single power trafo removed … looks like it’s got great big golden balls.  the point one stereo preamp has new bass and treble controls which improved the sound action adjustment effects  hugely of course. no small feat. the bass  is a  5 meg lin dual!  try and buy that from the dairy. i found  5meg board mount pots and some other dual pots by the same manufacturer & swapped out the resistor elements. he has a new balance control circuit too. it attenuates on the input circuit now, rather than the output. the overall sound is much alive with that preamp output loading left off. the wharfdales are my workshop throwaways but you can tell that pumping up some longlegged altecs with extra horn bossoombas is going to rock it. woof!. (i definitely have to get out more)

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 a neumann cmv microphone im fixing up for a client. it came to me all messed around with and not going. somebody had attempted to modify it from its original ec92 amplifier into an ef86 without a clue as to how valves actually work!. the thing could never have gone. they were just guessing. so after some careful brain surgery it goes beautiful now with a nice simple circuit . all new components. but still has a strange spurious noise issue to solve.  the noise only occurs after bassey tones and comes up in the background for about 6 seconds. and then the mic goes perfectly quiet again. what the? so after repeating and checking everything im now resolved that the capsule has a fault. it still sounds great tho as long as you dont heavy breath close up. wouldnt suit darth vader.

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.

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.