Here’s A $25,000 Gift!
Harvey (The Scrooge Gizmo!) Rosenberg

The rumors of my fabulous wealth are true. Donald Trump calls me up when his bankers won’t lend him money. I commute to work everyday in my own private jet, and work is only one mile from my home. My 100,000 acre Montana ranch is where I go for the reverie of fly fishing, Elk hunting and to tend my Buffalo herd. It also happens to be my retreat where I write all of my articles for Positive Feedback. I own the only 400 foot ocean going yacht with its own bagel oven, because nothing is more divine than eating a fresh baked bagel, cream cheese and lox while listening to the porpoises sing by moonlight ... for a Jewish thermionic techno-shaman. Of course you all know about my private Soviet military surplus space station I bought so I can make my own tubes in outer space where there is a perfect vacuum. I light my cigars with $ 1 00 bills, and rather than use water in my toilet system I use champagne..... Cuvée Dom Perignon 1955, because I love the feeling of those bubbles on my butt when I flush. Robin Leach is my butler, and in my two hundred room mansion, every room uses an AudioNote Ongaku as a door stop.

Yes, this rumor is also true, being a Billionaire really distorts and corrupts one’s perceptions, and the timeless paradox runs true: really hyper-rich people, like me, are penny pinching audio misers. So let me share with my fellow Positivists the penny pinching secrets of megarich and famous audiomaniacs, which is exactly like giving you all a $25,000 Christmas gift. What other high end audio journal is this generous to its readers, Bah Humbug?

25 CENT NOT SOLID GOLD TIP-TOES

Have you ever heard the expression: "You can never be too thin, too wealthy or use too many tip-toes?" The way I figure it the average audio system requires at least one hundred!

Years ago I bought a couple of tons of gold bars and sent them to my foundry where they were cast into tip-toes. I find the sound of solid-gold tip-toes sublime and much more refined than the aluminum or carbon fiber models, but with shifts in the currency market I saw an opportunity to making a killing in gold arbitrage and melted them down and made $ 1 00 million profit, but I was out of tip-toes.

So I invented the world’s best tip toes, which cost only 25 cents a piece to make. Being that tip-toes cost between $8 and $40 a piece by following my instructions you will have been given between a $800 and $4,000 Christmas gift: savings!

I now once again not only have my usual one hundred tip-toes in my system, but I have tip toes under everything...my coffee cups, my lamps, candles, telephone, ashtray, cigar humidor, computer, I even attached large tip toes directly to my butt so that no matter where I sit I get optimal focus.

By following these simple instruction you will never have to cry tip-toe poverty again.

INGREDIENTS: All of these components are purchased at your local hardware store:

large Phillips head screws, at least two inches long @ 10 cents;

washers, at least 1.25 inches wide @ 5 cents , and;

two-part metal epoxy ...i.e. PC7 brand.

INSTRUCTIONS: Place a piece of Saranwrap on your kitchen table. Mix up a batch of two part metal epoxy. Place the washers on the Saranwrap. Take a glob of mixed epoxy and put it on the screw heads. Push the screw heads down hard on the washers so that you are certain that the heads are making flat contact with washers. Let them dry for at least eight hours. Lift the units from the Saranwrap and now sand off the side of the washers that were next to the Saranwrap so that you have bare metal. That’s it.

You can make big ones or little ones. Just make sure you use nice thick washers. I made very big ones for use under my Tannoy horns, and smaller ones for my amplifiers, tape decks, etc.

Make hundreds of them and give them to all your audiomaniac friends for Christmas. Now that Positive Feedback has saved you thousands of dollars, you can order ten lifetime subscriptions to Positive Feedback — or get a face lift.

I AM SO WIRED MY SHRINK SUGGESTS PROSAC

Last year I almost had a nervous breakdown.... over wire and interconnects. Girls, who can we believe in the wire and interconnect jungle? Has anyone ever really talked to an electron and asked them what they really like in wire? And with subatomic/electro-magnetic theory going through a revolution, will we ever know what musical electrons like?

Because I was seeing five hundred pound spiders wearing sunglasses crawling up my walls doing the Macarena I called my shrink, and he told me to either take some Prosac or calm down and wipe my wire slate clean and start at the beginning. Gentlemen, let me assure you that I have in my collection the finest, most expensive wire and interconnects, and I was a very confused puppy!

So I went to Radio Shack and bought some spools of magnet wire, Part #278-1345 @ $3.99 for 315 feet. Using ultra-cheap Radio Shack RCA plugs and the 26 gauge magnet wire, I made a bunch of interconnects using this coated solid copper wire for both ground and signal and listened. I was so startled I made another emergency call to my shrink.

"Doctor, How is it possible that my own home made, under $1 interconnects, sound better than my $1000 interconnects? They are made with solid super cheap solid copper..... they are unstranded, have no fancy configuration, no fancy dielectric, no gold plated plugs."

My shrink simply said, "Trust your feelings Harvey" and slammed down the phone.

Easy for my shrink to say that, which gave me no relief, so with my hands and ears trembling I called my audiomaniac brother Art Dudley, editor and publisher of LISTENER MAGAZINE, and asked him to do the experiment. Art too was so amazed by the quality of these under $1 interconnect that he did a story about them, complete with construction instruction, in his Summer 1996 issue, agreeing with me that they sounded better than most megabuck interconnects, and I quote Art here, "All I’ll say is: The only interconnects I’ve heard recently that I like any better would cost more than a week on Cape Cod".

In October Art showed me some of the letters he received from his initially cynical readers who made their own magnet wire interconnects and compared them to the expensive spread and confirmed, once again, that Gizmo may not be totally deaf. Now the penurious tweaker’s fire was burning so hot in my loins that I had to go much, much further with my solid wire experiments,

So I called MYRON TOBACK INC, 25 West 47th St., NYC 190036 ( 212 398-8300, Fax 212 869-0808), silver wire purveyors, and ordered fine gauge pure (not Sterling) SOLID silver wire. Pure uninsulated SOLID silver wire costs $ 10 an ounce in any gauge ... the thinner the gauge the more you get per ounce. You get about 50 feet an ounce at 26 gauge, which means that for $ 10 you get enough SOLID silver wire to make five, ten, twenty interconnects or one really long one.

I called MOUSER ELECTRONICS, 800-346-6873, and ordered my favorite male RCA phono plugs, Part # 174-4206, @ $2.71.... when you buy ten pieces, and called ALLIED ELECTRONICS at 800-433-5700 and ordered a 100 foot roll of Teflon insulation Part # 708-5020 @ $38.76..... and started making my own SOLID silver cables. Rub ultrafine steel wool on your silver wire then rub on a thin film of virgin olive oil (use no petroleum based oil) before you slip it into the insulation so that it will not oxidize. My favorite brand is ITALICA-NATURALLY PRESSED VIRGIN OLIVE OIL.

Gentledudes, should you believe my ranting praise about the quality of 26 gauge SOLID silver interconnects? No, never trust anyone over thirty! Go to Radio Shack and buy the parts and make my under $ 10 total cost magnet wire interconnect or call Myron Toback Inc., and go crazy and order some pure SOLID silver wire and do this under $20 experiment. Art Dudley, the generous soul, has agreed that if you will send him a stamped self-addressed envelope, he will send you a copy of the article: Listener Magazine, 33 Chestnut Street, Oneonta, NY, 13820... and yes, use these cables for digital and phono! Let your fellow Positivists know your results. Yes, use heavier gauge solid silver wire for all your internal wiring in your amplifiers, etc.

Let me suggest what you will hear: any form of multi-stranded wire (copper or silver) is foggy and confused relative to solid silver wire. To my ears the more complicated the construction, the more complicated the sound! DOWN WITH AUDIO GRUNGE, NO MORE STRANDED WIRE!

I could be wrong because I once bought a brand new Edsel. If I am right, on the other hand, Positive Feedback has given you a $20,000 Christmas gift — savings — and you can now afford to buy everyone in your neighborhood a subscription to Positive Feedback.... and you will notice GIZMO: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE posters put up by cable companies. It won’t be the first time that I received death threats!

MORE BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE BATTERY REVOLUTION AND DE-GRUNGING DIGITAL AUDIO

Sometime soon, in the twenty first century, after spending millions of man hours and zillions of dollars on research, digital audio will almost sound as good as a 1970s vinyl system. It will be a profound moment of victory for the Audio Engineering Society, but until that time we are faced with dilemma of getting the best sound from a technology that adds a significant amount of grunge to the music. Do you really have to spend $6000 plus to start getting grunge-free, ultra-pure digital?

Not long ago all audio equipment was battery powered, which was a real pain in the ass, so God in Her Infinite wisdom invented rectifier tubes so music lovers could use their wall plugs instead of hauling heavy batteries down to the recharging station. In the 1960s when moving coil cartridges become popular and lots of low noise gain was needed, we suddenly noticed battery powered solid-state gain stages, which made enormous sense. Then we discovered that the AC coming out of our walls was contaminating and modulating our power supplies, even those with regulators, so She invented AC line conditioners. If that wasn’t enough trouble, we then discover that it is really hard to get any power supply, even multi-stage regulated ones, to be free of grunge.

So one starry night about eighteen months ago, while undulating on the sea listening to porpoises singing, this thought occurred to me: Everyone who reads the techy literature knows how super critical power supply design is for digital circuits. This means that those little expensive digital processing chips are hypersensitive to the quality of the power supplies. Was it possible that that no rectified power supply could ever be pure enough for digital circuits!? Was it possible while everyone is exploring new formats and sampling rates, the real problem endemic to digital is that they simply can’t be powered from the wall and achieve ultimate refinement? Was it possible that one of the main contributions to digital grunge was the problems endemic to all rectification... no matter how refined?

With the unquenchable fires of gizmological desire burning in my loins, I ordered the helicopter that I keep on my yacht to fly me back to shore and to my local Rolls Royce dealer, where I bought a brand new Corniche convertible for $325,000, drove it home, took out its two batteries, and then ordered the car sent to the junk yard. Of course you could go to the local Sears store and buy two 12 volt car batteries, a charger, and replicate my experimental bipolar battery power supply (see the diagram on the next page). Total parts cost were under $100 because the batteries and charger were on sale! I started with my Audio Alchemy digital gear, and let me assure the legions of Alchemists that battery power supplies are a big leap forward in sound quality. Of course with battery power supplies you don’t need those expensive AC line filters!

Based on my results I immediately sent a fax to Peter Madnick telling him of the stupendous improvement in sound quality. You will note that Audio Alchemy is now selling a battery power supply for their digital equipment! And did you remember the big brouhaha that Sam Tellig caused over the Radio Shack 3400 portable digital player.... it was because it was powered by batteries and not plugged into the wall! Are you noting all of the big buck audio equipment that is now battery powered?

Look around, the battery revolution has begun and for a good reason: batteries are the best power supplies for any small signal transistor or chips. I am suggesting that all small signal solid state gear — meaning your preamps, the front end of your solid state amplifiers, i.e. Adcoms, Haflers, et al., all of your digital equipment, all of your cassette decks and FM tuners — will be vastly improved by battery power supplies.

Those with the technical competence should experiment with battery power supplies and report to their fellow Positivists their results. Technical note: the batteries are taking the place of the rectifier’s raw output voltage, so you use the existing regulator circuits.

THE LIKE ALMOST $3000 ROTEL RD 980 DAC FOR $600

Please remember that I am the guy that bought Tannoy Westminster Royals and immediately took them apart and tweaked them, and that as far as I am concerned the only things worth tweaking are the great works of audio art!

When you undress the Rotel RDD 980 so its naked circuit board is exposed, you have to wonder how they offer all of this circuit sophistication at the same price I pay for one $600 custom made shirt. We are talking about big gizmological bang for the dollar. They are doing it right with mucho multi-regulated power supplies, i.e. separate regulated power supplies for analog and digital circuits. I am not going to repeat the rave reviews that Rotel digital gear, i.e. RDD 980 and 960, is getting, so I suggest you review the appropriate recent issues of AUDIO ADVENTURE. But let me share my experience: I invite my musician friends who have DAT master tapes of their own performances to my listening room and ask their opinion of which DAC sound "right" to them. Of course this is a completely subjective opinion, but who better to judge the quality of a digital processor? The Rotel is frequently picked more often than units costing two and three times as much, so when you consider that the list price is $600, which means you can probably buy it for less .... well, gents ... you must audition this unit.

The battery supply tweak I am suggesting is only for the technically competent and those who are prepared to trek into the land of warrantee violation, but here is where we get into big tweaking thrills! With less than a hour of surgery in Dr. Gizmo’s operating room to install multiple raw battery supplies, which because of Rotel’s sophistication means more complexity than the battery supplies for the Audio Alchemy, we can shake, rattle, and roll. This is one of the explanations for this unit’s refinement .... lots of different stages of regulation. The raw battery power supplies used for the digital circuits, in the place of rectification, catapults the sound quality of this Rotel unit to the megabuck category of DACs in terms of refinement.... much less digital grunge. Say hello to sweetness, and smooth digital sound with all of the air and spatiality that this unit already has in spades. The digital grunge that is in all digital gear and so apparent in voices is now melting away, and yes, begins to approach vinylosity.

What is the point of all of this tweaking: (1) Rotel is doing something tremendously right in their engineering and is giving the audiomaniac a tremendous value, and (2) the battery power supplies shows me just how good their engineering is because it reveals another level of refinement to the digital circuits.

But let me tell you why I also love this Rotel unit. I, like so many others, have multiple CD players and digital tape decks, and the gonzo advantage of this Rotel unit is that I can plug FOUR digital units into it because it has lots of input switching. Let me put this to you another way: finally some smart designer figured out the real world needs of digitalmaniacs and created a unit that lets us have maximum fun, with the potential for extraordinary refinement.

Even if you are not contemplating the complex battery/warrantee voiding mod, you must check this unit out, because the rumors you have heard about the big musical bang for the buck you get from Rotel digital are true. A Christmas prayer: Rotel and every other digital maker will make the battery supply hookup a standard feature. And the blessed few who want to accelerate the coming of the digital Messiah will start using silver not copper plated printed circuit boards.

If you followed the advice of this humble audiomaniac editor you will have increased your musical pleasure enormously, and saved at least $25,000, which you can now invest in lifetime subscriptions to POSTIVE FEEDBACK, or something of equal joyous bounty. Merry Christmas to everyone, and I promise you next year I will take you so deep into the Nth Dimension of Music-Hyperspace that your unique aural matrix will expand at the speed of light. And here’s a sneak preview: You see this pinky, You see this thumb, HERE COMES TRIODZILLAÓ, YOU BETTA’ RUN. I am creating TRIODZILLAÓ, a 300 pound per mono channel, twelve feet tall, 5 Watt directly heated triode single-ended amplifier that is so terrifyingly refined that it can faithfully reproduce the garlic on Johann Sebastian Bach’s breath. Way cool!

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