Posted by Albertporter on November 30, 2002 at 19:43:44:
In Reply to: Why Not Ask Wolcott..? If he is smart enough to build the Wo posted by Terry Koehn on November 30, 2002 at 17:24:08:
Terry it is obvious by now that you disapprove of anyone changing anything as manufactured by the factory. Following this to it's logical conclusion, BMW automobiles in Minnesota should slip and slide to work during the winter, as changing the factory BMW tires would be heresy. I also assume you would disapprove of my changing the engine and transmission chips to Dinan on my BMW 5 series V8. Or does purchasing and installation by way of local authorized BMW dealer makes this action OK?
Back to a SLOG topic. Hank Wolcott is a great engineer and has produced an amplifier that I am pleased with. However, Hank is like all humans and makes errors in judgement about many things, including his own products.
I spent several hours over the last three days tracing problems as to why a Wolcott set for 240 Volts that I shipped to Switzerland, brand new from the factory, failed to work and blew fuses when turned on. ( Yes, I am an authorized dealer for this product ).
After much discussion on the phone between Wolcott and myself and many emails to Switzerland, we finally resorted to a full pictorial diagram of the wire code of the amp. It was faxed to me, I scanned it and cleaned it up in Photoshop and then converted it to a JPEG and inclosed as an attachment to Switzerland.
I received an email about an hour ago where my customer found the wiring REVERSED on the 240 terminals of the transformer and CORRECT on the 120 terminals. My specific instructions to the factory during the two week burn in before shipping was to be CERTAIN that the unit was preselected to 240 and burned in before a trip across the ocean. I was assured that this was done by Hank himself.
Further, last year I was advised that Hank was going to replace the 6GW8 drivers with RSD German tubes in place of Tungsram (NOTE this was a factory decision). After a week or two of run time on the amps their fuses began to blow. The (new factory selected) tubes were non functional with this design because of poor quality. Wolcott determined this only after failure. I never considered these tubes as they are EAST German and poor copies of West German Telefunkens. They are frequently sold on EBAY and the dealer who sells them has reworded his warranty to exclude return of these tubes due to the inability of a product to accommodate them. He has obviously been down this road before.
Point being that aftermarket tubes exist that are MUCH better than supplied by anyone in the manufacturing business. We need to maintain open discussions as to what is the best quality for our gear, avoiding problems that even the factory makes.
Likewise, criticizing those who wish to avoid these problems makes absolutely no sense. There is no security or comfort in blindly following what is provided when good information gives us choices that can improve our sound. There are quality upgrades that not only improve performance, but reliability and longevity.