Yggdrasil: The back back-saga
It is spring 1976. I was back from Peru working for Texas Instruments wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I sank hopelessly back into my audio habit, a mental neighborhood I hadn't visited since before Vietnam. My best audio buddies are Mike, John, and Paul. Mike runs a janitorial business, John and Paul are mechanical geeks – they specialize in making engines for model airplanes that weigh twenty pounds or so that were still legal to fly back then. When they crashed they killed people and occasionally started forest fires. We just finished Bruno Walter's Beethoven 9th on my Quad 1956 ESLs, homebrew/modified Dyna all tube pre/poweramps, and Sony TTS-3000 Rabco arm with Decca 4RC cartridge tracking at 4 grams. I am in a goose-stepping, exited about audio mood.
John looks at me and says “Let's start a company building audio electronics – you know how to make it sound incredible. It just looks like s**t and I can help you there.” Just then Paul raised a leg and anally sang a 30 second ten note atonal melody. Despite my audio reverie, I instantly sensed why he had no girlfriend. Mike, who actually had a modicum of sensibility offered “At least you'll be able to hang out with civilized people” before we adjourned to the garage to escape the stench. Thus was conceived Theta Electronics. (Not Theta Digital - that was almost 10 years later.)
I was terrified. I had a wife and step-daughter to support. I thought about what Mike said about hanging with the civilized. I was still naive; I didn't realize that audio geeks were little different from mechanical geeks and I was therefore condemned. What the hell, I'll take the plunge but what will I build? At that pre-digital time sources were predominantly turntables – the best reputation was won by the builder of the best electronics designed for turntables. So the first product was a preamp which, unlike power amps, was a product suitable for all systems, regardless of speaker.
At the time, solid state gear had almost universally replaced older vacuum tube based hi-fi systems. (hi-fi = high fidelity = legacy speak for good sounding audio gear). This was just about the moment that most audiophiles were beginning to realize that they had been conned. Early germanium based transistor gear made deafening noise like stuck toilets. Low bandwidth solid state power devices sounded grainy and strained when they weren't setting fire to your speaker or stinking up the house. To quote the Japanese, the soul of the music had been destroyed with solid state. The biggest market for the better used tube equipment was, indeed, Japan. That bid up the price of used tube gear, and there was little to no new tube gear available.
Almost all tube preamps used a variation of the same-o, same-o, 2 section 12AX7 active feedback eq circuit. 12AX7 tubes were designed for table radios and those sh**ty phonographs like schools used to use in the 60's-80's because they were cheap. (The only cool thing about older schools were the mimeograph machines which made copies that all of the future audiophiles and drug addicts used to sniff.) Not only were the 12AX7s cheap, but they were also designed with high gain so you don't have to use so many of them. They have terrible curves (read distortion), require lots of feedback to partially correct, and are noisy to boot. I hadn't and wouldn't use these in any of my beloved gear!
So there was this tube called a 6DJ8 - It turned out that the intellectual badasses at Tektronix and Hewlett Packard used a lot of them in their oscilloscope amplifiers. They also had good curves, low distortion, and are 12db quieter than 12AX7s. I also lost the active eq, switching to passive, which allowed my Theta Preamp to be the first 6DJ8, passive equalization, NO feedback design.
Before I was done with this company, I designed the first hi-fi hardware app for a 6BZ7 (in a power amp), and the first WE417A tube design in a head-amp (Moving coil pre-pre amp) which was, indeed, the first tube head amp. Why did I do these designs?? Because they sounded better!
Now did I get rich doing this? Nope. Did I go bankrupt? Nope. Did I learn? You bet. I also picked up two characteristics, neither of which I realized at the time. The first was an addiction to build audio stuff. The second was a reputation amongst audiophiles for building against-the-grain, maverick audio equipment, even if it appeared to be traditional in nature. There were many other valuable experiences – I met Dave (Yes! The Dave that I still work with today that Jason mentions in his writing). I learned how to do tradeshows with hangovers and too little sleep 5 out of the 4 nights. I learned that a huge percentage of the high end audio exhibitors were playing to their competitors and their dealers rather than their customers. Most tellingly, I learned that a loaded dealer was a loyal dealer, which often did not bode well for their customers.
Be all that as it may, I told myself I was done with audio – another grand adventure awaited me in Japan. So off I went. The trouble was that wherever I went, my audio junkie self was there as well. So I very excitedly bought the first available compact disk player – a full year before they were available in the US!! It was a cool looking thing that played the disk vertically behind a plexiglass door. The first CDs were Japanese pop songs – not exactly my style, but WTH I cued it up and listened. Just then a painful edge distracted me from the music. I wondered if one of those old-fashioned supersonic burglar alarms was in the vicinity. Slowly, it dawned on me that this system really did sound like bats with clothespins on their testicles. The digital audio event horizon deflated with a flatulent roar. Wow, it was as if I just found out that there was no tooth fairy, no more twinkies, and no more LPs or vinyl available because Warren Buffet or whoever cornered the market all at the same time.
Stubbornly I took this player home with me and took it apart in an attempt to discover why it was so excruciatingly bad. Little did I know that this would begin the Yggdrasil back-saga, which will be continued soon.
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