The times of your life
Stereo was brand-new, analog was king, and the buzz of an impending proclamation of martial law was in the air. Music was our family’s refuge from the gathering political storm. The voice of Connie Francis, my mother’s favorite, would play non-stop, temporarily clearing out the gloom caused by the suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The whole nation, my father surmised, must be losing a lot of sleep, uncertain of what the future may bring. It was the late 1960s, I was in grade school, but I vividly remember the fear engulfing our whole family — well, except for my brother Danny.
So engrossed was he in pushing his pen to draft what he believed was the most important project that he’d ever make. His fears were different from the rest of the brood. He was an electronics engineering senior at the Feati University, required to design a stereo phono stage for a moving magnet cartridge as his final test. All our audio gear back then were designed and made by him and my other brother Ding, who was already an electronics engineer.
Martial law came and went, and Danny searched for and found greener pastures in the US where he has been comfortably settled for more than four decades now. But he left us his prized project, and it provided our home with years of musical bliss.
Fast-forward to 2010. I was rummaging through my old files when I came upon a piece of A4-sized pad paper, yellowed with age and heavily creased. It was my brother Danny’s schematic diagram for an MM phono stage that he painstakingly designed as a school project. Who would have thought that I would unearth my brother’s design at a time when analog is enjoying a well-deserved renaissance? I rushed to commission Rene Rivo to create a phono stage based on my brother’s schematics.
Rene, whose educational background is in management and industrial engineering, found his true love in audio. From beating competitors in spelling bees as a boy, he has become the ultimate restorer of vintage audio gear, gaining the respect of a grateful audio community. He has earned this badge through his exceptional work ethic; and by speaking and reading electronic languages better than some of his peers.
He has been assembling tubed audio equipment since 1984, and specializes in preamplifiers and amplifiers. He also troubleshoots and repairs audio gadgets, but it is in restoring vintage gear where he found his niche. If you happen to drop by his Hypertriode shop on Calatagan Street in Palanan, Makati City, you will be amazed by the quality of his restored vintage audio equipment.
While remaining faithful to my brother’s schematics, Rene incorporated some of his own ideas into the final design. He equips it with two pairs of Altec step-up transformers (4722 and 115095) to accommodate moving coil carts with switchable loading. This gives the phono stage full flexibility to accept different carts with load impedance of betwen 38 and 600 ohms.
In the past I have discussed how critical the carts are in the audio chain, especially in retrieving musical information from vinyl records. But the musical signal that the carts pick up is so low (thousandths of a volt) that it needs a phono stage to bring it up to the volume level of the other music sources you listen to such as CD, SACD, or even DVD audio players.
How good a phono stage is in pumping up these faint musical signals could make or break the playback quality of your audio system: music data could simply be lost or twisted at this stage rather than later on in the signal path. Lost musical information can never be recovered; worst, distortions and colorations are augmented several times over.
The phono stage, designed by my brother and hot-rodded by Rene, is now singing beautifully in my music room. I am happily reliving the memories of my childhood and teen years, listening to the same music that my parents, brothers and sisters used to enjoy, using the same medium that reminds me of just how much mellower life was back then. For now, in my music room, with my wife and daughter engulfed by the melodies that have marked milestones in my life, and anticipating the pleasure of listening to many more compositions to make joyful recollections. These are the times of my life, and everything is all right in my world.
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com or you can tweet audiofiler at www.twitter.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.
