I’ve been meaning to join this site since I happened to speak to Owen at a vintage radio auction, realised he was the Owen from the discontinued AudioEnz site and learned that Dark Lantern existed.

I got back into this audio hobby thing a couple of decades ago when I dug out my old Rega Planar, played some records and was hooked again, (I’d previously moved exclusively into CDs and, as a result, lost interest in music over time). I then bought a Lenco B55 turntable, joined the Lenco Heaven site to learn how to fix it up and then realised “Hey, some of this old stuff sounds pretty good.” Soon afterwards the Rega was sold and the collection of funny smelling old audio gear started building up.

These days I mainly listen to a pair of 1950s speakers with 15” bass drivers and Lorenz tweeters driven by an American push-pull 7189 amplifier, with whatever front end I have going at the time plugged into it. The speakers aren’t perfect but are very sensitive and do some things very well, like dynamics and decay. Still, the search for the perfect sound never ends and maybe I’ll find it in the pages of Dark Lantern. I’ve tried a lot of audio gear over the years in the never-ending search for ‘The Sound’ and hope to find it while there is still some high frequency hearing left.

Paul.

Greetings budgie Paul - American 7189s I'm not familiar with, but the not-too-dissimilar EL84/6BQ5 is a favourite & almost invariably musical sounding tube.

Welcome & tell us a bit about the Lenco TT.

Pics please, if you can.

DarkLantern blog - darklanternforowen.wordpress.com

Hi Paul, welcome!
The 7189 is almost the same as a 6BQ5 with the same pin connections and similar ratings. The 7189A has extra connections for the control and screen grids on pins 1 and 6 respectively. So if you use a 6BQ5 in place of a 7189A you should check the pin connections on the valve socket.

AMR-iFi R&D

Thanks for the welcome Owen and Colin, when I found the PACO amp it had one output transformer blown and the two associated 7189s testing very low. NOS 7189s were so pricey that I bought Sovtek 6P14P-EV valves and, never having heard the 7189 tubes to compare, I'm very happy with the Sovteks.

As for the B55, it fell victim to the uninformed-beginner audio-enthusiast disease, upgrade-itis, but after sitting partly modified for over a decade it will rise again.

I'll look around the site and see how to upload pics.

Welcome along Budgie,

Apologies for the late welcome but I got sidetracked researching 7189s as I had the thought that I had run them in the past but no I hadnt.

Never heard of PACO amplifiers ?

Cheers

Precision Apparatus COmpany. They were in Long Island, New York, just down the road from Fisher. When my wife worked as a draughtswoman at an Auckland industrial electrical company in the early '70s the test equipment was mainly PACO. It had all been assembled from kits and calibrated by the technicians there as import restrictions made fully assembled test apparatus difficult and expensive to get. My amp (plus the matching un-restored tuner) was also made from a kit and I have the 90 page build book.

PACO mainly made test equipment and the home audio stuff was a sideline mainly aimed at the large kit market in the 1950s and '60s, so that's why most people have never heard of them.

budgie - for image posting, we use the www.imgur.com image-hosting site, which works better than the above 'Add image' button & avoids overloading the small storage capacity provided by this free-forums site.

You can read the general guideline for adding images on our Forum Navigation page - here.

DarkLantern blog - darklanternforowen.wordpress.com

Hi Budgie, like you I have been meaning to join this group for a long time and finally got around to it.
Over 55 years of messing with audio gear for me. Have done the tech side in my younger years when ai trained as a technician, then started an audio store in Tokoroa (where ai first met you) and morphed out of retail and into the import side of things. Still enjoying music and gear to the max. My system has been relatively stable for the past few years with SOTA / ET2 front end, VTL electronics and Magnepan speakers aided by REL subs.

TuBe or not TuBe - that is the question.
PQ Imports - a Passion for Quality - since 1986.

Welcome Paul Q !

For those who don't know, Paul is the PQ in PQ Imports and founder of the original Listening Post store in Tokoroa.

Back in the day that store was a highlight of the NZ audio scene, with a great line up of products and superb customer service, especially for out of town buyers.

Here in the boonies, two audio highlights were the arrival of the latest issue of The Absolute Sound and The Listening Post newsletter, the latter having the more reliable publishing schedule.



As a trade member feel free to add a signature.

We can also setup a sub-forum for PQI in the trade area.

And there's an Other interests area, currently there's plenty of car talk, we need a motorcycle correspondent