TAKET BATPURE Supertweeter - Mini Project

[The Black Adder]

I wouldn't mind giving some Super Tweeters a try again TBH.

I remember the ones in my Harbeth SHL5's to add realism.

[RothwellAudio]

After several exchanges you quoted me £300 (plus some parts I was required to provide) for a solution that wasn't guaranteed to work. I suggested we might re-use a digital amp I own already to bring the cost down but was told the guts would have to come out anyway (so no reduction seemed forthcoming).

To be fair to Jez I think you may not be aware how much work is involved in doing custom work, and reusing old casework can involve more work than building from scratch. I use metalwork that is CNC punched and folded and it takes literally seconds for one of those machines to knock out a case. Doing the same work by hand could take me all day.
Similarly, the machines that assemble surface mounted boards can pick and place 12,000 components per hour. Get a bloke at a bench to work at that speed!!
Then compare Jez's quoted price for custom work to what a solicitor would charge just to write a letter
I don't think Jez was trying to rip you off.

[montesquieu]

Jez I have no desire to have a big public fight with you - I respect your work and enjoy your contributions here.

But - I told you I was looking to do something on the cheap to prove the idea. I had a bad feeling about spending £300 here, and if it turns out the bulk of the the £300 was in building a gainclone then I certainly made the right decision. Though to be fair, perhaps I should have contacted you to tell you what I was doing and why. I'm certainly sorry now I didn't

I went on to ebay immediately after that email on the 11th to look at boards and mains transformers - only to find I could thanks to the miracle of chifi I could get a fully built up device for not much more. (About $80, and customs only charged me £3 for some reason).

As I say I planned to come back to you about the autoformers (not really understanding what they would add in this scenario). I'm still up for that if it makes sense.

But your IP - buying a gainclone? Come on.

To be fair to Jez I think you may not be aware how much work is involved in doing custom work, and reusing old casework can involve more work than building from scratch. I use metalwork that is CNC punched and folded and it takes literally seconds for one of those machines to knock out a case. Doing the same work by hand could take me all day.
Similarly, the machines that assemble surface mounted boards can pick and place 12,000 components per hour. Get a bloke at a bench to work at that speed!!
Then compare Jez's quoted price for custom work to what a solicitor would charge just to write a letter
I don't think Jez was trying to rip you off.

I don't think that either - I just wasn't convinced I wanted to spend that much at this stage and I told Jez as much. This was an experiment I made that clear.

I genuinely though re-using casework would help, it's a small case with switches, RCAs etc in place- it appeared to me that to swap out a ready-populated chip amp board for another one and swap the transformer was a half hour job.

[Arkless Electronics]

Jez I have no desire to have a big public fight with you - I respect your work and enjoy your contributions here.

But - I told you I was looking to do something on the cheap to prove the idea. I had a bad feeling about spending £300 here, and if it turns out the bulk of the the £300 was in building a gainclone then I certainly made the right decision. Though to be fair, perhaps I should have contacted you to tell you what I was doing and why. I'm certainly sorry now I didn't

I went on to ebay immediately after that email on the 11th to look at boards and mains transformers - only to find I could thanks to the miracle of chifi I could get a fully built up device for not much more. (About $80, and customs only charged me £3 for some reason).

As I say I planned to come back to you about the autoformers (not really understanding what they would add in this scenario). I'm still up for that if it makes sense.

But your IP - buying a gainclone? Come on.

I have no particular desire for a "big public fight" with you either and also enjoy your contributions to AOS but felt that something had to be said here. I certainly would not have thought you the type to do as you have....

At least half of the fee would have been in designing, building and testing the custom made auto transformers. They would then have needed testing in conjunction with the gain clone and the tweeters and any snubber networks etc found necessary (to suppress likely ringing etc) would have to be experimentally arrived at and added. Like I said, it is less straightforward than it appears. The points made by Andrew above are also most pertinent to this...

"But your IP - buying a gainclone? Come on." You were planning on obtaining the batpures and just connecting them across the outputs of your Radford power amp, sans transformer... I came up with the whole idea of using a separate amplifier to prevent the capacitive, and probably very low impedance loading at HF, from spoiling the top end from your Radford, as heard through the Tannoys own tweeters. I pointed out that a step up transformer would almost certainly be required. I said that a volume control on the extra amp would allow the super tweeter level to be set appropriately to match the Tannoy's. I advised that no you couldn't use the class D amps you had already and advised a specific gain clone type amp which I considered most suitable for the task, even going to the lengths of providing a link to a suitable board on ebay... and then gave you the specs for a suitable transformer.

Other than the autotransformers, which no doubt are built in to the factory version you bought second-hand, you followed all my technical proposals in carrying out the job yourself. Yeah that "IP".

I'm not about to take this any further or to put you on my ignore list or anything of the sort but to say I'm disappointed is putting it mildly... I would certainly think twice before doing any work for you in the future, not without guarantees that you were not going to use my answers to the questions on the lines of "and how do you propose to overcome this or that issue Jez in building this "thing" for me?" and then using the advice to either do the work yourself or get a mate to put into action or buy similar from China....

To someone who can afford the sort of hi fi gear you own, not to mention vintage harpsichords etc, I guess £300 isn't really much... It's a lot to me and I now know how a hi fi dealer who has gone to the lengths of a home demo etc must feel when the "customer" then buys it secondhand or from Amazon etc...

There is a possible issue with the bought in version of the gain clone which may make it less proficient than you would have hoped for in its standard form and which I would have remedied in my application of it.... I think I'll keep the details to myself....

Edit for your edit....
"I genuinely though re-using casework would help, it's a small case with switches, RCAs etc in place- it appeared to me that to swap out a ready-populated chip amp board for another one and swap the transformer was a half hour job"

More like 4-6 hours+ in all including safely removing all the old gubbins for re-use, measuring up, marking out and drilling new mounting holes for the board and for mounting the chip packages to the heatsink with new insulating pads etc and then testing it etc... More if there were any problems and it went less than 100% smoothly.

[The Black Adder]

Can we now bring this thread back to discussing the subject please. Thanks.

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[montesquieu]

Interestingly I took the Gainclone out last night and wired these direct from my speaker terminals.

The 4k ohm load seems to have no effect whatsoever on the power amp, which works just as it did before, no degredation at all in performance (this is currently a Tsakiridis KT120 push pull amp - the big Radford has gone off to Will for its long-awaited refurbishment). Meanwhile the supertweeter effect remains quite clear even given the (presumably measured) 70db sensitivity. I don't understand at all what's going on - comb filtering, phase shifts, I don't know but the effect is definitely there..

I contacted Takei-san at Taket and he says the batpures can be used as they are for speakers up to 94db. Above that he says you need his fancy ones (much more expensive) with the autoformers built in. This is the same info I got from the US distributor.

Really curious.

[brian2957]

I use mine connected directly to the speaker without any problem .

Tom when you talk about the effect of the Takets do you mean that this is a positive or negative effect ? Like most hifi some will like this kind of thing and some won't .

[montesquieu]

I use mine connected directly to the speaker without any problem .

Tom when you talk about the effect of the Takets do you mean that this is a positive or negative effect ? Like most hifi some will like this kind of thing and some won't .

Definitely positive. And it's top to bottom.

[brian2957]

Yup , I agree the Takets seem to provide improvements across the whole audio spectrum . Like you I've been at a loss to fathom what's going on . I only know what when I take them out the SQ suffers and they are quickly plugged back in again .

I've been thinking about buying another pair ( I missed yours for sale ) and moving them around my listening ares to see what the effect will be .

I'm surprised you didn't do that Tom ...or did you ?

[The Black Adder]

Me too, thanks Tom for going in depth with these.

So, do you have a link to where are these available from? Or have I missed something?

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