Antonio,

Do not anticipate the “Secret Melquiades” - it does not exist in a way that you might expect it.  The real secret of Melquiades is buried in real respect, real love and real understanding of the result and spending some targeted efforts to accomplish the result. All the rest is upon a complexity of the tasks that you expose yourself to.

I am a very pleased to realize that cruelty this amp leads me in my understanding of sound reproduction instead of me leading the amp – there is still a lot of learn. With powers amplifiers it happened to me before juts once in 1999-2001 while I was using ML2 – this is why so many references of mine to the Lamm’s SETs

Rgs,
The Cat

“one can work onto a result if can envision the result”.

Antonio, do you remember that magnificent story how Jacob stolen Laban’s animals when Jacob desisted to leave him? I am referring to how Jacob was able to bread the spotted and striped flock….I sincerely feel the everything derives from there.

The caT

After Rachel gave birth to Joseph, Jacob said to Laban, "Send me on my way so that I can go back to my own homeland. 26Give me my wives and children, for whom I have served you, and I will be on my way. You know how much work I've done for you."
But Laban said to him, "If I have found favor in your eyes, please stay. I have learned by divination that the LORD has blessed me because of you." 28He added, "Name your wages, and I will pay them."
Jacob said to him, "You know how I have worked for you and how your livestock has fared under my care. 30The little you had before I came has increased greatly, and the LORD has blessed you wherever I have been. But now, when may I do something for my own household?"

"What shall I give you?" he asked.

"Don't give me anything," Jacob replied. "But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them: Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages. And my honesty will testify for me in the future, whenever you check on the wages you have paid me. Any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any lamb that is not dark-colored, will be considered stolen."

"Agreed," said Laban. "Let it be as you have said." That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-colored lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons. Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban's flocks.

Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban. Thus he made separate flocks for himself and did not put them with Laban's animals. Whenever the stronger females were in heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the animals so that they would mate near the branches, but if the animals were weak, he would not place them there. So the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones to Jacob. In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.

The Melquiades amplifiers practically dally demonstrate so much “interesting” behavior that it is not even funny. My relationship with this amp reminds me that bird for the Montaigne's “An Apologie Of Raymond Sebond”:

“But the tale of the plot is very strange, which Plutarke confidently witnessed to have seen: 'This jay was in a Barbers shop of Rome, and was admirable in counterfeiting with her voice whatsoever she heard: It fortuned one day that certain Trumpeters stayed before this shop and there sounded a good while; and being gone, all that day and the next after the plot began to be very sad, silent, and melancholy, whereat all men marveled, and surmised that the noise or clang of the trumpets had thus affrighted and dizzied her, and that with her hearing she had also lost her voice. But at last they found she was but in a deep study and dumpish, retracting into herself, exercising her mind, and preparing her voice to represent the sound, and express the noise of the Trumpets she had heard. And the first voice she uttered was that wherein she perfectly expressed their straines, their closes, and their changes: having by her new prentiship altogether quit, and as it were scorned whatever she could prattle before.”

A strange new story took plays today.

A couple months back when I saw what Melquiades could do I decided to go for a “Super Melquiades”, or basically the optimized version of Melquiades for a multi-channels operation. I was thinking to make the LF channel really-really outrages and I asked Dima if he could come up with absolutely crazy specification for an output transformer that would work only at sub 100Hz. Dima did come up with something and suggested that if I would be able to make it then it would be very “interesting”.  I dumped the task to Jack Elliano and many conversations he made the sucker. Jack was quite pleased with the results of this 450mA monster.

Well, yesterday I decided to test it and connect it to the Melquiades without changing anything else. It turned out that the transformer outputs a full 15W power at 7.5Hz and it is with very moderate operation point of 6C33C dissipating on plate juts 50W! In fact, the transformer handle at 7.5Hz not only 2V of input voltage (corresponding to 15W) but 2.7V. At 2.0V it begins to clip the sinusoid at 6.8Hz! This was quite amazing – there is not a lot of SS PP amps the can handle it at full power but this was a 7H of full class A1 SET!!!

Hm, the next this was to connect it to the layback and hear it. I do have a very good LF section that run very low, very flat in my room with a very good quality of bass, so I am accustomed to a quite good LF result but what I head was completely out of this world. It’s very hard to explain but whatever it was it left something in me. I was listening for one hour or two and then… I fell asleep. I woke up in a few hours, couple times, and after 15-20 minuets I was falling asleep again.  I woke up this morning in…. 16 hours…  that practically never happen to me. I usually sleep very little a 3-4 hour and almost never during a day. I know my body very well and I know that I am not sick or anything like this. So shat the hell is going on? Are any relations between the ultra low frequency reproduction and our intention to sleep?

Puzzling,
Romy the Cat