Wayne Parham, Akhilesh Bajaj, Norman Tracy and Bill Wassilak
Wayne Parham, Jim Denton, Norman Tracy and Bill Wassilak

Jim is a big fan of single driver speakers, and he had some new drivers to hear. His Martin King transmission line speakers were recently loaded with Lowther drivers, which sounded very nice.

Martin King TL speaker with Lowther driver

We listened to this speaker with and without a midrange notch filter. It also had a BSC, which was left in place. Comparison of the Lowther with the notch filter to the same setup without, as one might expect, the speaker was a little strident when the filter was removed. Some thought it more revealing without the notch filter, others thought it too shrill. Again, these are common reactions to Lowthers.

Fred Thompson Voigt Pipes

Jim bought these Voigt pipes from Fred Thompson last year. They use a Fostex driver and sound very nice. Jim later added a pair of "wings", to act as movable baffle extensions. We've all heard these speakers before, so it made a sort of baseline for comparison with Jim's Lowthers in the Martin King boxes. We also listened to several amplifiers through both sets of speakers.

Abraxas Audio "Yellow" amp

Jim bought another Abraxas amp since we'd all seen him last. I always like the colored transformer hoods, and have started naming them by colors. "Yellow" has a very nice sound and a little more power than "Blue", shown below.

Abraxas Audio "Blue" amp

Blue puts out a whopping three-quarter watts in triode mode, something like 1.5 in pentode mode. It's a neat little amp.

Akhilesh's custom 2A3 amp

Akhilesh bought a new SET amplifier based on 2A3 tubes. I thought it sounded good and looked very nice. The chassis is all brushed aluminum with a smart looking solid wood front panel, plain, no knobs or switches. It sounded a little conjested in the mids, but I think it was the slightly throaty sound of the speakers I was hearing, maybe not so much the amp. The speakers sounded great, but it may have been the combination that was a little off. We'll have to try it in some other settings to know for sure.

Jim Denton, Wayne Parham and Bill Wassilak checking out Akhilesh's new amp

It was really great to get together with everyone on Saturday. I think we all wanted to see each other as much as we wanted to check out audio gear, because we hadn't since GPAF in May. We've planned a meeting at Akhilesh's house in December and another at Mark Margiotta's house in January, so we're making up on lost time.