@bdp24 Roger I happened to make my first visit to a new hi-fi shop just opening in Livermore, CA in 1973, Audio Arts. It was a 1-man shop, that man being Walter Davies, now the maker of the great Last Record Care products. And as luck would have it, that was the same day Bill Johnson was delivering and installing a complete ARC system in his new dealer Walt’s listening room; a Thorens TD-125 MK.2, a Decca Blue mounted on a prototype ARC arm (it never went into production), an ARC SP-3, and Tympani T-I’s (as you said, at the time distributed by ARC) bi-amped with a D75 and D51.
I was just a kid, and spent a couple of hours getting an education in high end hi-fi. A couple of months later I had that exact system (with a Decca arm) in my own room. All set up and connected, I pushed in the power switch on my SP-3, and immediately heard a "poof" and smelled the aroma of something burning, which turned out to be a resistor in the power supply. Welcome to the wonderful world of using under-rated parts!
Thank your for the walk back in time. Anyone who is not old enough to have your experience I encourage to read every word above. Thats exactly how is was back then. My store in Richmond VA was called Audio Art and is still in business. Manufacturers visited us. Nakamichi flew in on their private Mitsubishi plane. We ate, we drank, Bob Fulton told the story how the monkeys behaved when they heard sounds carried by different speaker cables.He said bad cables confused them. No kidding. In his Fulton J system, one of the best things going back then, he used Ford solenoid coils for woofer chokes. He was delightful.
The J was cool because you made it in pieces as your funds allowed. First you bought the bookshelf speaker which was a fine speaker in itself. Did what a good "monitor" should. Then you could either buy the 8 Cu Ft woofer box or the RTR ESL tweeter. When you were done you could please the missus with a dark brown cloth and wood "hat" that covered the whole thing. Stood about 4-5 ft tall. Marvelous. No bullshit, even the monkey story is better than most cable claims today. He made some good wire when this current crowd of cable makers were babies. I think some of them are still babies the way they rant and bend science.
As to your "POOF of smoke" thats is simply an unprotected power supply. Bill didnt seem to get the point that the down side filter capacitor looks like a short every time you turn on the preamp. Rather than take the time to discover how to make a Short Protected power supply he just added band-aids. It was always claimed to be some "sonic improvement" to make it easier to swallow. Most times it was a fixing a failure mode in an unfinished design. Power supply failures were never mentioned. As I recall the SP-6A upgrade was $150 for a little circuit board with two diodes and a resistor. He always kept the price you paid plus the upgrade cost equal to the price of the newer unit. Of course you had to send the preamp back, wait 6 months and some claim they got someone elses preamp back. ARC database has lots of information, though no stories. http://www.arcdb.ws/ It is the work of a group of dedicated ARC fans. Good place for ARC info on prices, modification dates, some schematics.
Back then the joke was. If you buy an ARC preamp you have to get two because one will always be in the shop and by the time you get that one back its aready one or more behind the latest version. People like Harry Pearson turned that inconvenience into a virtue.
If you dont believe me ask bdp24. He has obviously been around the block. Im sad for the horrible choices newbies have to make. The pressure to buy expensive cables and power cords and fuses and products that do nothing. Those did not exist when I got into this. We had to make real stuff. However we had coloful fellows like Bob Fulton, Jim Whiney, Matt Polk and Co, Arthur Jansen was still alive and I interviewed him as well as Saul Marantz and SId Smith. And last but not lease Harold Beveridge, my mentor.
