Adventures with the wrong lens

When I first started on digital photography, that was really the first time I had to care about "gear" in the sense that I had learned how to use my mom's Pentax MX and the two lenses I had - 24mm and 135mm - and had only made it as far as getting a gift from my dad of a Tamron two-lens kit, a 28-80 zoom and 80-210 zoom. I was able to find a new-old-stock ZX-L at the Ritz camera at the mall in 2005, got that, and used the living daylights out of it, enjoying access to autofocus and aperture priority metering.

[edit: skip to the second half of this paragraph if you read my post "reengaging with photography" from last year, as I didn't realize I basically already told it. sorry.] That all changed when I got my *ist DL, and the company was in the midst of introducing a bunch of new lenses to deal with APS-C image sensors. I actually skipped the 18-55 kit and went with the 16-45 zoom they introduced, as 16 got me out to the 84 degrees I was used to with the M 24mm lens, and then the standard DA 50-200 lens. That kit served me very well for a year and a half, when I got my first limited lenses, the 43mm and the 77mm. At some point in this stretch, my dad got me the 14mm from Pentax, which is still one of my absolute favorites. Through this stretch, though, I of course always wanted the star lenses. The 16-50 would have been nice, but I didn't feel let down in any way by the 16-45 (and indeed, if they were to reintroduce the latter lens, screw drive and all, but with weather sealing, I would be in line tomorrow). The 50-135, on the other hand... the 50-200 served me well but the softness and lack of speed at 200 left me wanting something faster. The pricing was never going to work well for my budget, though.

Until this year, when I decided to take a look at them again. I learned all about SDM motor failure and screw-drive conversions, and decided it was worth a shot. The copy I got for less than a third of what they cost new 15 years ago came out of the shipping box without wanting to autofocus at all. Eventually it got itself to the point where it would begrudgingly swing through the focus range over the course of ten seconds, and I was resigned to returning it. The next morning, I read someone suggesting that this lens could suffer from sleepy SDM, and that one way they were able to get around it was to point the lens at the ground, run the AF, then point the lens at the sky and run the AF again, and that would be enough to wake it up. Lo and behold, the focus is working correctly. At least for a use session, then if I leave it sit for a while, it will slow up again. I figured I could live with that if the lens performed well in the field, and then resolved to take it on a walk before deciding for sure.

Today, I took that walk. The lens performs superbly... at 135mm, which is the only place in the zoom range I wanted to use it. This actually just now has reminded me of my experience with the Tamron 80-210, a lens that I basically only used as a 200mm stand-in because the minimum focus distance meant it wasn't great at shooting pictures of small things really anywhere short of that length. I guess these are traditionally intended to be used for portraiture or general walkabout stuff, and nobody ever thought they'd be on someone's camera that was into little things. The 50-135 worked great for a couple of birds today, even, but it's a lot to keep in the bag for what is effectively something I can effectively do with a 100mm f2.8 macro, or if I were to dig up an FA 135 f2.8, I'd have the same field of view at a fraction of the size. It probably would not do bokeh as well and may not be quite as sharp, but those are trades I can live with in that world.

Anyway, a younger version of myself would not have admitted this. He would have kept this lens and basically let it fall into disuse, believing it had a place in the hoard despite the limitations inherent to a zoom lens. I'm proud of myself for being mature enough to know it's best to let this go to a new home, maybe where someone can convert it to screw drive (since that's not even something you can do on the latest bodies, it turns out).

Incidentally, on zooms: I do have one zoom lens I absolutely adore - the 20-40mm limited. Not only does it feel fantastic in use and produce beautiful images, because the zoom range is so small, the focal distance doesn't create problems with trying to use it at 20mm. I think if they ended up doing a similar lens design that was maybe APS-C only, 40-80mm f2.8-4, same limited construction and feel, I'd again be in line tomorrow for one. I see they made an M zoom in that spec that I may go with just for fun for a while, but I really would like something a little longer that's weather sealed for flowers and bugs. Yes, I do recognize that means I need to stop futzing with it and get the 100 AW macro.

A couple more highlights from the star lens:

Here's the rest of the shoot.

Photo walk gone good

I went for a photo walk on Saturday. This is the infamous "I finished my five year old roll of film" day... and I had taken my MX and also decided to take what I had gotten once as a curiosity but has become a backup body for when I finally get a service vendor to care about setting me up for the two things I need to get dealt with.

The Pentax K-01 is the also-ran mirrorless camera they built with designer Marc Newson, and the ergonomics definitely show the result of being done by a designer, not a photographer. The camera isn't difficult to use by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a number of things about it that make you want to just set it to auto and not do much. Also, since it uses the K-mount, the registration distance is still 45.46mm, so the camera isn't really much smaller than a standard SLR. It's quite a bit lighter, though, which is nice.

Anyway, since I don't use this camera all that much, I went out without checking on its settings (or indeed even verifying that the memory card I grabbed was any good or had any room on it). It was kind of liberating to just grab something and go... but it turned out that the camera was set to JPEG mode, not raw. For those that don't live in this world, the two things you lose out on are some fine pixel detail and then the detail at the brightest and darkest parts of the image. Basically, imagine a chart of brightnesses from 0 to 100; let's say the image shows us from 20 to 80. With a raw file, there's some additional detail in the parts of the image we can't see, and with editing software, you can change the brightnesses to let you see some of that additional detail.

So it's been a rough week outside the camera world... sick cat at home, work going through a dumb patch with new inventory policies, just generally having some wintertime funk. Imagine my disappointment when I got home and found that I couldn't do what I wanted with my digital pictures. I don't have much to share from that day specifically, nor can I say any of the images that were still on this random card from this specific camera with these specific settings that I took back in 2018 were worth keeping around. But I decided to tell my story and post some of them on a discussion forum populated by other middle-aged computer touchers, and they actually really liked what I was able to eke out of this frame. As I told them: it's good to remember that with artistic works, other people can look at your stuff and see past the internal limitations you see in your own work. I guess sometimes if you knowingly publish work below your usual standard, you might find that some of your voice and expertise still shine through. Honest process, honest feedback.

On Cropping

When I first started in photography, it was on film (as thoroughly discussed across the broad history of this blog, and mentioned in the previous post), and it was C41-process prints from photo shops. I did not ever do my own development (though I have a curiosity about the process and see now that there are at-home C41 kits, and color speaks more to me than black and white...), and I never at all thought to try at-home printing. My prints were as they came out of the camera.

With early-boom digital SLRs existing in a world of about six megapixels and a maximum usable ISO of maybe 800, more often 400, there was no significant* room for cropping. Not in my experience, anyway. I got used to living in a world where I was disappointed I didn't have access to lenses that created the exact framing I wanted on sensor. Practically speaking, that means I had to settle for having a slow 200mm zoom.

As I fast forward 15 years to get to today, I have all of the sudden found that I don't care anymore. Almost every single photo I take, I crop for artistic refinement. I've almost completely stopped worrying about filling the frame with my shot, which has helped a lot with feeling held back by the amount of money I can put in front of the camera. This seems to entirely come down to the fact that I have accepted the resolution of the 24.whatever megapixels I have available to me as adequate for detail at crop, and that processing raw photos to remove the failings of old film-era coatings has gotten to be so good that I can reliably make any of the glass I have look good enough for what I want at pretty much any crop setting, as long as I have done a good enough job with the technicals of aperture, focal point, ISO, and steadiness.

This is all to say that I've found a significant feeling of liberation by actually taking advantage of the hardware I paid for, and also I have a much greater degree of appreciation for the work the engineers are doing to make the imaging and processing algorithms better. It lets me do things like snap with an inappropriate focal length because it's the lens I have with me and get results like this:

out of framing like this:

with a camera lens from 1978 (smc-Pentax M 135mm f3.5) mounted on a camera body released in 2013 (Pentax K-3). It makes me wonder how much better I could do with the advances in stabilization and high-sensitivity noise, and with exposure latitude, if that's something that's improved in last year's K-3 III. I know the K-1 and K-1 II both have significantly more exposure latitude than the K-3 did. I don't want to say I've already outgrown the K-3 given how little I've used it since I got it in 2015. I did my 11,000 pictures with the *ist DL in 4 years, apparently about 14,000 pictures with the K20D in 5 years, and I've only just gotten to 9,600 today after 7 years with the K-3, so I've slowed down considerably as phones and a general lack of interest in the hobby have taken their toll on me. If I outgrow the K-3, I don't know that I could pick a single replacement anyway, as both the current K-3 III and the K-1 II present significant advantages for my interests and lens library... not least of which in the case of the K-1 II is that it should be less hard on my film-era lenses for their imperfections, and also because it will further enhance the bokeh experience I have with my 43 and 77 limited lenses.

Anyway, all that's to say I am really enjoying getting out and doing this stuff again, and letting it tickle my brain has been rewarding so far.

Reengaging with photography

Well, since it's been over a year since my last update again, on the off chance anyone was actually rotating through here on a regular basis: sorry.

I was recently supposed to have gone on vacation back to where I grew up, and I had booked a lot of time beyond the high school reunion date to get out and explore and maybe reconnect with 'home' while I had an excuse to do so. As part of the prep for that, I bought a couple of new camera gear items for the first time in almost seven years. I used to be a huge photography nerd, starting back with my Kodak advantix point and shoot, and then moving into 35mm when my mom gave me her Pentax MX. By the time I finished college, I was blowing through $200 a month in film and processing, and that was back in 2006, so jumping into digital made a lot of financial sense for me. My graduation present was an *ist DL and the DA 16-45 f4 lens, and I put in enough practice with that camera body (at least 13,000 pictures between May 2006 and January 2010) that I outgrew where it kept sensitivity and focus settings, so I moved into the K20D with some reluctance, as I barely had enough money for that to be My Thing in 2010. I shot two weddings with my K20D, and hung onto it for five years, moving to the newer K-3 in 2015. I had picked up a couple of additional lenses in that time, but the last one I had pulled in was the HD DA 20-40 f2.8-4 Limited zoom.

A brief aside... Oddly, as I look at my habits and past work, I tend to gravitate toward two frames: close up with a wide angle, and zoomed as far as I can go with whatever telezoom I happen to have. In film, this was set up with my mom's K 24 f2.8 and the Tamron AF 80-210 f4.5-5.6 my dad got me; when I went digital, I gave my autofocus camera and autofocus lenses to my cousin, so for the next decade or so, it was the 16-45 (I picked 16 because I wanted the same field of view as the 24 on film) and a DA 50-200, which I think was probably a step backwards from the Tamron. After that, I got a DA 55-300, which has been with me out of the house nearly every time I take my camera anywhere. It isn't a terribly good lens, though, at least not for distant wildlife. I found this out the hard way when I tried to document our trip to Delta, Utah this spring, when I got a series of a few thousand white blobs that represented the snow geese. The 20-40 Limited lens has gotten a LOT of use despite not filling either of these niches. It's just got such a delightful character that it more or less pushed both the HD DA 21mm limited and the 16-45 out of my regular rotation.

2015 was a long time ago, and a lot has happened since then. I spent a lot of time with music, and I think music kind of took the place that photography had from about 2016 through 2019. In 2019, I had to back out of music for a while because of more surgery, and then 2020 happened. Some might argue it is still happening. Having lived through all that, I wanted to do something nice for myself, and I had already given myself the brainworms for long glass following the Great Delta Disappointment.

I got myself a DA★ 300mm f4 telephoto lens. Used, from Japan. It showed up smelling vaguely of cigars, but hey, small price to pay for the right deal, and a significant savings over new. Almost immediately after ordering that, but before it arrived, I realized I was going to have a problem in Oregon: I wanted to spend a lot of time on the coast, but I didn't have a weather-sealed walkabout zoom, nor a weather-sealed telezoom, for that matter. I fought with myself for a long time about did I want to go with the DA 18-135 or did I want the width of a 16mm and need the DA 16-85? When I face a question like this, I tend to do a lot of research. Too much, probably. All indications were that the 18-135 and the 16-85 were effectively indistinguishable in practice, though, and so I decided the 16mm was going to be the more important consideration. I ordered one, used, from KEH. It did not arrive smelling vaguely of cigars.

Another brief aside: I don't like the 16-85 very much. It's got fine optical performance, possibly better than the 16-45, but it does not focus as closely, it still manages to have some shift in the optics when the focus changes direction, the manual focus feel is garbage, and the lens hood is fiddly to put on and take off. On top of that, it's enormous. The zoom range is nice, though, and I don't think I particularly miss the 85-135 range.

It was shortly after the 16-85 arrived that my cat started to tell me he was about done, which ended up coinciding with when I needed to get packed to leave for the west. The vet's report from his imaging told me I needed to cancel my trip, I spent as much time with him as I could, and I said goodbye when he needed me to. All of that was miserable, and I needed an escape, I guess... and so I've really leaned into photography as a good way to get myself out of the house, to get me back into paying attention to the world around me, and to get me moving again. I've done a walk with the 300, I've done a walk with the 16-85, I've tried to carry both around at the same time, and I've tried to carry around a bag full of kit with the 300 velcroed onto the side.

Today, though, I took a different kit with me to an old favorite, Brookside Gardens in Wheaton. I took my K-3 and a whole pile of primes and my trusty 16-45. 14mm, 21mm, 24mm, 50mm, and 135mm were the fixed length, and only the two widest were modern lenses. The 24, 50, and 135 are all lenses my parents gave to me many years ago. I haven't spent an extensive amount of time shooting with any of them in years, and shooting with old K and M series lenses on a post-2004 camera means stop down metering and a lot of patience with trying to get focus right. I had a focusing screen for my K20D that had the split image focusing aid for just that situation, which also meant the metering was messed up. Well, it was messed up more than normal... for whatever reason, I've almost never gotten good metering results with these lenses when using stop-down metering. They tend to dramatically overexpose the shot, requiring in some cases -1.3 or even -1.7 stops of EV compensation to produce a raw file that does what I want. I don't know why I struggle with it so much, but it's been the case across all three digital SLR bodies I've had and impacts all four of the K and M series lenses I have. Anyway, I wanted to make a point to suffer today, and I loved almost every minute of it. There were a few times I forgot to set the focal length when turning the camera back on, there were a lot of just-fuzzy missed focus shots, and there were more than a few instances of just having a scene that the combination of high resolution APS-C sensor and lens coatings and optical forumulae from the 70s simply couldn't handle well together.

I think I've done it, I think I've rekindled the love. I haven't processed all 101 shots that made it out of the 250 I took, but I wanted to share an example out of each of the three manual lenses.

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-K 24mm f2.8

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 135mm f3.5

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 50mm f1.7

For the last few days, I've been fighting off a number of similarly-functioning brainworms. I'd love to get a newer body to take even better advantage of the improved autofocus technologies in the 300 and 16-85. I'd love it if that was a K-1 ii, but that's a big and heavy camera, and the K-3 iii is right there. Both of those are expensive, though. The K-1 would give me a lot of additional depth of field on the FA 43 and FA 77 Limited lenses, and it would give me back the full field of view from my old standby 24... but still expensive and heavy. Maybe a KP? Used, they're not bad, and they're smaller and lighter than the K-3, but I'm not sure it's enough of an improvement over my K-3 to justify, and it would just take money away from being able to buy one of the new production models, and buying a new production model would help to encourage the company to keep making cameras and lenses.

Well, fine, then... maybe not a body, maybe a lens. I used my 14mm today, which just puts a smile on my face every time I use it. How about a DA 12-24 f4 zoom then? Used, since of course they're discontinued. But there's also the new production DA★ 11-18 f2.8 zoom. Which is expensive and huge and heavy, but it's also weather sealed, which neither my 14 is nor the 12-24 would be. 

And then there's the not-SLR world. I have been thinking very hard on picking up a used MX-1 based on the YouTube algorithm recommending me a few videos in the "is this still a good camera after a decade?" genre. But it's old, and huge. What about a Ricoh GR? I find the snap focusing fascinating in concept... but fixed 28mm or 40mm is a little scary to me for some reason, probably because the camera is expensive and I don't want to end up wanting two.

Anyway, all that's to say: anything I have brainworms on, I'm engaged in. That's a great sign, and that feels good. My next trip out will include more automatic lenses, but I'm really looking forward to rotating through my equipment more in the near future.

Dear Robots, Thank You.

I saw a bunch of folks put up posts about Daft Punk's announcement yesterday, and I had an immediate thought about that (especially with Touch as the music on the farewell video), but wanted to give an album a spin today with the intent of reflection and now feel like I have something to say.

I was late to the party, having been directed to the release in August, about three months after it came out. I never listened to Daft Punk intentionally, but the two lead radio singles, with Nile Rodgers providing the guitar tracks and Nathan East on bass convinced me I had to have a copy of the whole album. Somewhere within the first 25 minutes, I was awakened to the sound of post-disco and synth pop, or at least this particular blend. The album made the cut for my monthly listening for at least five years, and while it's dropped off some in rotation, it isn't because it wasn't influential to my taste in music. The most recent album that's fallen into this slot is Donny Benet's Mr Experience, from last year (with some crunchy fingerstyle StingRay work), which sounds delightfully 1983 to me. I can also trace the Cory Wong habit to this, and it is also the source of blame for the Zainichi Funk CDs I've ordered from Japan.

 

On the subject of the 1983 and the title Random Access Memories... I have few memory connections to my early and middle childhood, what with all the head trauma, with really just random events here and there to fall back on. In much the same way that the smell of hospital-grade cleaning supplies and medical-issue low-pile carpet used to send me into an actual panic, though, I guess the combination of strings, horns, and synthesizer really speaks to the sounds of the radio and shopping-trip background music I would have heard early on while growing up. Whether it can qualify as nostalgia, it sure seems like I had an immediate positive emotional reaction to the style. It also came into my orbit at a particularly important time in my adult life, and links me to a state of being I haven't been able to really get at since. Fresh out of the thyroidectomy but before I found out about the lymph nodes. Driving 'home' for the night after chowing down on a particularly nice pizza in Charleston, West Virginia, with Rogue's Dirtoir accompanying. Having a stable voice again and finally being at a certain stability with my thyroid replacement hormones. You know, the whole scene.

 

But all that wouldn't be anything to recommend to everyone if it weren't for the great performances. Nile Rodgers is a master of his craft and Nathan East is just such a smooth player, but the more I've listened to the work, the drumming, especially by Omar Hakim, is absolutely stellar. I think my favorite musical assembly is Touch, as I suggested earlier, but I love Contact and Giorgio By Moroder, and the string intro for Beyond is a fantastic opening salvo to the rest of the song. I can't really speak to how effective the lyrics are because of whatever my condition is, but they feel honest and it turned out I enjoy the sound of vocoders, at least on occasion. Even Julian Casablancas' guest spot on Instant Crush fits the style to a T. Plus the key change modulation in Within... I just can't get enough.

 

Anyway, if you haven't ever given it a spin, go find this on your listening destination of choice and give it a chance. I know a few of you are already on board, but still. This album was transformational to my listening habits.

 

Daft Punk wasn't an important part of my listening for years, and I still haven't given a deep dive to their other work, but this album was so important to me by itself that I'm thankful they did it. Thanks, robots: painters in my mind.

Reposted from Facebook. At least here, I have an expectation of low engagement.

On Electronics Servicing, or: How I Saved $50 By Building Two Amplifiers And Buying Test Equipment

 

Back in August of 2014, my Ampeg SVT-3 Pro head had developed this strange scratchy sound that didn’t prevent playing to come through but was audible enough that it was annoying. I reached out to a local electronics repair shop that is an Ampeg authorized service center to ask for them to take a look at it, to avoid having to buy a replacement. For a $50 bench fee, they told me they wanted to reflow the solder on the input jack. Another $50 later, and I had an amplifier that was still doing the thing I took it to them to solve. I may be misremembering the conversation some, but my recollection is that, when I called them to let them know the work didn’t solve the problem, they told me it’d be another $50 diagnostic fee because the repair they did wasn’t at fault. I declined that service, partly because spending unforeseeable quantities of money on diagnosing a piece of equipment that, at the time, was 19 years old and was still available brand new from the company seemed dumb, but also because I knew they didn’t value my business. I don’t say that to disparage them, so much as to say that my first-time customer status combined with a mystery rinky dink problem that didn’t affect a moneymaking enterprise pretty understandable doesn’t rate with the only factory-authorized service center on the north side of DC for a lot of brands. Also, my sense of work ethic resented being given back something that was just as broken as it was when I took it there. Again, I get that they probably don’t have time to let something sit powered on for a few minutes to see what it does, but it still didn’t sit well with me.

 

It was around that time that I decided to build my first desktop computer. Electronics components have been compared to LEGO, so I think that’s where the itch started: selecting parts to work together to produce a coherent whole has been something I’ve enjoyed my whole life as far as I know, and by the time I had made it to 2016, I had started to lean more heavily into diagnostic and repair tasks. This was the year of the processor thefts from classrooms, and reading part numbers off processors, while not impressive in any meaningful way, isn’t really all that far removed from identifying ICs and diodes and so on. I also started to watch a youtube channel that specialized at the time in tearing down power tools, which started to show me a world of materials selection versus cost and was especially helpful in formulating strategies for identifying suspect components for failure based on environment, location, and device type. It was here that I built my first test component (an equivalent series resistance meter for measuring capacitor performance) and bought my first ‘good’ multimeter (a Chinese domestic market Fluke recommended for ‘hobbyist’ low voltage DC circuits, of the types that I found myself wanting to fix most often). Then came the Tektronix 317, a vacuum tube-driven oscilloscope that I knew would need some refresh work. That led to buying a $10 surplus Tektronix 465 from work, and then fixing them both with a Tek 2336 that I managed to convince myself to sell on after fixing its latches with a 3D printed part I learned software well enough to draw up the model for myself. At that point, I got myself a broken Ampeg PF-500 class D amplifier that was sold parts/as-is that I managed to resurrect by tracing the circuit back from the known-blown power transistors and identifying failed components, to include the class D driver IC, before deciding to build my own Fender 5F1 Champ clone amplifier. That turned into a commission for a second one, and before you knew it, I had built up enough skills and equipment to be able to turn my attention to this project that professionals decided not to take seriously. This was good, because in the intervening two years, the amplifier had also started to completely lose sound output periodically and intermittently, which seemed to be, in my opinion, “bad.”

 

I started with the obvious-to-me, by removing the circuit boards from the chassis and reflowing ALL of the solder joints. I figured “hey, this is what the professionals said would help!” It did not. I started to read over forum posts and, of course, the first thing everyone says is “replace the tubes!” That also did not do anything. Buying tubes is fun, though, so at least there was that. I started digging a little further, trying various combinations of search terms, when the first This Is A Major Issue With These Amplifiers came up: poor bias on the power output transistors due to changes in position or something of the biasing trim pot, a device that Ampeg’s parent company apparently decided to cheap out on when selecting parts.

 

That’s when I found out the original 1995 power mosfets were so poorly matched that one of them was barely on while one was near the top of the adjustment range. There was no way to get them to operate together at a bias level that was unlikely to create crossover distortion at low volume levels. This was when I learned about a couple of things: transistor biasing, and parts catalogs and datasheets. I ran through Mouser for output devices and ordered a testing device that let me attempt to match them at their turn-on voltages. I did a bunch of charting, selected the eight closest devices, and got to installing. Now the amp biases correctly! The voltages you’re supposed to measure to determine current flow are all within two millivolts instead of spreading over 23. The amp just sort of generally sounded and felt better at low volumes... and within a few weeks, I had my next cutout, which meant that my root problem was still with me.

 

By this time, I had developed a bit more experience with both high voltage tube circuits owing to my experience building the two Champs, and with using a schematic to do diagnostics. Using my digital oscilloscope revealed something I didn’t see with my analog scope, that the power board’s tube plate voltage circuit had weird periodic sag issues and a lot of noise. I went ahead and replaced the filter capacitors and the power transistor that regulates voltage in that part of the circuit, and lo and behold, now my tube gain knob seems to work the way it did when I started playing this amp back circa 2002. Cool, another tired transistor out and some fresh electrolytics, and I seem to have further smoothed out the sound. And then a week after that, another cutout.

 

At this point, having had a series of repair dramas with a bass guitar as well, I am close to saying “okay, one last go at this and then it’s on to class D. It won’t sound the same to me, but I can’t keep going like this.” I had figured out previously that the cutouts were only happening at low volume levels (I could shake a stage for an hour, but practice downstairs was a problem), I knew that it was more likely to happen with the tube drive knob below 12:00, and I knew it seemed to be more common when the amp and room were cold, but sometimes it could come up after a stretch of time playing without any problems. I also knew, because the amp has a line output, that the problem was at the very least on the very end of the preboard signal chain or somewhere on the power board.

 

I’m glad I gave it one more chance.

 

Deciding that this was going to take some serious elbow grease to get to the bottom of, I decided I needed to devote actual, significant sit-down time to this. I set up with a device that let me record from the speaker output, and found out that, yep, the problem is between preamp and power amp. Then I found a potential last stop on the pre board and decided to move my recording device to the preamp out/power amp in loop, which, if that were fine, would require the fault to be on the power board for certain. It was fine. So at this point, I take the power board back out and clean the contacts in those jacks - I was going to replace the jacks outright, but the modern parts are a slightly different physical package - because they use their bridging pins to route signal. Cleaning didn’t fix the issue despite THAT being a common forum suggestion, so onward with technology. This time around, I decided to scope it before and after every stage from the last 12AX7 tube on the preamp. No problems at all between points, so I’m at a total loss when not only does it keep happening, but it seems to have gotten worse. (Aside: I just realized that I had closed my vent a little bit so that we’d have more HVAC pressure into the upper floors. This reduction in temperature was almost certainly the cause of the worsening symptom, not anything internal or what I was doing.)

 

So the sound cuts out one more time and, out of some degree of frustration and a greater degree of lack of options, I do what everyone who has been working on the same problem for five years does: percussive maintenance. And what do you know? The sound cut back in.

 

Oh ho ho! I have an electromechanical issue... I assumed at this point that it’s not crusty soldering, and so it must be either a failing component or a failing jack. I have the scope out still, so I hook up to the output of the last tube and to the inputs of the power mosfets... still signal in both places, so I move to the outputs of the mosfets... still signal there, so I look at the schematic and there’s only one more component in the signal chain: the output protection relay. With scope on mosfet output and the positive binding post, I start playing and BLAMMO - cutout with signal before the relay but not after. I also know now that if you have a nonconductive maintenance implement (read: chopstick), you can tap suspect components with it to see what happens. I know this because, some months ago, I did this song and dance with the tubes. So tappy tap tap - sound comes right back in.

 

This is where understanding how electronics LEGO works comes back in. Unlike the output mosfets and the voltage control transistor, or the electrolytic capacitors, the original Ampeg part is totally obsolete and unavailable anywhere. One parts site that looks like it was last updated in 2002 lists a newer T9S or something part number on the picture next to Ampeg’s part number, which is also obsolete and unavailble... so now I have to figure out what the right replacement part is. I pulled a datasheet for the last known Ampeg part and go digging on Mouser and Digikey and eventually come up with a suitable replacement, once I learned what a relay having contacts in form-C actually meant and realized that the reason the original relays are obsolete is that the contact materials have been changed and they no longer sell open air relay units, instead preferring sealed devices (aside: I believe the original relay failed because of corrosion on the moving contact and surface ablation on the static contact, issues which perhaps the new materials will prevent and being sealed definitely will prevent).

 

And so yesterday, I replaced that relay. For the first time since probably 2013 or 2014 overall, and certainly the first time in a winter in at least that long, I was able to sit down, play at low volume, hear no weird distortions, develop no unwanted noise, and experience no random intermittent signal drops. I don’t know if the relay was the problem all along, and if I had been able to devote the time and energy to the diagnostics I did that one long day earlier, I might have been able to do this sooner. But I have an amp that, at 25 years old, pulls hard again and sounds better than I have heard it in a long, long time.

 

All of this is to say that, given the prospect of being asked to pay for lazy treatment twice, I’ve ended up learning a ton about repair, diagnostics, parts cannoneering, electronic component failure modes, and the value of smacking something with an intermittent failure. I’m happy with the immediate outcome, assuming I make it through the next few weeks without any more issues at all... but more importantly, I’m proud at how much I’ve learned in that time, and what I believe I’m capable of fixing now that I wouldn’t have even thought I could try, let alone succeed at. Which I think the takeaway here is probably not “if someone asks you to pay $100 to not fix your widget, buy an electronics repair lab, fix equipment for that lab, fix a different amplifier, build two other amplifiers, build some other test equipment, and then get mad at your widget and hit, thus revealing its secret” necessarily... but man, what a value I feel like I got from that trip to the shop.

The proper outdoors experience

Last year, for my birthday, I was given a copy of "The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs," a book that contained a lot of new information about a very not-new-to-me subject: looking at things while you're outside. In the interest of context, I provde an excerpt here that summarizes one of my key takeaways from the book:

"Which way am I looking? What will the weather do? How far is that? What is the temperature? How old is that? What will I see next? These simple questions and many others, if answered without the aid of dumb tools and with clues from smells, shades, colors and shapes, will force the senses and mind to work together afresh and light an intriguing bonfire between the walker's ears.
A fair warning should be issued here: this is not a process for all; not everyone should be expected to enjoy such ignitions. There are many kinds of walkers. There are some who like to walk to switch off their mind, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is however a large group of walkers who like to feel their minds flex with their legs and this book is written for them. For those who feel that the mind will get plenty of rest in the brief lulls during sleep or the apparently abundant downtime after death, then walking is a time to revel in fresh insight.
There have, I am aware, been documented cases of these two groups of walkers tolerating each other's company and even passing pleasant hours together. However, the worrying twinkle in the eyes of the latter group tends to scatter the former and the two should not, in the normal course of events, attempt to walk together. They are best advised to place small hills between each other."

The last week has seen my housemate start to identify birds by call after two or so weeks of walks, intensive, with returning migratory birds and with year-round residents beginning their 'it's good weather, so it's time to establish territory' calls.

My parents have talked before about how they notice things outside, so I assume at this point that I got my outdoors behavior from them. I don't think the Boy Scouts helped, and I know having multiple coworkers awake to the things that lurk in bushes and trees hasn't done anything to help me not pay attention to literally everything I see while I'm outside on the trails.

That's actually not what this is about - I've reached a peace with this, an understanding that whatever my past-life predator or prey drive is, I can't change that and I might as well just acknowledge all the things that catch my eye. What this is about is the realization that, no matter how committed to being the first kind of walker one may be, I think the right attitude from those of us among the class of the second can bring members of the first into the ranks, as well. In the case of my housemate, just caring at all, then extended to identifying which birds are yelling at the feeders as her cat watches from the open bedroom window, seems to be an indication that my constant babbling about which bird is making what yell is taking root. A friend who I introduced to white-breasted nuthatch some weeks ago, who did not seem previously inclined to me to care deeply about what kind of little upside-down butt-nugget (thanks, Field Guide to Dumb Birds) was mewing at us from a tree alongside the mall at work, was delighted to see our new friend hopping madly down a tree trunk. And I just concluded a conversation with a friend who appreciates flowers, but at the cost of spending time getting to know them, instead preferring to take a picture and move on.

I wonder if I could change that. I wonder if, given time with someone who recognizes that outside exists, if you can't turn 'hey look at that thing.' into 'hey look at this thing.' The difference is subtle, to be sure. 'That' is an outward-bound word, one that implies acknowledgement but not understanding. 'This,' in this case, implies a desire to bring an understanding together with the object.

At any rate, if you're the second type of walker, try just sharing what you're doing with the first type. Not trying to get them to do the appreciation themslves, just appreciate in front of them. See if they don't join you next time you're out.