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Re: Leak Stereo 20

Posted by Joe Rosen on October 1, 2001 at 02:30:29

In Reply to: Re: Leak Stereo 20 posted by caveman on September 28, 2001 at 07:50:14:

If the TL12 had something that vaguely resembled a properly-engineered power supply, it would in fact be revered, and not merely "venerable"...although my buds over at the Hong Kong Tube Audio Club see the TL12 in a more favourable light than either one of us do, and I've caught proper heck for it...
As for not modifying the Stereo 20 and just "enjoying" it as is...what's there to enjoy?
It does look nice all disconnected from danger, sitting lonely on some display shelf like the forlorn collectors' trophy that is all it can ever be. But me, I thought this stuff ought to be listened to.
And since much of it sounds as good if not much better than today's miserable junk, at least once parts upgraded and retubed, why settle for one of yesterday's rejects?
Only modifying can save this piece from being an utterly useless hunk, since not all old audio equipment is particularly good. And the Stereo 20 should have been re-named: "Scario 20 Double Plus Ungood"...
It would be nicer, I suppose, had I never owned one, then I would have far less vitriol to dispense in Leak's general direction. I've also had experience with the TL50+, which is actually as good as the Stereo 20 is bad, but only after being utterly and COMPLETELY rebuilt, with only the chassis & transformers left unchanged...
Did cost cutting get to Leak? This was a British company, does the Queen use a flush-toilet?
There is nothing, and I mean, NOTHING, that an Englishman can't find a way to do more cheaply, and more MISERABLY, than anyone else on the planet.
An Englishman has the uncanny ability to do brilliant design work unparalleled by his compatriots in the same field in other countries, and then totally throw it all away by making a complete hash of it with shoddy worksmanship and the most miserable, defect-riddled substandard cheap materials.
The English only won the Second World War because the average lifespan of a Spitfire in depth of the combat was about 10 days. If that hadn't been the case, the wood & tin-foil pieces of junk would have been falling out of the sky all by themselves 10 days or so after that...
Messerschmitt's had porcelain instrument binnacles, fer crumb's sake!
PORCELAIN.
I have a German friend, ex-Hitler youth. During the war, at least up to around 1944, he was exempt from any kind of service, and he and some close friends would amuse themselves by chasing downed aircraft, and then scavenging out the electronic parts to build stuff like receiving sets. He quickly learned not to bother with British aircraft, which he said were nothing but unserviceable junk (plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...eh Concorde?)...Messerschmitt's were better, but when an American bomber went down, it was like winning the lottery. "We'd be there two, sometimes three days! Nice modular construction, we could get the switches out of the instrument panels, too. And all the tubes and technology were from the consumer electronics industry, perfect!"
He survived by making receiving sets out of his stockpile of scavenged parts for the wealthier types after the war ended...mostly black marketeers, I guess.
Well, I can see the genius in putting the bare minimum of money into things that were just going to get bullet-riddled and blown up.
I can't tolerate the idea that stuff should built that way so that I would want to riddle it with bullets myself, because the darn thing blew up again...
Somebody should have told the British consumer goods industry the war ended over 55 years ago. Then maybe Rolls-Royce wouldn't be German, Bentley owned by Volkswagen and Jaguar & Land Rover owned by the Yanks...

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