Alexander Dumble on YouTube?

[Tdale]

Are these for real????

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVTj08qTwGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkjLTGhEYt8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwEEFi7d60
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti6dBkl1wg0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1qCczGgSxw

Tommy

[Tubetwang]

Tommy,

those are outtakes from a 1980's N.Y. television shoe called Saturday Night Lives...these guys are clones...

EAT!!!
Only kidding...

I think those guys are real...

[Tdale]

Funny...what does a television shoe look like?

Tommy

[JimiB]

wow terrible. the first one the guitar is terribly out of tune!

[novosibir]

Funny...what does a television shoe look like?

They look totally different from shoes for humans! There are no left ones and right ones, because they are round like a pan cake

Never seen those?



Larry

[les_guitar]

A couple of these clips were also on TGP. I think Dumble sounds great playing rhythm guitar. Nice tone too!

Without offending anyone - Henry Kaiser sounds like shit on those clips... Can the guy play guitar?

[Tdale]

It's almost unreal to se Dumble in person.. He's a myth, not a person, to me

Tommy

[blave]

I bought a Henry Kaiser DVD a while ago, because it has some footage of "Don't Call Me Howard" playing a few riffs and talking a bit about his amps (which, as an electrical engineer, I found to be total BS but maybe I'm not worthy).

Pretty interesting, but not worth the cost of the disc 8^) .

Edit: oops, I didn't view the clips before posting this. These are segments from the video that I "own".


Dave B.

[dre95060]

Dumble: "The more fragile harmonics can survive in a vacuum tube, where they seem to be eliminated or squashed in a solid state crystal lattice. I think it just comes down to that. The physics of it--electrons can survive in a free space vacuum, where they have trouble in a crystal lattice. I think that's the best and simplest I can put it."

Bwaaahaaahaaahaaa!!!! Now we can add Dumble's B.S. to Fischer's B.S.

At least [AH]D sounds pretty good playing the rhythm riff. Kaiser should just turn his rig off. Ouch!

- Dave E. (BSEE, MIT 1977)

[Structo]

You really think he was that far off.
Sure he was trying to put it in lay terms but why is it most of us have gravitated back to vacuum tubes.
Surely it has something to do with complex harmonics.

[dre95060]

You are right that it has to do with the high order harmonics but not for the reasons Dumble stated.

1) Harmonics are not "fragile"--I don't even know what that means. Maybe he means if you have an amp full of stray capacitances acting as low pass filters then the higher harmonics would be attenuated more.

2) Electrons are not "eliminated" or "squashed" in a crystal lattice. If they were you would have something akin to a nuclear meltdown on your hands. Electrons can be "eliminated" by collision with positrons (resulting in gamma rays) or perhaps by more complex nuclear reactions--but not by transistors. The Law of Conservation of Matter applies.

The fundamental reason that tube amps are so much more pleasing to the ear than transistor amps is this: When tubes are driven to distortion, they tend to add even harmonics--especially the second harmonic. When transistors are driven beyond their linear region of operation they clip sharply--which adds odd harmonics (the spectrum of a square wave consists of odd harmonics).

Since the even harmonics are octaves, they add pleasing sounds. For example, if you put the pedal down on a piano to raise all the dampers and then hit a key hard, the octave notes will sound in sympathetic vibration. Sounds good!

I respect what these amp gurus have achieved tone-wise, but I have heard so much nonsense out of many of them. I am reading a book now that quotes Ken Fischer as saying that Teflon-coated wire is silver plated so you have to worry about the skin effect because of the difference in conductivity between silver and copper. Well, the wavelength of a 20 KHz signal is (1/20000) x 3 x 10^8 = 15,000 meters--slightly over 9 MILES! Even on a cheap PC board with a dialectric constant of, say, 4.8, the wavelength would be over 4 miles. Believe me, NONE of the tone differences--whether real or perceived--are due to the skin effect. You can look at that piece of wire as a lumped element. To first order, it's a very small series inductor and resistor and a capacitor to ground.

I could write a book exploding some of these myths. Perhaps someone has done so but I have not found it yet.

Regards,

Dave E.

[bcook]

When calculating wavelengths, you MUST factor in Leary's Constant, as in: ((1/20000) x 3 x 10^8) x 1^LSD). The result can vary greatly.

[Tdale]

It looks to me that the calculation is based on the speed of light (3 * 10^8)?

But is the signal in the wires travelling at this speed?

Or put another way: Can an electrical signal in a wire be compared directely to radio waves travelling in air?

Edit: I did some google'ing and found some info. Current moves very slow in wires (something I knew), but I also read that "Electrical signals travel through their wires at nearly the speed of light,"

I guess the speed of the electrons isn't what's important when we calculate wavelength of an electronic signal in a wire....?

Tommy

[Tubetwang]

Dumble is an artist...my guess is that he is probably not a good communicator, but, i could be wrong...Think of him as a poet.

Plays a mean riff to both...drenched in tone but.

Cork sniffing aside, his amps have a solid reputation...he must be doing something well...

My great grandfather Major Twang used to say..."the proof is in the pudding."

[dre95060]

The speed of light down a wire (to first order) is c / sqrt(epsilon), where c is the speed of light in a vacuum and epsilon is the dialectric constant of the insulation relative to a vacuum. For PVC with a dialectric constant of 3.18 or so, the speed of light is 0.56*c.

I found an interesting article which quantifies some of these effects to debunk the claims of products such as Monster speaker cables. While the discussion is about speaker cables, the principles for signal path wires inside an amplifier are the same. To make a long story short, the lumped element properties of the wire segment (i.e. stray capacitance, series resistance and series inductance) have far greater effects at audio frequences than skin effect or dialectric absorption.

http://www.audioholics.com/education/ca ... s-debunked

You can either wade through this article--or go play your guitar!

Regards,

Dave