A Work of Art from Matt Kamna
Vacuum Tube Valley VSAC 2003 Show Report
The Craftsman's Room remains the heart and soul of the VSAC; without it, the VSAC would be just another hi-fi show. Here are some of the more beautiful expressions from triode craftsman all over the country. Matt's amplifier is a stunning design in copper and rosewood - copper isn't just there to look pretty, it has real technical advantages as a superior ground plane for the rest of the circuit. Matt takes what would be a mundane technical requirement and makes it into a truly beautiful expression of technology and art.
Tony's confection - believe it or not, there's a Bottlehead Foreplay somewhere in there - is somehow reminiscent of a steamship turbine drive, a Victorian science lab complete with cherrywood Wheatstone Bridge, and a microprocessor control system. Jules Verne meets William Gibson, or as our Brit friends say, "Steam Punk."
The twin motorized controls are mechanically cross-coupled by an ingenious belt drive, so when you turn one volume control by hand, the other channel magically follows along. Plus, of course, there's wireless remote control, which silently rotates both controls at once. Operating Tony's preamp has this wonderful Science Fair quality, like a working exhibit in the Museum of Science and Technology. You twist the big copper knob and all these moving parts whir and move around - all this just to change the volume! But fun, very much in the VSAC amaze-the-crowd tradition.
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All Text and Photographs © 2003 Lynn Olson.