Classic Hifi Care

Here by popular demand...... You notice I'm being good, not derailing a topic, setting a good example......

When I was Director of our local Buick club, it behooved me to also serve as chairman of our yearly Fall Festival. The Fall Festival was an all-Buick car show, hosted and sponsored by a local Buick dealership, held in October, after the new models had arrived. This particular year was 1994 and was being hosted by Childress Buick in Phoenix and was attended by Al McCoy, the "Voice of the Phoenix Suns". A pretty good piano player, but I digress.....

Our Fall Festival was the largest single-make car show in the Valley in its heyday. The GTO's took that spot eventually. Childress was especially accomodating, since it was their idea to start an all-Buick car show held at their dealership. They went all out, pulled out all the stops. They got Al McCoy, got him to record "commercials" telling about the aspects of the show, something about certain cars, interviews with the owners, that kind of thing. They would clear off their used car lot where we could set up a decent sound system and could park 100+ old Buicks with enough room to open the doors without bumping the car next to you. "Space, line" parking, if you will. Utilizing our speakers and the ones on their lot, that area had the best sound and stereo separation I have ever seen in an outdoor venue.

There was a little cassita with an arch that led from the new car lot to the used car lot. We normally used that archway as our "office", where we set up our ballot counting area and where we had our sound system. It was out of the way and centrally located. The year in this story, the fire marshal said this was a fire exit and we would have to move our operations. We moved to the east porch of the dealership building. The building was built on grade about a story above the lot. They would run cars up the ramp onto the porch to put them on display in the showroom.

One of the features of the show was a dunking booth, sponsored and manned by the personnel from the service department. Proceeds from the dunking booth went to a charity, typically the children's hospital. Normally, the dunking booth was right next to that archway. This year, they set it up right under where we had the sound system. I had taken lots of guff by people for having an "Old" tube amp on the sound system. Tubes are not crabby about wonky speaker wiring. I kept spare output tubes with the sound system just in case.

Everything went "swimmingly" that day, both with the dunking booth and with the show. It was a beautiful day, lots of old Buicks, Al McCoy was mingling. They dunked the service manager, somebody donated $25 for his bath, then the service writers, then they started on the service guys. Everything went fine until one particularly rotund gentleman had his turn. When he got dunked, a drop of water went high enough to land square in the middle of the four 500 degree output tubes in the Dynaco SCA-35 amp. There was a noise from the speakers that sounded like a cannon had gone off, glass went flying, and a puff of smoke came from the amp. I hit the power switch and prayed for the best. I waited a couple of minutes, pulled the broken tubes, inserted the four GE mismatched tubes that are still there, flipped the switch, and we had music once again. I never got any more grief about using an old tube amp.

Hmmmm... so that SCA35 has some "experience". lol

That old SCA-35 has been run a lot, both "professionally" and personally. It would fill that large lot with the warm tube sound, run pretty hard most of the time. It didn't have enough power to do justice to the big Peavy speakers I used with the SX-1050. I had four Electro-Voice outdoor speakers I used on the lot, along with the lot speakers, used as tweeters. It sounded amazing for being a mishmash of components, not necessarily designed to work together. The first year, the guy who ran the show used a Radio Shack PA amp and fried it due to the wiring on those outside lot speakers. And old tube amp wasn't as sensitive to speaker impedence, I guess. That dunking booth killed three of the original quad of output tubes. I kinda felt bad about that. I should have used the GE tubes and used the originals as backups. I took the cage off the amp so I could work on it quickly if necessary. I have often wondered if the cage would have saved those tubes.

Good story! Tubes can be very durable. They managed to survive in car radios, for example. But sudden cooling on glass, that's a no-no.

My dunking story involves the car radio from the 1960 Plymouth Fury wagon. It is the premium option, a hybrid with P-P transistor output and tube RF. It has an audio input, intended for the record playing devices Chrysler used to offer. The pushbuttons spell out "HI-FI." Or they did. I loaned the radio to a college roommate for his '61 Plymouth sedan. He loaned the car to a frat boy and one of the frat boys yanked one button off with pliers. I'm looking for a replacement and added that to my list of reasons for taking a dim view of frat boys.

In any event, Dad bought a new '66 Plymouth Fury III wagon, a grand machine, 383 2-bbl with the "sport" suspension that included front disc brakes. I have never driven such an agile, sporty large car. The suspension was taut and firm, it's didn't roll or wallow; what a car. It was a gem.

But the '60 Plymouth was 6 years old, and like dog years, Michigan car years must be multiplied by 3 at least. It was a really old car so I decided to extract the deluxe car radio. For a time its storage place was in a basement, and the basement flooded, and the radio was submerged for a couple hours. I figured it was soggy toast. But then I dried it out and hooked it up and it played just fine. It's out in the garage right now.

Chris Campbell