If you have followed the reports of the Oswaldsmill Tube and Speaker Tasting over the years, you will have noticed a few things- that each year the Tasting gets bigger, with more people, more interesting things brought, and with changes to the background- meaning the Mill itself. The big horn system now resides on either side of the large double windows you see in many of the photos. The ancient wooden staircase that bisected the room earlier is now gone (to be recycled on the ground floor, the last area to be renovated.) In most of the pictures which follow, you may notice that the horns are placed in the far corners of the space. On Sunday evening (after most had already left) the horns were placed much more closely together, and therein lies an interesting story. I will be posting more on that in the Forum section.

Every year new people come to the Tasting, and this time Joseph Esmilla, concert violinist, Sound Practices author and DIY tube and speaker practitioner of repute joined us with truly wonderful tube amplifiers and preamps. Standing in the back of the main listening room, a full 40 feet away from the horns, hearing Joseph's less than a watt amplifier had me truly amazed. Fantastic sound. So many people have built Joseph's designs over the years, or been influenced by his writings or his website. It's easy to understand why listening to his work in person.

Jeffrey Jackson was back but without any Guiness Book of World Record's attempts in the amplifier category of last year. His contribution this year was quite a surprise. Most participants fall into what you might call a "camp"- the single ended camp, the push pull camp, and so on. Myself, I am in neither camp technically speaking, as the Mill system is composed of a single ended driver stage amplifier (AL4 in triode screen mode/300B) driving a push pull output stage(845). This year Jeffrey brought a prototype breadboard amp featuring similar topology, i.e. single ended driver into pp output using the GM70. Is this the beginning of a trend?

Bill Woods brought a very compact, prototype W horn which he initially conceived for a special 6" prosound woofer. Holed up in one of the Mill bedrooms, it was paired with another new product, the AH300 300hz conical horn, of his fledgling outfit, the Acoustic Horn Company. I had a pair of solid walnut and solid cherry 250hz flare horns made for this casting, and it was used with the Cogent DS1428 midrange field coil driver. Oswaldsmillaudio is now the East Coast distributor for Cogent, so you can find more information on Cogent products on the Cogent section of this website; same for the solid wood (cherry and walnut) horns we are making for Bill's throats (see the Products page.) These horns are a substantial change in direction from the round tractrix horns that have proliferated in both the commercial audio market and the DIY arena over the last five years. Two reasons come to mind-Conical. Real solid wood, not plastic.

Herbert Jeschke has been working on the theme of semi OTL (output transformerless) designs for years now, using various Philips 800ohms full range speakers that I brought back from Holland during my time living in Amsterdam in 1999-2001. Once, I accidentally acquired a batch of small, oval fullrange drivers, thinking they were a more desirable, larger speaker. Herbert, magician that he is, took these little drivers and made a linear array voight pipe with them, driven by first a 300B OTL, and later by a 50 donated by Dave Slagle. This was a rather shocking experience. An extremely intimate, present and unmititgated sound resulted. Perhaps Herbert will expound on this in the forum section.

The other interesting speaker surprise resulted from Doug Eisemann's small RCA field coil fullrange 6" drivers, mounted in very humble, old plywood ported test enclosures that the late RCA engineer A.J. May used for in testing transducers at the RCA laboratory in Camden, N.J. These little speakers had many people fleeing the main listening room for the trip up the stairs to the attic, a new Mecca. Jim Dowdy was so taken by these speakers that he actually hauled his behemoth GM70, two chassis 100lb plus SET up the stairs to set up with the little RCA's. The general sentiment seemed to be that if only one speaker design from the past could be reproduced for sale today, this should be the one. Thomas Schick compared the sound to the legendary Eckmiller coaxial field coil monitor (lucky guy to have ever heard one of those.) Perhaps our friends at Cogent can be persuaded to add that to their list of future projects.

The 2007 Oswaldsmill Tube and Speaker Tasting became an international event this year, with the arrival of Thomas Schick from Berlin. With his handmade, high mass tonearm, Thomas brought a serious vinyl presence to the Tasting. In addition, Thomas had with him an extremely interesting version of the Denon 103- an "R" type which had been stripped of its cheap plastic housing and placed in a beautifully milled wooden carapace made of a laminated Swedish wood product known in Germany as "panzerholz" as it is used in the construction of armored cars as a bulletproofing material. These wooden housings are made by Uwe in Belgium (he has produced them in various woods, including ebony. View pdf here)

The Denon modified cartridge was used in Thomas' arm along with a Miyabi (courtesy of Jeffrey Jackson) and an EMT XSD. The comparison was fruitful. The Denon in this guise would be a great surprise, I think, to anyone who has listened to the cartridge in stock form. Thomas has produced a digital video of how one can do this modification oneself. I feel confident in suggesting this as an alternative to spending thousands of dollars on a new, high end cartridge.

After the Tasting, Thomas and I got together and I am pleased to report that the Schick Tonearm is now a featured product of Oswaldsmill Audio. We are the exclusive distributor for North America. See more info in the Products section.

One vinyl related item that was present but not played was the massive slate two layer plinth I made for a newly acquired Thorens TD124. I've since launched a new line of custom made slate plinths for any turntable, including most of the usual suspects; idler wheel Garrards, ROK's, Lenco's, the TD124, and also the Technics SP10 direct drive. More info over in the Products section.

To give analog playback a run for the money, Walter Farwell Clay brought his back breaking 70lb Sony SCD1 SACD player, modified by Robert Kern for the reviewer David Robinson. How Walter got the deck out of Robinson's clutch I do not know, but it was the first time that I ever heard digital in the Mill system sound on a par with vinyl. I'm not saying it's equal, just that this was certainly in the same league.

Would you like to know more about what someone brought, what they thought, how they did what they did, or anything else? Try posting on the new Forum section.

Till next year,

Jonathan Weiss
Oswald's Mill