What a long strange trip it's been. 30 years ago I was working at a private school for deaf children as a house parent in a dorm setting. During days, I would occasionally hang out with one of the techs who would do general repair work on pretty much anything they brought tp him. One day another tech came in and asked me if I could repair a stereo amp he had. I asked him what it was and he said "A Fisher 400", and at the time I had stop and think. I hadn't really dug into any tube gear and wasn't familiar with much of it. But I said bring it in and let me take a look at it, which he did the next day. There sat a rather sad looking amp that I took back to the dorm and hooked up to the very basic speakers and CD player I had at the time. My gear list had taken a serious hit a few years before and I was starting on a rebuild cycle. Well the poor amp needed a ton of attention...every control was wobbly and scratchy..and my report back to him was not encouraging. He was not surprised and told me to just toss it. But I just didn't have the heart to do that. Oddly enough, I had a copy of a fairly late RCA tube manual and I started looking around inside and found where to seperate the pre and power amp sections. I still had a line stage left that I hung onto... a Superphon CD Maxx..so I could feed a clean signal into the Fisher amp section with its 7868 tubes. And nothing has ever been quite the same since. There have been a couple generations of gear gone through here since then...and it's time for the next one. So that's one of the reasons I'm here. Sorry about that being lengthy but the journey of a thousand steps.....
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