Who wants autoformers?

Posted by Paul Speltz on March 2, 2001 at 08:38:51

I still see that the Z-Music Autoformers are still included on their web sight pricing page. The last that I heard, the $800 Zs are long out of stock, but they may consider making more if enough people commit to a pair. You would have to ask Ralph for sure.

The Zs are amazing! I observed a 1Hz signal pass through them without visible distortion or attenuation. And they run flat to beyond 50kHz.

I have to believe that no matter how effective and transparent an autoformer is, it would seem to be in conflict with the basic concept of an OTL manufacture to offer "iron" as an option. I totally understand Ralph's position of simply staying away from low impedance / low efficient speakers.

The real life reality of it is, that even though we fall in love with A-S OTLs, we may also love our OTL un-friendly speakers, or we may not be able to fund OTL friendly speakers for a year or two. It may be that even with OTL un-friendly speakers, the virtues of the OTL amps are so musical that we are not willing to use any other amplifiers. In any of these cases the autoformers can be used as an temporary of permanent solution.

The Z-music Autoformers work so well in my system, (I have had mine for five months now) that I have often thought about "rolling my own" as a fun project. The taps on the original Zs are "off", in other words the winding ratios are not correct, yet the Zs are still very useable by running the taps different than originally recommended. I would make sure that the winding ratios are correct. I would structure them to multiply the impedance of the speaker by 1.5 or 2 or 3 or 4 times (depending on the tap selected). This way any speaker can be made to be put into the maximum power band of the OTL (ie. 14-16 ohms for a M-60). Yes, your 4 ohm speakers can look like 16 ohms to the M-60!

If I get a few people interested in joining me, I think that I will work with a transformer manufacture and make some high performance autoformers for ourselves. The cost should not be that bad. Anybody that is interested please email me, but keep in mind that I will be in LA until March 10th, so don't expect a response back until then.

mcken001@tc.umn.edu

See ya all in a week, Paul Speltz

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Topic - Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 08:38:51 03/02/01 (25)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Bill Sibner 21:38:14 03/07/01 (4)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 20:39:37 03/10/01 (3)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Bill Sibner 21:35:00 03/13/01 (2)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 10:27:19 03/14/01 (1)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Bill Sibner 14:21:26 03/14/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Joseph Stocco 14:27:35 03/05/01 (1)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 20:47:21 03/10/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - tre 22:55:50 03/02/01 (4)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - mark 06:29:01 03/03/01 (3)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Dan 10:37:24 03/03/01 (2)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - mark 13:13:03 03/03/01 (1)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 21:01:00 03/10/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Todd 19:44:06 03/02/01 (2)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Travis 22:02:34 03/02/01 (1)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 20:51:30 03/10/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - mark 18:53:08 03/02/01 (2)

Was that funny, or what? - bryan 22:28:04 03/02/01 (1)

No... - mark 06:26:15 03/03/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Garland 14:40:38 03/02/01 (2)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 16:55:21 03/02/01 (1)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Garland 08:10:37 03/03/01 (0)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Joseph Stocco 14:02:13 03/02/01 (3)

Re: Who wants autoformers? - Paul Speltz 10:42:00 03/12/01 (0)

autoformer useful on Scanspeak 8545? - Egads 09:47:15 03/08/01 (1)

Re: autoformer useful on Scanspeak 8545? - Paul Speltz 10:46:27 03/12/01 (0)

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