Hi all. My name is chris and I'm an audio...equipment owner. I love gear. Started with a JBL obsession from my early 90s years in NYC where all the record stores had JBL monitors hanging from the ceiling. I now live in Connecticut and with more space has come more gear. Lots of speakers and a few McIntosh amps and preamps, and recently a pair of Odyssey Stratos Extreme Monoblocks.
I don't seek perfection, ever. I'm a believer in perfection being the enemy of actual enjoyment. I love to listen to my system - my current go to combo is: Schitt Saga+ performing volume control for a McIntosh C34V, feeding signal to a McIntosh MC2002, driving a pair of Urei 811A monitors.
My hope for the Stratos amps was to create a more refined listening setup. I've played them a bit to test them as they were sold to me as one of them blowing a fuse intermittently. I immediately set them up, replaced all the fuses with Klaus-approved spec fuses and played them for like 20 hours straight. No problem.
Then I thought I'd hook them up to play my JBL 4430 monitors - much larger scale speakers than they'd previously been played on (Merlin 1B). I used an Adcom GTP500 preamp to do a cursory hookup. When I switched it all on, a high pitched squeal that had a sonic corkscrew kind of tone to it, emerged and the fuse blew on the one side, that had been told to me to be problematic.
I replaced the fuse and set up the system again back in my workshop with the same pre-amp, but back feeding the Merlins. Both amps played well.
My first angle of attack is bias setting, as it seems a popular topic of conversation around these amps, and obviously amps in general. I've read the descriptions of the process I could find, but I'm still a little lost - there's a vagueness to some of the directions. I like brutally simply instructions and I've yet to find these.
For now I'm happy to simply introduce myself and keep searching for answers. Once I figure it out, hopefully with the help of those here, I'll post my process with visual directions as well, to aid the other challenged audio...lovers, in the group.
To be sure, I've emailed Klaus and had a perfunctory conversation with him, in which he directed me to do a few things first - fuses, play amps for awhile, etc. These amps are 20+ years old and frankly, I don't want to distract Klaus from his current agenda with old gear, when I figure I could conquer this project myself, with the help of the hive mind here. I've read Klaus's brief take on the process, but I'm feeling like his brain and my brain are configured differently, and while it makes some sense when I look under the hood, there are some logic leaps that are left unexplained.
Thanks for having me - if anyone needs help local to me, please reach out. I really enjoying this hobby with others. My area of expertise is really vintage JBL monitors, but I'm pretty comfortable with turntables as well as speaker repair. Or if you just need help getting your 100lb amp up onto a shelf, I'm happy to help with that too.
chris
