Good Day all
Just thought I'll add my experiences in building & using the Hagerman Bugle.
I bought a "pre-prepared" Hagerman Bugle kit from Jack Gallagher on Ebay. By "Pre-prepared" I mean that everything needed to build the kit as per instructions was in the package - all electronic components as well as all hardware right down to the nuts & bolts. I just needed to supply the tools & "elbow grease". The only thing missing was one 1K resistor, and when I emailed Jack Gallagher about this, he immediately mailed me a couple. I substituted a 5% resistor for the time being, as 1% precision resistors are just about impossible to buy over the counter at the average industrial electronics supplier in my neck of the woods.
Assembly went smoothly and quickly - in my enthusiasm I built it in one evening! So, I plugged it in. added batteries, switched it on, put one of my favorite vinyls on my TT, and... NOTHING! Dead as a doornail! I struggled with it until 4 AM the next morning to try and get it to work, eventually gave up and went to bed. In the bright light of the next day, I finally realized / noticed that I somehow missed soldering pin 4 on opamp 1 (Yah yah - I'm a bloody idiot!). Once I did that, the amplifier worked BEAUTIFULLY.
Anyway, I did modify the kit slightly: I installed it into a fancy extruded aluminum case (at a cost of $25) with a case-mounted toggle switch, and I replaced the supplied RCA sockets with gold-plated items plus additional wiring to case-mount the RCA plugs and toggle switch.
I'd say that this kit is easier to assemble than the average 8-year old schoolboy Meccano / Erector toy (just make sure that you solder ALL the pins on the opamp sockets!). Regarding the sound quality - I'm afraid I cannot make a proper comparative judgment as I previously had access only to low-budget items such as the Rat Shack phono preamp. The best I had heard so far previously was the built-in phono preamp on my old Harman/Kardon HK495i amplifier. The Hagerman Bugle surpasses both mentioned as far as sound quality goes. The Rat Shack preamp is no competition whatsoever, and is so susceptible to RF interference / noise that I am wondering if the one I have is perhaps faulty.
My initial subjective impression of the Hagerman Bugle is that it is analytical and precise almost to the point where it sounds "cold". After listening to it for a while & getting used to it, I realized that my impression of "coldness" stems from the fact that I am hearing so much more detail that I have never heard before - and I am talking about vinyl that I have owned for 30 years! For instance, on the Melodia/Eurodisc 2-album set of Pavel & Nina Kogan's renditions of Mendelsohn (piano, violin, viola Trio) and Mozart (concertante for orchestra, violin & viola), as well as Moe Koffman's Jazz rendition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons I am hearing information that I have NEVER heard before, and I bought those albums new during my college days back in the late 1970s!
I find the biggest change to my ears to be the more precise rendition of the timbre of acoustic instruments. This is difficult to explain - would you understand what I meant if I said that the cello or bassoon suddenly sounds like, well, EXACTLY like a cello or bassoon?
For what it is worth, I am running the Hagerman Bugle as part of the following setup:
Turntable & cartridge: Thorens TD 160 / Denon DL160
Amplifier: Dared MP-7 (Canadian-badged version: Vuum "The AMP", tube-rolled with 5670W input / KT66 output tubes)
Speakers: Mission M70
Thanks for reading, Gents!
JunkyJan in Beautiful BC, Canada
