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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: RAAL “Water Drop” tweeter for Macondo.
Post Subject: The Water Drop's "second breathing" became publicly availablePosted by Romy the Cat on: 10/20/2007

 Romy the Cat wrote:
Over the course of the last year I have been gently harassing my transformers-savvy surrounding trying to evangelize them into amorphous core. They stubbornly and perhaps stupidly resist. Some of them not… 

During the last few months I was talking with a number or people with objective to have the HF channel of my 6-chennal Super Milq to drive RAAL’s “Water Drop” directly. The requirement was to use amorphous transformer. Two people bid for the job but after a conversation with Alex, (the RAAL guy who made the “Water Drop”) I gave him the project as I fell that he has better experience with the Ribbon’s needs then any other person I know. I got the new transformers a week ago from Alex and put them today into the play.

It looks like the RAAL’s Alex converted the Water Drop's recent “Direct Ride on Amorphous core” into a commercial product – good for him. Alex was the only one among 4 transformers manufactures whom I harassed about amorphous core for  “Water Drop”  and  who “got it”. Here the news from RAAL site:

http://www.raalribbon.com/news.htm

“Finished development of Amorphous C-cores application in our ribbons. Some years ago, we were the first to introduce large gap approach in bulding ribbon transformers and now we are the first to use AMCC's in ribbons for absolutely uncompressed high power transient transfer and, at the same time, even further improving already the best low-level performance in the world today, by decreasing the width of hysteresis compared to HF ferrite cores. For direct coupled tube SE-ribbon, we succesfuly developed 175:1 ratio, -3dB at 120kHz Amorpous C-core transformers that can carry DC idle current of SET. Impedance conversion is about 30000:1, bringing the 0.1 Ohm ribbon up to 3kOhm, good for plate loading of most triodes in HF. AMCC's are available as an option to both OEM and DIY.”

I can not objectively assess the benefit of “Direct Ride” as my specific application has 4 new major changes:

1)     The “Direct Ride” transformer from plate to ribbon

2)     The Amorphous core transformer

3)     New Single Stage Amplifier

4)     Use of air-capacitor in crossover

I did not evaluate the contribution of each change incrementally but I might report that the whole package works extremely differently-positive.  I think the next step for Alex should be design own custom amorphous core size-shape, imbed it into his production transformer and introduce a “relax” version of his products. The only thing is that I am concerned that the Morons out there use RAAL’s in 2-way systems, driving them all the way to 1.5kHz-3kHz and this application (completely bogus from my point of view) would have some issues with the amorphous core size for RAAL’s production models…

Romy the Cat

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