Bay Electronics

A Story for You. In the photo below you can see the first set of S4-20 speakers with the new "Coffin Series" name. I have been making these for quite a while and build them hand one pair at a time. The material is 3/4" pine. They are stained with a medium cherry stain and given a couple coats of Tung Oil. When brand new they have a dark cherry look with a mild gloss from the Tung Oil. As they age they lighten up and take on a distressed look. Distressed meaning they look like... they were left outside for a year. Being made of pine they also check in dry conditions. The checking only occurred on the outside panels with none ever seen inside. The older they get, the more checking they took on. To fix the checking I would repair them with saw dust mixed with tinted adhesives used to fill the cracks. In most cases an odd piece of 16 gauge sheet steel was screwed to the cabinet where checking occurred. The unfinished sheet metal was hand cut, hammered flat, drilled and screwed over the checks. The sawdust/adhesive mixture sealed the checks and the steel strengthened the cabinet. One customer has over 22 repairs made on his set of cabinets. On the latest checking fix he commented on the appearance of his cabinets. To him the sheet metal fixes looked like hinges, handles, and stitching, resulting in his calling them "Coffins". Hence the birth of the Alien Kinetics "Coffin Series" speakers name. These cool horns just get cooler and cooler looking with the check repairs. Call them repairs, battle scars, whatever, they just add to the uniqueness and character of your speakers. See more

Received a new batch of speaker cabinets. These are a mix of black walnut and cherry. Nice.

Had a tube fail last night. This set of Russian 6V6GT's ran for over 7,500 hours in an A1-5 amplifier that is used for breaking in speaker drivers. Drivers are ran for 100 hours at a very low amplitude to break in the surround and spider. Anyway, the tube on the right developed a microphonics problem about a month ago. A tap on the tube produced all kinds of craziness on the audio. I originally suspected a bad tube socket, this particular amp is worked like a rented mule, it'...s been power cycled thousands of times, and has had the tubes changes many many times. But the socket was fine. Around 8pm while playing some Pink Floyd a small arc developed and sustained for about 2 seconds. After that the channel went dead. Found some cathode coating flakes inside the bad tube. Hmmm, gassy? Stress caused by power dissipation in the cathode during power up? You can see the flakes. This was very common in 5U4 rectifier tubes. If I had to bet i would say this failure is due to excessive cathode heating upon power up due to the fast solid state power supply and slowly heating cathode. See more