This is my Father's Hi-Fi Sound!

My father is constantly tuning his home made all-tube Hi-Fi equipment, built under the wise advices from the record "engeneer" Marcelo Sfoggia (in fact Sfoggia is a dentist, but his fame as an audiophile and sound technician crosses country boundaries). This page will be dedicated to sound equipment and electronics, but is currently under constructuion.

Our main sound source is an old professional Garrard turntable with the famous SME arm, as shown in the picture above. As an aside, you can look at two big capacitors at the left, normally used in the power supplies. The picture bellow shows the tube power and pre amplifiers, along with their respective power suplies. every voltage needed is independently generated, stabilized and filtered, including the low voltage sources for heating the tubes.

There are many tricks used to make the power be as quiet and as low resistive as possible, and this is what makes the equipment so big. The picture bellow shows the power amplifier assembly under the case, where you can see how simple it is, and how different types of capacitors ara arranged to help filtering and letting all frequencies pass from one stage to another without significant losses.

The amplifiers drive at the end a set of old loudspeakers, including a vintage Warfedale 15" bass, two big Warfedale tweeters, some low-power midranges taken from tube radios, and some modern tweeters as well. Altougth it is almost completely built from junk, and requires a lot of dedication, this equipment sounds far much better than any commercial transistored gear, as my Hafler and Nashville power amps, Event Electronics speakers and so. Thanks to that effort, we listen to incredible realistic reproductions of classical recordings in vinil almost daily. I´m used to go to some places in Porto Alegre where we can buy used long plays for only R$1,00 (1 real, which is about US$0.33). So, our collection of good classical works is getting pretty rich.