Interview with Dr. Edward Pong of UltraAnalogue Recordings

This RCA 826-based amp that drives the super tweeters (JBL 2405) gives the highs a magical sound! The others here are all rectifying tubes.

Tony just used whichever box he could find. So this one was a stock thing; we just stripped it. On the Quad, we have single-ended parallel 300Bs. On everything else we have transmission tubes. These silver transformers probably cost a fortune now.

I had an original Audion parallel 300B. So Tony just used the box. He first changed some caps to modify. It sounded pretty good. And then he said he could make it even better. So I gave him permission to gut it and do whatever he saw fit.

Now this is my phono stage. These clips go to a black box. That’s from Tara Labs. It does something, or so Tony says. It has four 437A for amplification, and two 300B for output. Everything is made by Western Electric. That’s the character of the sound. All my amplifiers are transformer coupled, capacitor-less designs utilizing the Western Electric WE 437A input tube, and all have custom-wound transformers: silver input, interstage, and output.

LL: Your phono stage is one hell of an assembly of three boxes!

EP: Now those two are the power supplies for this main unit: a power supply for one channel, and a power supply for the other channel. This is the main unit with step-up transformers, and various inter-stage transformers. There are EIGHT of them in here. Crazy, isn’t it?

LL: Wouldn’t microphonics be a problem for a phono stage with so many tubes?

EP: This phono stage has some hum that Tony has to work on. But it extracts so much information from the records. It’s unbelievable. We even built silver components for the RIAA circuit. The unit is a box of about 6 by 6 by an inch high. The components inside are all discreet. We went to the nth degree on it. There are about ten silver transformers in there!

LL: Now, is this the crossover?

EP: Yes, my Quad is run full range; the complete signal goes into the Quad. The sub is added at 50 Hz, and the super at 15K. The Quad’s signal is not split.

LL: Is there any overlapping?

EP: You see, on that range, the Quads actually don’t go that high, and they don’t go that low either. So in a way it’s split by the nature of its response.

LL: I’m surprised that the Western Electric stock hasn’t been depleted by you, or the Japanese!

EP: WE for some reasons cannot produce the 300Bs anymore. I ordered some a few years ago. They still owe me a few. They have some production problems.

LL: Ironically in China now they have something called Eastern Electric.

EP: I’m sure we have a lot of stuff coming from China now. They may be good, but I wouldn’t know.

LL: Do you listen to CDs at all?

EP: Yes, but only when I’m in the car.

LL: Now are these big isolation transformers powering your entire system?

EP: Yes, they were originally built for computers. In certain ways they really do their job by cleaning up the power. But we found that they don’t work with everything. So far only one power amp is plugged into it.

LL: Wow, look at all these homemade silver cables! High-end cable manufacturers are selling them for $2K a meter and they’re not even half as thick as yours.

EP: Tony made all these shielded interconnects for me. We’re lucky to have made them when silver was still cheap!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ed’s website: ultraanaloguerecordings.com