I talk with quadbob at least every sunday night and last night's session was mainly about Gerardo's D-1 (don't mean to steal Gerardo's thunder). Bob has just finished recapping it with regular caps (no poly's used) and calibrating it. He A B'd against his D-1000 that was made in 1982 (for those who don't know about the D-1000, it was an audiophile version of the variomatrix that was produced in Japan only in small #'s years after quad was DOA. It had fets and poly's which made it a fast decoder with lower distortion). Compared to Bob's D-1000 Gerardo's D-1 sounded cleaner according to them. This is troublesome! The guys who run modern gear with vintage decoders don't have as much to worry about but a lot of us run vintage gear with a sprinkling of modern stuff (this is the case in my quad room). Before Bob heard Gerardo's newly capped D-1 he thought his D-1000 was tits. So what we are talking about is a slow degradation that untill we have some thing to compare with, we don't notice. Most of us already know this so this is not news to most but it really hit home as we talked and I looked at my quad rack (SE'9 eq's, DBX200's, 224's,3Bx and other companders, RTR's, demod, Marantz center channel amp, so on) and saw red ink. Bob has done a couple of my pieces like my Tate and my Q8 deck and the difference was very noticable! I envy you guyz that work on this stuff I don't. I have gotten quite a few vintage quad units on ebay and maybe 25% of them didn't have cap problems. So what can we do? Go modern with stand alone decoders (as many do). Great except for one thing for me, I love my vintage babies! Guess I will just have to be money poor and quad rich!
Dave
Dave