With the threat of bad weather, we still had a good group of members making the trek to Alexandria for another very pleasant get together at Greg Viggianno’s condo party room. This was a combo meeting with DC Hi-Fi Group and the Carver enthusiast club. They are a worldwide owners of Carver vintage products. They have a forum called “The Carver Site”.

The meeting followed with the usual format of “meet and greet” with pizza and various liquid refreshments.  After way too much pizza, we had a short business meeting and quickly delved into a listening session with some interesting equipment.  John brought his digital rig consisting of his MacBook and the superb Mytek Brooklyn DAC. Completing the front end was John’s Rogue RP-7.  John brought two speaker systems—a stand mounted monitor from Studio Electric M4 and the new Martin Logan Motion 20i.  The 20i is a compact floor stander with an Air Motion folded ribbon tweeter. This type of tweeter is becoming very popular now that the AMT Heil patent has expired. Below the tweeter are a pair of 5 ½ inch aluminum cone woofers. Claimed frequency response is 46Hz to 25kHz.

The power amps for this set up was a real Yin-Yang affair. First was from the Carver Group, a vintage Caver M500t that was highly modified for higher power (400 watts), lower distortion and tighter control.

Next up was the McGary SA-2. This amp is a modern take on the classic 6550 family push-pull amp. The Amp is self-biased so one can roll in any of the KT-XX’s for the KT66 the KT120 with no problem.  Mike McGary builds the amps himself in Virginia. Point-to point wiring is used along with the best possible components.

The Amp has a bunch of features such as adjustable feedback (1 to 9db’s), balanced or unbalanced inputs, switchable (on the fly) between Triode and Pentode modes and the ability to strap this amp to mono so one could have dual monoblocs.

Mike presented the members with a brief description of the amp and his plans to include in the future a full function modular preamp.

The raffle winners received some goodies and we all went home smiling

See you next month!