Dear Joe,
I regret to say I will not get your gear out this week.
Unfortunately my father died Monday evening. My wife, two of my four children and I fly out of Minneapolis Saturday, for England. My eldest boy is living in England currently. The funeral is Thursday. I am glad I had a good visit with him five weeks ago over his 90th birthday celebrations.
The good news is, that I have your rig up and running. In fact I am listening to it now, as I type this message. I have the Brahms piano concerto No. 1 on the turntable. I have been evaluating it this evening with LPs and CDs.
I have refinished the speakers, and I think I have made them acceptable. I have installed a set of drivers that I personally built. I did a lot of research and experiment on adhesives. The drivers I have installed are my late model version of the JW module Mk II. I then went on to design the Mk III. The company was sold to Volt shortly after that and was closed down.
I have had a lot of interruptions the last couple of days with phone calls and Emails. I have refinished the Juliets and they are now I think acceptable.
I will not have time to pack all this up tomorrow and get it shipped. I leave here Friday first thing and will not be back here until January 22.
I have made all your leads except 1, which will be for your CD player. I will do that when I get back.
The other issue is that the switched outlets of the Quad 33 were designed for the 303. It was sold with the 405, but the high start current causes the switch on the volume pot to fail. These are NLA, and I have a few of the last ones. I'm awaiting delivery of a Niles trigger relay system I purchased used on eBay that will prevent this problem form occurring.
I also want to do further testing before shipping. The speakers appeared in 1959, the Quad 33 in 1969, the Quad 405 in 1974, and the 405 II in the late seventies I think. So I need to be sure this excellent venerable gear will give you good service.
Now I need you to send me your Email, so I can send you the instruction and service manuals.
I will ship this probably January 24 or 25 I suspect, most likely January 24.
The 33 and 405 will ship in original packaging. I request that you ship this packing back to me. If you need the 33 or 405 serviced by me, I will ship the packing back to you, so you can ship the units back to me.
If there are any items you don't like or want after you get them, I would respectfully request you return them to me since these are scarce resources.
Please be careful with the speaker sockets on the 405. When yanked they are inclined to break. Usually a short occurs and blows the amp. Please watch out for this and do not leave the speaker leads where you can trip on them.
Your speakers sound very nice with this rig. Even though the speakers are fairly small and there is only one 4" speaker on each cabinet, the speakers are only 6 db down at 40 Hz! In this aspect and many others they are quite remarkable. They handle 15 watts rms (continuous power). However, they have a sensitivity of 90 db 1 watt 1 meter, and will generate 100 db spl in a smallish room. Do not use them for HT. If you must play rock music then keep the volume low. A continuous pounding from rock will destroy these speakers fast. The designers of your electronics and speakers only listened to classical music and may be little folk and jazz. Rock music they despised as I do and was not on their radar. Peter Walker was an excellent flautist and played in professional orchestras, especially the orchestra for the yearly Thee Choirs Festival.
With this rig I would encourage you to test the waters with some classical repertory. I suggest starting with Mozart, Beethoven, Handel Bach, Brahms Schubert and Schumann. The you can advance from there. This rig is more than adequate to do this justice.
The Ortofon Red, I feel inclines to the slightly aggressive. This is where you will find Peter Walkers slope controls and absolute boon. You can select turnover frequencies of 10, 7 and 5 kHz. The slope after turnover can be varied between 1 and 25 db per octave. It works wonders on edgy aggressive discs.
I'm sorry this has got drawn out, but I had my father's 90th birthday celebrations, the holiday season and now my father's funeral. All I can say is that I have done my best.
I have made your speaker leads, amp/pre lead, and a record/playback lead for a tape deck. It would help me if you could let me know the output voltage range of your CD player, then I can get things spot on. The Magnetic 2 preamp of the Quad 33 loads your cartridge perfectly. The Magnetic 1 is for lower output moving magnet types.
As far as Cassette decks, these are now highly problematic and all starting to fail now. All tape decks are a pain. All need the restorers touch now. I just went to use my TEAC Z6000 mastering deck the other day, and find it has a problem in the transport servo board. So that will be on the bench, as soon as I get your gear shipped. If it needs custom parts it is probably the end of the road for it. Fortunately I do have a pro NAK deck which is working.
The Cassette really was an inferior medium, with little to recommend it. If you have cassettes with items not available on other media, I suggest you send them to me for mastering to CD. Even though your cassettes were out of the water, they might well have been damaged by the high humidity. This damages the lubricants and binder, and gives the tape high friction in the tape path, so they will not play properly. I do have a tape baking system that can temporarily restore the tape so it can be archived.
Anyhow sorry for all the delays. The good news is that this seems to be a very nice vintage system, currently in good working order.
Here are some pictures to cheer you up.
