A console gut win-win

[Firedome]

Just found a nice one owner '61 Fisher Electra IV all tube console locally for a very reasonable price. These have a nice tube PP EL84 440a amp and an all tube preamp/tuner with Garrard 210 and 6 speaker set. I have absolutely no room for it, but have been wanting to put the Scott 222 in my office back to the LR where it belongs in it's custom Ethan Allen cabinet, right next to my '63 DuMont SE console. The cabinet is in very nice shape but no way I can accommodate it, besides it's FP style, not my favorite. What to do. Dave MM needs a cabinet to put some Electra VII guts into as his existing FP cabinet which is beat up. So got the IV this past weekend, pulled out the amp and tuner/preamp (cleaned up nicely!!) and it's going to sit on an office cabinet to power my bookshelf ADS L-10s, and Dave will get the rest to swap his guts into. Win-win! I get a good tube office rig, he gets a much nicer home for his Electra VII guts, everybody's happy!

[William]

Roger, that is a nice looking unit for French Provincial, not my favorite either says a guy who has two French Provincial consoles. Did Fisher not use a rectifier tube in their amps, or, am I not seeing it?

Bill

[Firedome]

Bill, by about 1961 Fisher moved from tube rectifiers to selenium, so this will get the 1N4007 SS diode treatment at some point, along with the usual other stuff.

The cabinet is really nice and the ensemble of Garrard 210/Shure M8D and a speaker set consisting of 2 x 12" woofers, 2 x 5x7" ovals, and 2 x 3" tweeters in individual closed & sealed compartments makes for a particularly nice balance with this amp at about 15w/ ch. I've very glad to have a very high quality tube amp complemented by the usual excellent Fisher preamp circuit and sensitive tuner quite cheaply, and being able to let Dave have it to upgrade his ratty unit and keep everything complete and original is truly the icing on the cake... no Fisher should be allowed have a poor presentation imo. After McIntosh and Marantz, which for most at that time were under the radar, Fisher was THE known name for truly high-quality Hi-Fi in the '50s and '60, it was the first brand that came to mind for most people, and for a very good reason.

[William]

Is the 12" woofer a Jensen?

Bill

[TC Chris]

The only negative thing about this group is that we can't hear how all these cool devices sound! I was looking at that nice Fisher amp and its 6BQ5s and big transformers and wondered how it sounds at its best.

Also wondering.... I've got a little Fisher 6BQ5 mono amp, a 20-A. I wonder if it's half of that 440-A in the photo? Mine came from an office remodel. My brother in VT spied it when they were deconstructing an old office to add on. It had been in background music service apparently. He snagged it for me.

Chris Campbell

[William]

I agree, Chris. It would be great if we could hear what others have done. Trevor did a great job of that for us when he posted his working consoles in a photo bucket thing. I have not idea how to do that, and without the proper microphones it probably would not sound good. Do you have a photo of the Fisher 20-A? That's a hint by the way!

Bill

[Motorola minion]

My first Fisher was a 1956 610 radio chassis, using 2xEL84. After that experience with a great tuner and sweet-sounding amp, I knew they were special. I left it on too long after I fell asleep to late-night elevator music and toasted the power transformer, possibly due to rectifier tube 6CA4 failure

That 20 watt amp Chris speaks of was likely used by an enterprising young tech to re-purpose AND upgrade with something special as well, possibly using an amp snagged from a console going to the curb? I also would have tried such a retrofit, even if the speakers were just down-facing 8" driver behind grilles in a suspended ceiling. My grandfather's shop used Sherwood tuner connected to a Stromberg Carlson 70 watt PA amp, 6550 in push pull, this covered a huge machine shop of 50,000 square feet with 25-20 feet ceilings. Much of the speakers were Utah brand horns and bass suffered as a result. I still have the amp, tuner and just one of the corner-mount Utah speakers.

[Firedome]

The 30a amp was 1/2 of a 440a, and I believe the 20a was as well, in '60 the Custom Electra III came with either a pr of 30a amps OR a SA-16 stereo amp, the immediate predecessor of the 440a., I'm guessing the stereo amps were used towards the end of the model run and thereafter as a cost saving measure by combining everything on a single chassis. The 20a had the brown painted chassis with tube cage and slightly different location of tubes and xfmrs. The 30a had a plated chassis, but both circuits pretty much the same afaik. Any of the above Fishers are very nice low-ish power but very sweet sounding amps. The 440a, 460a, and 480a amps were the same from what I can see with model #s changing to mainly to reflect the new model year.

[Firedome]

Fisher 20a:

[Firedome]

Fisher 30a:

[Firedome]

Need correction!

[Firedome]

Correction! In 1960 the early CE III came with a 610 mono 6BQ5 receiver (amp/tuner/preamp ) and separate 30a mono amp in order to have true stereo (but no mpx yet), OR a 510 stereo preamp/tuner (no amp) and SA-16 stereo amp.

As nice as these Electra consoles were, given the components that you see pictured above, keep in mind that the Electra IV was actually only 5th out of 6th of Fisher's 1961 console offerings! That gives one a true feel for the quality (and concomitant pricing) of Fisher's console line and it's place in the console market.

[William]

Those are all nice looking amps, and the size if the transformers is, Wow!

Bill

[TC Chris]

My grandfather's shop used Sherwood tuner connected to a Stromberg Carlson 70 watt PA amp, 6550 in push pull, this covered a huge machine shop of 50,000 square feet with 25-20 feet ceilings. Much of the speakers were Utah brand horns and bass suffered as a result. I still have the amp, tuner and just one of the corner-mount Utah speakers.

I've got an old Stromberg-Carlson PA amp, an AU-36B. It's a serious device, parallel push-pull 6L6 outputs, two 5U4 rectifiers. The heater current for those two rectifiers is probably more than some whole radios draw. I've read that the fidelity limit is the output transformers, which weren't designed for wide frequency response. Haven't fired mine up in many years--it almost certainly needs filter caps at a minimum.here are many projects for when I retire.

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

Many years ago (early 1990s I think?) John Atwood the Tech Editor of VTV and owner of One -Electron transformers
https://www.one-electron.com/Products/trans.html (sold through Antique Electronic in Phoenix) preformed testing on about 35-40 output transformers taken from vintage audio amplifiers. This included 11 different tests performed on each. The results were extremely interesting and revealing.

Because the output transformer's material, design, and construction are so vital to the sound of an audio amplifier, particularly it's ability to reproduce faithfully a very wide frequency band for music, as opposed to PA, it's really one of
the main determinants of the overall ability of an amp to perform it's chief task, the proverbial "straight wire with gain".

One of the reasons that Scott and McIntosh were some of the best was their huge in-house wound super-quality transformers made of the best fine oriented-grain steel laminations, and in Mc's case, a unique bipfilar winding design. Fisher specified very high quality transformers from their OEMs, IDing them is part of my research, as detailed below.

One of the tasks I've set myself is to compile a list of the actual manufacturers of the xfmrs used in the products of the larger legacy audio companies. To that end I'm working with a former Stromberg engineer involved in that part of their business. Also with a company that is only about 5 miles from my home, that was started by some ex-McIntosh folks.

https://www.mainecoil.com/
Note this in not in the State of Maine but in the small town of Maine NY, a part of Johnson City NY

If anyone is aware of the source of the transformers, or has EIA #s on them that can be traced (currently I have EIA #s for 40 different xfmr makers), from xfrms on any of their amplifiers, or knows of the xfmr provider for any particular manufacturer's product, I'd appreciate having that data to add to my current research database. This kind of work helps to keep my brain form rotting away in retirement! lol. Thanks for any info you may have.