Helios "folklore" ?

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cuelist

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Aug 21, 2004
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Some years ago a former SSL employe told me a story about Colin Sanders (the founder of SSL) paying a visit to Dick Swettenham of Helios and being really put off by seeing Dick stacking 741's on top of each other (paralelling pin for pin) in order to achieve a lower noise opamp. This inspired Mr Sanders to go into console manufacturing.

Any one here believe this story? It sounds a bit strange to me but...
 
No. SSL started off as a studio. They felt they could design a better console then what was out at the time so they did. People liked it and suggested they make more for other studios. The rest is history.
 
[quote author="pucho812"]No. SSL started off as a studio. [/quote]

Well if you go way back, they worked with church organ!

From; http://mixonline.com/TEC20/tecnology-hall-of-fame/

Sanders founded SSL in 1969 at age 22 to build electrical control systems for church organs. By the early ?70s, SSL moved out of Sanders? parents? house in Oxford to a nearby village where a workshop and studio were set up. When Sanders decided to upgrade the studio for multitrack capability, he launched an intensive R&D project, studying existing consoles, while planning to add advanced features such as computerized automation, dynamics and transport control. Clearly, the board was designed for production-scale manufacturing from the very start, and the basis for a commercial product was underway.

I don't think that rules out Sanders looking at console to buy and at the time, Helios was one of the big names.
 
I don't think the story is quite right..... I got the idea from Dick of using Harris 4741 chips in parallel, and fitting 47 ohm resistors in series with the outputs so that they would drive capacitative loads better; I dont remember him physically piling up 471s, it sounds unlikely to me.
Ted Fletcher
 
[quote author="TedF"]I don't think the story is quite right..... I got the idea from Dick of using Harris 4741 chips in parallel, and fitting 47 ohm resistors in series with the outputs so that they would drive capacitative loads better; I dont remember him physically piling up 471s, it sounds unlikely to me.
Ted Fletcher[/quote]

Agree Ted---sounds like a nasty tug-of-war directly paralleled!
 
[quote author="bcarso"][quote author="TedF"]I don't think the story is quite right..... I got the idea from Dick of using Harris 4741 chips in parallel, and fitting 47 ohm resistors in series with the outputs so that they would drive capacitative loads better; I dont remember him physically piling up 471s, it sounds unlikely to me.
Ted Fletcher[/quote]

Agree Ted---sounds like a nasty tug-of-war directly paralleled![/quote]

Yes, that makes a lot more sense!
 
Hmm, 741's... makes me always think of that strange guy I had to work with during studies. One of his obsessions was to attack about each 741 within his reach with a car battery, power supply, whatever... his schematic was always like 'plus' to #4, 'minus' to #7. Without exception, each one blew off its roof... :? :roll:
 
[quote author="clintrubber"]Hmm, 741's... makes me always think of that strange guy I had to work with during studies. One of his obsessions was to attack about each 741 within his reach with a car battery, power supply, whatever... his schematic was always like 'plus' to #4, 'minus' to #7. Without exception, each one blew off its roof... :? :roll:[/quote]

Many are the ways to Widlarization. Bob Widlar's preference was a hammer and an anvil, but he did this to parts that were defective, not just any old part for the fun of it.

There are people that are intrinsically dangerous around electronics. A friend worked with one in a physics lab, and eventually got into a fistfight out of frustration. Some of the schlemiel's tricks: take the most dangerous accessory in a lab, a mains power cord with clip leads on the end, and attach to the BNC input of a 'scope to get a signal. Of course the 'scope was safety-grounded and he reversed hot and neutral. It blew the breaker but not before ruining the BNC, which was a special order item from Tek and disabled the one decent 'scope in the lab for weeks.
 
It's a bit strange there are so many furious types amongst all people electronic... I mean, you have to have some patience built in in order to complete all these circuit-details, otherwise it won't work. Not good then to have such a temper just below the surface... Not unlikely it'll be a reaction to it...

Those 741s were new fresh parts, well, at least they didn't gave us anything more fancy to do our 'practical lessons' (there'll be a better word). It must have been somewhere around '85/'86.


A less destructive trick during those afternoons was this:

Most of us (the students) had DIY-experience, but the older student who had to guide us through those afternoons hadn't and wasn't really familiar with the gear.
Great was his amazement when he saw student #1 with round cheeks inflating a BNC-cable that was attached to a scope and seeing the trace rising on the scope screen ! :shock: :shock:
He failed to notice the hand of student #2 that was quietly controlling the vertical position control... :wink:

OK, sorry, now back to Helios.
 
[quote author="clintrubber"]It's a bit strange there are so many furious types amongst all people electronic... I mean, you have to have some patience built in in order to complete all these circuit-details, otherwise it won't work. Not good then to have such a temper just below the surface... Not unlikely it'll be a reaction to it...

Those 741s were new fresh parts, well, at least they didn't gave us anything more fancy to do our 'practical lessons' (there'll be a better word). It must have been somewhere around '85/'86.


A less destructive trick during those afternoons was this:

Most of us (the students) had DIY-experience, but the older student who had to guide us through those afternoons hadn't and wasn't really familiar with the gear.
Great was his amazement when he saw student #1 with round cheeks inflating a BNC-cable that was attached to a scope and seeing the trace rising on the scope screen ! :shock: :shock:
He failed to notice the hand of student #2 that was quietly controlling the vertical position control... :wink:

OK, sorry, now back to Helios.[/quote]

Lest this be banished to the brewery I will not recount a vulgar joke this reminds me of---however I can't resist lingering off-topic for one more anecdote:

Dick Auerbach, in his younger days, used to work at harm*n/kardon in NY. I was told that during lunch breaks he was known to take another engineer's amplifier prototype and reverse the electrolytics in the power supply. The hapless and unknowing engineer would return from lunch to have the cans explode.

Remarkably, although he left that particular job, he returned to the employ of the harmanic empire and remained there for many years until a bit of additional nasty business led him to agree to disagree.
 

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