#citation 12

That is always an interesting question.

This week there are two adds on Audiomart for pretty much the same thing.

In BC there is a set of Harman Kardon Citation 11, 12, 14 deluxe models. That is an Amplifier, a Preamplifier, and a tuner of 1970's vintage all in lovely wooden cases. Perfect if you are into that Danish teak wood furniture vibe. Price $2150 CDN.

photo from CAM add.

In QC (the other end of the country) is a Citation 11, and 12 in the metal box finish for $ 940 CDN. That's about where I think that should be if in fine electrical shape. Cleaned and checked and working correctly.

photo from CAM add.

In the mid 1970s this was close to SOTA for a short time. The 11 was just a notch below the tube god of the day the ARC SP3a. Lots of people swoon to 70s stuff. It is very good no debate.

Sonically they are a good set. Is one worth double the other? The tuner is OK, but.... The value of these things is what someone is willing to pay for it.

The real difference is the boxes. Really nice wood and nice to look at. Goes well with "modern wood" furniture. Relatively high WAF.

So what does one do? Are the boxes worth 1k? The vendor spent some TLC on the wood. If you are into nice wood nuf said.

I think the guy could be bargained down on the pretty set. Shipping is a cost and these are heavy if you gotta UPS them.

I recall seeing a Citation 12 for $350 bucks a few years ago. There was an 11 for about the same money. $700 the set. I would like to have an 11 to go with my 12 to make the set. I could dump my SAE. I am not going to bid on these. If I were a collector I might, but I aint.

For comparison there is a Citation 25 preamp on the US Audiomart for $200 USD. 20 years newer. It is probably "better", but how much is it worth? It has some phunky phono settings which is not a bad thing. The tribe thinks well of that one.

Sometimes a brand is pretty good for what it is, but not really in comparison to better stuff. It all depends on what you consider good. Sometimes a brand gets a bad reputation it does not deserve.

If you like motorcycles there is a huge divide in the culture of owners. One one side is Harley Davidson and a few imitators. On the other side is everyone else. Harleys are expensive and loud and are a statement by the owner. They are not by any measure high performance. (Do not shout at me truth can hurt).

Japanese and European bikes have up to 200 hp from 1 liter and can turn 14,000 rpm. A big Harley can turn up to 6000 rpm and 67 hp.

But those owners are not after ultimate speed. They are after something else. Modifications usually impair handling, but are to look "good." All style and attitude. I am a handling type of guy.

McIntosh is a remarkably robust and enduring brand of electronics. They are famous for many things. There is the story of a roady for the Greatful Dead needing to replace some amps at Woodstock. He jumped in a helicopter and flew to the nearby McIntosh factory with wads of cash to buy new units right off the line. Tough and bullet proof and decent sounding. The famous WALL OF SOUND.

McIntosh has a sound. They are good, but I never saw it at the top of any golden eared lists. They are the Harley Davidson of Electronics. They have some unique attributes. One is the use of output transformers for transistor power amps. There are advantages to moderating the stress on components, but they do modify the sound and create a voice. In usual listening there is nothing actually wrong.

They have a lock on looking cool. Those blue lights. Walk into a dark room with music blasting and you know there are Macs in the there from the glow.

They make both transistor and tube equipment. Strangely some of the transistor stuff is made to look like the classic tube stuff.

It is expensive, but holds its value. You may have to spend two or ten times what other brands charge for equal performance, but depreciation is far less. Buy used and sell it later for the same or more.

I have never owned McIntosh. Came close once.

On several websites I often see the comment that this person or that person never liked Dynaco products. They will say they do like HK or SAE or Carver in comparison.

My first good amp was a Dynaco 400 from a kit. I built it. Big and heavy and gold. It was well regarded as second tier in the early Absolute Sound magazine. Better than Phase Linears, but not quite as good as Crowns. I got it as it was affordable as a kit and I figured I could read instructions.

If anything was wrong with it there were protection circuits that monitored power output and would limit it to protect speakers from what was then crazy levels of power. You could hear them even when they were not actuating. Very slight veil. Also the shared power supply caused a bit of cross talk when things got going.

A fairly experienced Audiophile heard this system and thought it sounded pretty good. Though not as good as his all tube set up.

A good friend had a Dynaco 120 for some time. No less an authority as J G Holt of Stereophile crowned that as the first solid state amp to beat a tube amp. Shortly after that is was surpassed by the HK Citation 12 by a hair. My friend went from his Dynaco to a Citation 12.

The next good system I had used a pair of Dynaco Mk III tube amps. Several people swore by Dynaco Stereo 70 tube amps. I also got a Citation 12. I know what these sound like.

The Citation 12 has a good reputation as a solid little unit and works really well. Its shortcomings if any are it does not add the nice even harmonic distortion of good tube amps. I have had both and have heard this so I am not speculating.

So when I see people saying the Dynaco amps are not good all I can say they never heard healthy examples. Come hear mine and prepare to eat crow.

To be fair my current beast is a bit hotrodded and tweaked. There is no protection circuit. The power supply is twinned to kill cross talk. The output is from a 416. The filter capacitor bank is HUGE. It aint the standard 400, but it is only an improvement on the standard which was pretty damn good.

The upshot of this is if you can find a Dynaco 400 it will be relatively cheap. There are 2 on the Audio Mart right now for $1000 bucks the pair.

I know enough about electronics to be dangerous.  I also know how to be effective.  I have built stuff from scratch, but to be completely honest I have never actually designed a complex audio circuit.  But I have tweaked the living wee out of them.

I mucked deeply into my tube equipment as parts from 40 or 50 years ago simply were not that good. That was just swapping out for new and better.

I am much more reserved in transistor stuff. My favorite tweak is to the power supply.  If you are in the high end cult you may buy plugs to go from the wall to your precious equipment that cost silly money.  If you do you are silly.  Golden ears will swear they hear an effect, and they actually may, but better or not is not a given.

Power to your machines comes from the wall socket.  The wires in the wall are plain single conductor and unshielded unless you built your house to order. The power to your home comes through high voltage cables and line transformers and is not really very clean.  Perfectly clean power would be a 60hz pure sine wave. (50hz in many places on the globe)

Even with fancy plugs the power coming into your devices is not perfect.  You may buy surge protectors and filters for your computers and TV that is all about noise and poor quality power.

My thing is dealing with this inside the box.  All audio equipment resolves alternating current into direct current.  It takes the noisy sine wave and makes it clean and steady plus + and minus - volts.  The quality of that is how steady.  Tiny variations can be heard.

Electrical power has a wonderful analog, water. Imagine you had a device that runs on water pressure (analog to volts) and is available in large volumes (analog to amps).  Now think of that water coming from a fast moving stream that surges and jumps (analog to the house current).  You want it calm and placid.  You dig a pond or build a dam to hold the water and calm it down.  The calmer the pond the more steady the supply.  If you want it really calm you make as big a pond as you can so the effects of the stream are dissipated.

It is exactly the same in amplifier power supplies.  The pond is a thing called a capacitor.  It charges up and acts as a reservoir of power.  The bigger the capacitors the bigger the pond the calmer the power for the machine.

The first thing you can do is plug the biggest capacitors in that will fit.  The downside is you can overwhelm the rectifier device that separates the plus and minus as a big capacitor that is not charged draws huge currents at start up.  For small devices that is not much of an issue for big ones it is.

Also there is the fact that big capacitors are like batteries using chemicals.  They are very fast high current batteries, but they only respond well to low frequencies.  Noise on the line will get through to your precious circuits. Noise being anything that is not exactly 60 hz pure sine wave.  The fix to that is to ground the capacitors with a smaller film type that respond to high frequencies.

The final big picture thing is each channel needs it’s own power.  If you have stereo you need two power supplies.  see below.

                 A tale of three amplifiers

I have three stereo amplifiers.  Each is considered good for its time and is collectable. They are very different.

Carver Magnetic field  M -200 T.  Roughly mid to late 1980′s vintage. This is a cool device.  The magic part is the power supply.  A standard power supply converts wall current to DC at 60 hz in North America.  That means the capacitors get charged in pulses 60 times per second.  You can hear 60 hz it is that background hum that is so annoying.  As I understand it Mr Carver did the simple and brilliant thing of artificially increasing the AC frequency so the power supply is charged far more often therefore requiring smaller capacitors to filter the current. They can therefore respond much faster.  It sounds very nice and is also one of the beasts tweaked to sound like a cost no object high end amplifier in a blind test.

Harman Kardon Citation 12.  This is a classic design from the early 70′s and is  half the rated power of the Carver.  Its magic is the power supply.  Inside the box it is two completely separate amplifiers.  This means Two power transformers, two full wave rectifiers, 4 power supply capacitors. It is otherwise dead conventional.

The difference between these two is far more than just the power supply, but the Carver shares the power between two channels so a big sound in one channel will draw power from the other.  It is subtle but this hobby is all about subtle.  The Citation sounds better even though it has poorer test scores.  The way it sounds better is the stereo image drawn between the speakers is clearer and more steady.

Even though both are “old” they both have been repaired and tuned up in the last two years so they are fresh.  I credit the superiority of the Citation to the separated power supplies.  One channel is free from the other.

Dynaco 410 / 416.  The beast. Design dated to the 1970′s. I built this thing from mostly prefabricated circuits while adding extra output transistors.  The Amplifier circuit is identical to the Dynaco 416 but in a black box.  I built it with two separate full wave rectifiers into two completely separate capacitor banks each the same size as “stock”.  That avoids the problem with excessive current at turn on.  So it is dual mono just like the Citation, but for sharing the HUGE transformer which is ok cuz its HUGE.

The capacitor banks are bridged with film capacitors to kill the noise from the wall.  All by itself this thing sounds amazing.  It is clear and clean and has huge bass and solid stereo imaging.  I fear no amplifier that may come against it.

Comparing all three the Dynaco is the king.  There is no contest on the clarity and the performance.  Recall that the Carver is reputed to be indistinguishable from very expensive high end amps of the day.

The final bit is my tweak to the tweak.  Just before Dynaco Inc. bit the dust they made an accessory to their top 416 model that was an enormous additional capacitor bank to plug into the 416.  It has a pretty complicated circuit to control the charge at turn on.  If it did not, it could fry the house wires.  I built one with a stupid simple charge circuit.  I found a bunch of big capacitors and built a set of 4 banks with 1 Farad of total capacitance.  That is 50 times the size of the stock design.

My trick here was that the capacitors charge through big resistors to limit current going in.  Those are them back fed through really fat diodes to let the current out very fast.  The effect of plugging it in is profound.  An already quite amp goes silent.  The image of a well recorded orchestra is solid where you can place every instrument and feel the metallic sound of the brass and the woody sound of the woodwinds.  In Rock the bass is solid and deep.  Vocals are just amazing.

Now the car stereo geeks will go meh.  “We use one farad caps all the time.”  Not the same kids.  The power in a capacitor is proportional to the square of the voltage.  A car uses 12 to 14 volts.  My beast uses 74 volts. That is about 30 times more power.  You could weld with it.

The Carver and the Citation have at best factory tweaks to “normal” circuits.  The designers were very good to brilliant.  The Dynaco was designed by a team that included people working on state of the art (1970′s) and included great and brilliant names too.  It was very good, but they were accused of hobbling it to hit a price point.  The 416 was apparently an attempt to un-hobble it.

I have vintage equipment.  I respect the Carver and the Citation and do no more than keep them maintained. The Dynaco is another matter.

Harman Kardon started in the 50's making hi -fi. Their old tube stuff is sought after. Everyone went to transistor in the 60s. One of the first "high power" quality amplifiers was the HK Citation 12. It's preamp partner was the citation 11. That was for a time considered the best preamplifier you could buy.

This is good stuff.

If you open the case of a 12 it is two separate amplifiers from the power plug on. Two transformers two full wave rectifiers and two complete circuits. They called that dual mono. It makes a difference. Each channel is unaffected by what happens in the other. That makes for clarity and good image.

The only compromise in the design was the output transistors. They are quasi-complementary which means they are the same polarity. My big amp is fully complementary where the positive signal is handled by one polarity and the negatives by the opposite type of transistor.

Back when new it was knocking on the door of audio Olympus. So I just got mine back. It has been overhauled and made new again. I am listening to it through the Advents. I am impressed. I am not cranking it as the wife is watching a movie. But at mellow level it sounds good.

I am going to say it is better than the Carver. There is less veil and more clarity. Almost certainly from the dual mono. The Carver brags about it's magnet field power supply, but dual mono with big capacitors is better.

The Advents are sounding better. I may have been unfair to the old beasts. Aside from the source the whole thing is 70s and 80s vintage. The HK 12 the SAE XXX and the A3 Advents.

The source is an iPhone.