Greg, James D and Nick G.
James, Nick and Paul formed the open baffle contingent at this EggFest with Greg providing the amplification in the form of his WAD 300B push-pull clone.
The story of Greg’s amp is a fascinating one as despite appearances his amp is not in fact a World Audio design kit.
This amp is in fact a clone developed after the now defunct WAD had discontinued the 300B push-pull series.
Greg, Max and several others had been of the opinion that this particular WAD kit was the best that WAD had ever offered in terms of sound quality so they set out to recreate what they considered to be a classic amplifier.
Designing their own PCBs and casework and contacting the original firm that had made the transformers for the WAD 300B they organised themselves into a syndicate and got the chassis components remade to their specs.
Working as a syndicate meant that the not inconsiderable costs of getting the parts made were shared out and thus the project became much more affordable.
The advent of Valve Arts and EH gold grid 300Bs also made the project possible as they had brought the 300B valve itself within the reach of the pockets 
of mere mortals.
of mere mortals.Greg’s PreII and Phono II are also heavily tweaked although these actually are WAD kits.
His PreII has been converted to cathode follower operation after Neal Gibbons original mods and his Phono II has also received much attention.
Greg has used very high quality components in his amp and PreII, PhonoII; the combinations of which have been arrived at with much experimentation.
Greg no longer tweaks the amp as he is extremely happy with the way this long-term project
sounds. The fact that this amp combo is extremely capable was rammed home big style by the way it belted out Deep Purple via James and Nick’s open baffles. But don’t think Greg’s amp is all about push-pull muscle. It proved equally able to turn on the charm with Paul’s open baffles playing Nick Drake’s unique brand of folk rock.
Although we see James here leaning on Nick’s open baffle monsters he is in fact talking about his Quasar acylic open baffle speakers to the right. These use AER full range drivers helped out at the bottom end by a Supravox bass helper.
James did a lot of work on this design to obtain the advantages of open baffle speakers without the consequent loss of bass due to cancellation that this type of speaker can suffer from.
In a nutshell, the triangular sided U shaped cabinet configuration changes the radiating pattern produced by the bass helper from a figure-of-eight response to a cardioid pattern, pushing the bass wavefront forwards into the room rather than backwards.
The upshot of this is that this design is more room friendly than you might think considering it’s size. Because the majority of bass energy is directed forwards the design can be placed far nearer to room boundaries than it’s flat baffle counterparts.
Nick is pictured here explaining his
version of James’ open baffle design.
version of James’ open baffle design. With this version Nick has used a Fostex full-range driver helped out at low frequencies by an Eminence 15 inch bass unit.
This is a fully finished cabinet based on his earlier lash-up with MDF and clip leads a few of us had heard at Steve Shiels’ place earlier in the year. It was impressive then and this one is just the same, offering a huge, live, band-in-the room type sound that works on both rock and more gentle types of music.
Nick joked that unlike his usual scant attention to visuals he had made a special effort to make his project look good for Eggborough.
It looked great in 24mm birch ply: well-finished with all the parts joined by dowels and glue.
His Technics SP10 plinth was equally impressive and looked just as good as the speakers.
Running vinyl in conjunction with his own LCR phono stage there was little to argue about in terms of sound quality from these speakers.
Nick’s phono stage as featured at Whitham now sports a modified power supply after he had expressed a certain dissatisfaction with his earlier eight choke Thorsten version.
Development is continuing to remove the last vestiges of noise his stage exhibits.
