I hate the holiday season for a very good reason. Because I am the Society Editor of Listener Magazine I am on all of the "A" invitation lists for all the holiday season’s glam parties, balls, charity fetes, and cotillions. After years of hob knobing with the swells, the hoy paloy and the rich and famous, well quite frankly, I want to heave cherries. So what do I do every holiday season ?...I escape to South Beach Florida to check out the rays and the vibe on the beach.

But before I take you to the beach let me tell you about St. Tropez in the late 1960s. I was actually paid to go to St. Tropez every year to check out the scene, when I was a design consultant in the fashion business, and the first time I walked onto this beach I almost had heart arrest, because in uptight Ozzie and Harriet Preppy America of the 1960s men and women didn’t hang out naked on beaches because this was a crime. How can you sit at a table enjoying drinks when opposite you is sitting a naked nubile perfect 10, and still keep your cool? The point being that I got early training in erotic beaches that are designed to celebrate the Dionysian spirit...the same spirit that is at the foundation of the audio arts, and still very much repressed in America.

Before you go hunting on any of the beaches in South Beach you have to dress properly and it should not surprise any of you that the marching song of the Triode Guild has completely dominated the minds of beach goers...LESS IS MORE, with this exception: the same beach shops that sell micro bathing suits sell a wide variety of bust enhances and jock enhancers, and I don’t mean jock straps. I mean jock stuffers, like a modern hi-tech form of a pair of socks and a pepperoni. The sexual competition is fierce on the beach and if you are not competitive..."Hey Skinny, here’s some sand kicked in your face".

So wearing my new thong bikini with "basket enhancer" I took my perfect soft round minus 10 body down to the beach to check out the scene and report back to you what is cool and what is fool. Are you ready to drool during Yule? In every nook and cranny of the beach hard body young men were performing, strutting their stuff and posing in hopes of snaring the young, beautiful, fertile and horny.

First, what is not cool is Eurotrash: men who look like Tarzan, speak with a faux Italian accent, have long greasy black hair and have tattoos all over their bodies. What is not cool: Tall athletic dudes who are Olympic jogger types that are doing back-flips, and handstands. What is not cool: Kung Fu types who are doing Tai-Chi, Tae Kwon Do and cracking open coconuts with their heads. What is not cool: Mr. Ab-Blaster Steroid, men who are so pumped up the can’t move and looks like they are about to explode.

So what is cool, and what kind of man was drawing all of the perfectly bronzed hard bodied daughters of Dionysisus, who were ready to sacrifice themselves on the alter of love?

TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

I could see off in the distance a very large crowd of super model types, so I slowly walked over because I didn’t want my basket enhancer to get out of alignment by running, and after I pushed my way to the center of the crowd, to my complete amazement was standing...now sit down on your potty for this...The Desired One, The King of the Beach Bitches, was wearing K-Mart black lace up shoes with white sock, murky brown and green plaid Bermuda shorts that came below his knees exposing his very white legs, and a pale yellow Banlon shirt with soup stains over a blue nylon T-Shirt. On his head he was wearing a Greyhound Bus cap with a short brim. This God was in his mid-sixties, had grayish hair and a pot belly, was wearing "Men in Black" sunglasses, and had a wild smile on his face....Mr. Big knew he was happening. So why were all the nymphets on the beach lusting for this man, rubbing their coconut oiled David Hamilton bodies all over him like a cat does to a chair? Clearly this man was the sex God of South Beach.

Then I realized it was Count Riccardo Kron and he was holding a pair of his new KR 300BXL directly heated triode tubes in his hands and waving them back and forth and the women were going wild with excitement...he was the Pied Piper of Beaudacity. Obviously this was the dude to hang out with if I wanted to score...the creamiest, I mean, the hottest, I mean, the coolest.....directly heated triodes.

Rather than steam your glasses with the details of the bacchanalia that occurred over the next two weeks with the Count, because that is off limits in audio magazines, let me tell you what happened when I installed the new KR 300BXLs in my objet d’amour 300B amplifiers: my own custom single-ended amps, the Sun Audio of Japan, push/pull amps, and the new David Berning 300B SET/ZOTL, because as far as I am concerned, I had more erotic pleasure in my living room with these tubes than I had on the beaches of South Beach. Don’t you find sex very limited in its range of expression and a poor excuse for a great audio system?

My second job as Guildmiester of the Triode Guild is to explore the edge of the audio arts, and report on what I experience as I hurtle towards the Nth Dimension of Music HyperSpace. To fulfill my responsibility I have created some very exotic custom forms of transportation to these non-normal dimensions of music reality because that is the only way to leave earthly music gravity. What is the sense of using the world’s finest directly heated triodes if they are not used with the most le plus ultra and perfectly simpatico audio equipment...meaning all of my speaker systems are 100db plus in efficient, above 8 ohms and have Alnico magnets. So when I report to you on tubes and amplifiers I am using them correctly at the highest level of resolution.

So when I assert that Count Riccardo Kron has created a brand new thermionic vernacular I am not flicking chickens. While the KR 300BXL can be plugged into any amplifier that is designed for a 300B, and you will be thrilled, this is like dropping a Indy 500 Chevrolet motor into your ‘63 Bel Aire Coupe. It fits. There is a definite big boost in go, and there is no going back, but you will never know the nascent power and subtly of this motor/tube in a "normal" amplifier because this new KR tube has pushed the boundaries of what 300Bs are all about. The KR 300BXL is the thermionic frontier.

And you are right when you gawk at the beauty of this tube and say.."Jumping, Gee Hosafat Dr. Gizmo...it doesn’t look like a classic 300B". This tube is a work of art, and when you hold it in your hand and stare at its naked glory you will be hypnotized by its mechanical artistry. It feels like it weighs twice as much as a classic 300B, and it does.

Because of the piety (mostly hot apple with a slice of cheddar) of my high position I only use these directly heated triode in my single-ended amps at 340 Volts at 60 ma., which is such a relaxed five watts that...and I swear this is true...when my speakers play music...thick music triode cream flows from the driver as sweet as the cream that flows from the women I love..(who looks remarkably like Elsie the Cow).....only better. But don’t be stupefied by this tube’s ineffable beauty, because unlike another other 300B you can drive this tube up to 500 volts at 120 ma giving you about 20 watts from one tube in a single-ended amp...made possible by its quality of construction and extra high vacuum.

How can I describe what it is like to have sex with a green women from Mars? Well that is the challenge I have in describing these tubes in the Sun Audio Push/Pull amplifiers with their (Dr. Gizmo installed) tube regulated power supplies. This is a completely new aural matrix for me, and is causing me the same type of self-doubt about the primacy of single-ended circuits that Martin Luther felt about the Catholic Church.

The same phenomenological problem exists in describing my experience of these tubes in the new David Berning 300B SET/ZOTL. Listening to these tubes without any of the distortion endemic to all transformer output amplifiers is confusing.

All of you brainy audio professors who relish the obsolete jargon of audio dementia here goes...the micro dynamics were so micro that I noticed that the flies in my house had goose bumps. These tube expanded my aural matrix to an extent so beyond what I expected that my next door neighbor, Mrs. Murphy, complained that my stereo image was in her living room and was bothering her cat Toby. What was the tonal quality? I just lay on my back at the base of my Tannoy horns and let the directly heated triode whole-istic cream ooze down and fill my mouth. Yummy. The highs were equal to the best Jimmy Hendrix ever achieved at Woodstock, and the bass response was as deep as my love for Cameron Diaz, and outclassed every other 300B. How much bass is there in bass? (Question: does this sentence mean, how much fish is there in low frequency, or, how much low frequency is there in fish, or, how much low frequency is there in low frequency, or, how much fish is there in fish?)

It is an audio metacontext jogulation to think that only a few years ago there were no high quality 300Bs, and now Count Kron takes the most exciting category of classic tubes and instantly ( well actually it took him five years to get where he is today with this tube) and invents a new classic.

I cannot be sure if your 300B amplifier can fully exploit the nascent beauty of these tubes, because I don’t think there are any existing amplifiers that are up to the task yet. This tube will require a new generation of tube amplifier designs, better power supplies, and better driver stages, but one thing you can be sure of...these tubes will never be obsolete...and the difference between this new tube and all of the classic 300Bs is about as subtle, as my praise.

Those you who have achieved a modicum of wholey dudeness; the integration of mind, body and music, may now go to The Triode Guild web site at www.positive-feedback.com, for a more advanced speculation on the artification of the space/time/continuum in an expanded aural matrix made possible by the genius of Count Kron.

And now for your Christmas present: A $30 Trip to Japan. That’s right! I have arranged for you to take a trip to the world’s most exotic audio culture to meet your Japanese audiomaniac bros’. Just call or fax ASAHIYA Bookstore NYC , and they will send you a copy of the very big and fat STEREO SOUND magazine, which will give you a clear vision of where the grass is greener and what the future of the American audio arts looks like. It is better to fax than call because their English is not that great. (212) 883-0011 FAX (212) 883-1011

That was good for me, was it good for you? Over and out from Music HyperSpace.

Dr. Gizmo drgizmo3@earthlink.net

KR Tubes are available from Welborne Labs 303 470 6585 Fax 303 791 5783