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Sinclair Hifi? I'd never heard of it.

Hewlett Packard calculators all used Reverse Polish notation too. They were pretty popular amongst my engineering and physics friends at uni. I could sort of use it - and if you do much programming RPN suddenly makes sense. It is a bit like speaking German or Latin, the action is at the end of the sentence.

I was always buying top of the range TI calculators - still have a TI85 somewhere

I used to use one of the TI calculators when at Armstrong as it was the closest they could get to a 'computer' at the time. I then took it with me and used for a few years afterwards. My old notebooks still have listings of some of the IT RPN programs I wrote. They made sense to me (and the calculator) at the time. But I now can't read them!

I long ago lost the calculator. But the wallet I got to hold it attached to my belt I now use to hold my DAP. :)
 
The Sinclair amplifiers have a very important place in hi fi history:
A young chap who had moved on from racing minis to working with sound recordings was firmly of the belief that all amplifiers would sound the same, so Mr Sinclair's very cheap modules would be a fine way to build an amplifier at low cost. Listening to it convinced him that there were sound quality differences between amplifiers, because it was so awful. He went to college to study electronics and started making mixing desks and amplifiers - this man was Julian Vereker and that is how Naim Audio started.
 
I've been a fan of Clive Sinclair since around 1959 when I bought a slim book on radio circuits. I think he was 19 when he wrote it and his ideas changed the way I viewed electronics. Two spring to mind a) using an OC71 (an audio transistor) as the RF stage for a radio receiver for Droitwich on 1500m and b) using a crystal radio voltage tripler tuned to Droitwich as a DC power supply that could be used to power a simple TRF radio (I lived not too far away).

In the days of mono my younger brother built an amp using the z30 module and we used this at parties to great effect with my guitar speaker cabinet (I had my own band) that had two 12" units. Later I used two z50s to build a stereo power amp using top notch paper capacitors for the power supply and output decoupling. These caps were paper and HUGE but in those days we had the government surplus shops where you could pick these and other stuff up like radar units for peanuts.

A friend of mine who was best man at my wedding and had an IQ of 186(!) was a member of the inner circle of MENSA and knew Clive Sinclair who was chairman at the time. He used to try out new questions on me and tried to get me to join but I just didn't have the time to spare. If only(!)

Cheers,

DV

What an opportunity missed!
You could have net Mick P.
 
I've been a fan of Clive Sinclair since around 1959 when I bought a slim book on radio circuits. I think he was 19 when he wrote it and his ideas changed the way I viewed electronics. Two spring to mind a) using an OC71 (an audio transistor) as the RF stage for a radio receiver for Droitwich on 1500m and b) using a crystal radio voltage tripler tuned to Droitwich as a DC power supply that could be used to power a simple TRF radio (I lived not too far away).

In the days of mono my younger brother built an amp using the z30 module and we used this at parties to great effect with my guitar speaker cabinet (I had my own band) that had two 12" units. Later I used two z50s to build a stereo power amp using top notch paper capacitors for the power supply and output decoupling. These caps were paper and HUGE but in those days we had the government surplus shops where you could pick these and other stuff up like radar units for peanuts.

A friend of mine who was best man at my wedding and had an IQ of 186(!) was a member of the inner circle of MENSA and knew Clive Sinclair who was chairman at the time. He used to try out new questions on me and tried to get me to join but I just didn't have the time to spare. If only(!)

Cheers,

DV

I still have some Babani books written by Sinclair along similar lines! Yep I built the crystal sets etc when about 9!
 
If that's the Richart T. I know, he's the man who now hosts the UKHHSoc pages. :)

Have gone to their web-site and only Audiomisc's name showed up. Chap was Richard Torrens, who'd be well into his seventies now. He joined C.S. when still based in London, but shortly after removed to Cambridge. Must have been '63, '64 or '65. I still have a picture of him fooling around on top of his Morris Minor van in Hampstead. Actually, I'm surprised that I've remembered so much as we lost contact shortly after his move to Cambridge, as I recall.
 
I still have some Babani books written by Sinclair along similar lines! Yep I built the crystal sets etc when about 9!
No it's Clive Sinclair. There is an Ian Sinclair that writes electronics books though. The Clive ones are 1960's, maybe a little earlier, and full of designs using OC71, OC44, AF117 etc

I believe that this is correct. I worked for GEC, and one of my workmates told me of Clive Sinclair writing for Babani, who also worked for GEC and also mentioned that there were cross words between them.
 
I had a Sinclair 2000 integrated in the early '70s, fed by my SP25 deck, driving DIY speakers with Goodmans Axiom 201 drivers. The amp self-destructed after about 2 years, after which I bought a Sinclair Neoteric 60 integrated : http://diy.torrens.org/Electronics/Neoteric/index.html. I thought the design of this amp was FANTASTIC ! It was a poor man's Lecson http://lecsonaudio.com/?page_id=6 , in design, if not in sound.

In 1977, I packed it into a large holdall with some small Technics speakers (poor man's Nakamichi miniature speakers - anyone remember them ?), very slim Technics cassette deck, and flew to India to live in the infamous Rajneesh Ashram in Poona. After about a year, I sold the whole system for about 3 times what it cost me to an Indian exporter, who absolutely loved it ! Don't know how long it lasted, but in India they always try to repair rather than replace...

Edit : I see Mike just mentioned Richard Torrens in his post above : my first link on the Neoteric 60 is from his website !
 
No it's Clive Sinclair. There is an Ian Sinclair that writes electronics books though. The Clive ones are 1960's, maybe a little earlier, and full of designs using OC71, OC44, AF117 etc
I was thinking of the very prolific Ian Sinclair. If that old, Clives books are before my time.
 
I had a Sinclair 2000 integrated in the early '70s, fed by my SP25 deck, driving DIY speakers with Goodmans Axiom 201 drivers. The amp self-destructed after about 2 years, after which I bought a Sinclair Neoteric 60 integrated : http://diy.torrens.org/Electronics/Neoteric/index.html. I thought the design of this amp was FANTASTIC ! It was a poor man's Lecson http://lecsonaudio.com/?page_id=6 , in design, if not in sound.

Edit : I see Mike just mentioned Richard Torrens in his post above : my first link on the Neoteric 60 is from his website !

I like RT's comment in that page "Clive Sinclair, however, had nothing to do with the circuit design, which is why it was a technically advanced and reliable product."
 
This is amazing! Prompted by Jim Audiomisc's reply to my post, I investigated Google and found the web-site and history of my brief friend from the mid-sixties. One look at his photo and I knew it was the same chappie, some 55 years later. Dick Torrens was more heavily involved in Sinclair Electronics and for longer than I'd thought. Small world, as they say.
 
I used to use one of the TI calculators when at Armstrong as it was the closest they could get to a 'computer' at the time. I then took it with me and used for a few years afterwards. My old notebooks still have listings of some of the IT RPN programs I wrote. They made sense to me (and the calculator) at the time. But I now can't read them!

I long ago lost the calculator. But the wallet I got to hold it attached to my belt I now use to hold my DAP. :)

Interesting, I didn’t know that TI calculators were RPN. I went down the HP-41 route, which definately were RPN! :)

The HP died years ago, and these days I use my iPhone Excess..........
 
I had the amp with the sliding controls. It was the first piece of audio kit I owned other than a mono record player with an auto-changer. I cannot remember what speakers I had though.


Me too the Sinclair Integra 4000 was my first amp, with a Garrad sp25 my something, and some awful unbranded hand me down speakers. Hawkwind sounded good on it (to a very young me with first bedroom hi fi)


http://www.urban75.org/blog/behold-...e-1970s-amstrad-integra-4000-mk-ii-amplifier/
 
Interesting, I didn’t know that TI calculators were RPN. I went down the HP-41 route, which definately were RPN! :)

The HP died years ago, and these days I use my iPhone Excess..........
I didn't ever have any Sinclair audio products other than a Micromatic pocket radio which I built from a kit.

However I did buy a Sinclair Cambridge Scientific calculator. Then a Commodore 4148R which was much more reliable. But I got a taste for RPN and in circa 1987 I acquired a HP-41CV. I still have it. It still functions perfectly.
 


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