Hello,
There is actually little to read about – Kraft - amplifiers worldwide.
In 1984 a new - Kraft 100 - could find me =
http://www.vernissage-laboratorium.de/kraft-100/
Combined with phenomenal (really) Echnaton (Akhenaten) -
http://www.vernissage-laboratorium.de/echnaton/ , that was a measure of all things back then.
And an optically inconspicuous preamplifier - Atmosphäre -
http://www.vernissage-laboratorium.de/atmosphare/
The construction and detailed integration was carried out by Felix Klinkenberg at that time (over weeks in countless nights), in the following text more about him.
The loudspeaker cables were hand-soldered with hundreds of individual wires from cables that were centimeter thick, which were used in telephone exchanges almost 40 years ago …….
The original “audio brain” behind Kraft was Felix Klinkenberg. I once ran the text of his homepage via google transfer and maybe the content is new for some Kraft users today
http://www.vernissage-laboratorium.de/mein-weg-zu-vernissage/
My way to the vernissage
When the child starts playing with wires, light bulbs and batteries at a young age, and then, when they get older, starts experimenting with old radios and loudspeakers ...
An attempt to motivate the boy to train with his uncle, an old Bauhaus architect, fails. At least during this time I internalized the philosophy on which the Bauhaus was based and attended my first classical music concerts with him. (At Wagner performances the dignitaries asleep blissfully ... at the fortissimo they were startled ...). The family council decided the boy had to do something with electricity.
So I completed an electrician apprenticeship. At that time, friends from the click wanted to start a rock band. Everyone should adopt an instrument. Everyone agreed I should play the keyboards, especially since I could raise the cash I needed. However, I decided to do the technical part with a PA and the mixing. A friend of mine from vocational school was also enthusiastic about the idea and so we did the technology and management for the band. She called herself New Sekt and later renamed herself Alma Ata. After that I became a founding member of one of the first municipalities in Duisburg. I was there at almost all concerts or open airs with progressive music all over Europe.
With a Telefunken Mr. Hit (stereo) and the then high-quality Shit I experienced music in a special resolution and intensity. After this impulse I looked for ways to realize this experience in a technical way.
In my job as an electronics technician at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) I was confronted with music recording and playback again. There I worked with studio equipment from AEG Telefunken, AKG, Altec Lansing, Bayer Dynamic, EMT-Thorens, Klein & Hummel, Neumann, Nagra, Studer-Revox, Shure and Stellavox.
After that I was employed by Siemens. I quickly submitted suggestions for improvement, but they were not acknowledged. So I had to skip hierarchies in the group and contact the head of the Essen branch directly. After accepting my suggestions, I received good advice from him that I should start studying.
I started studying electrical engineering in Cologne and was lucky enough to meet a lecturer who was previously research director at Rhode & Schwarz and who obviously didn't want to expose himself to the ignorance of the merchants. His most important tenet burned itself into me:
“Never trust scientific doctrines. See for yourself whether they are valid under all parameters. "
After graduating, I came back to Duisburg. With the first job advertisements I found an interesting advertisement: Looking for managing directors to set up a HiFi studio. At the interview, the owner reported that he was negotiating with an industry expert who had owned a hi-fi studio himself and that they were as good as agreed. During the conversation, his eyes kept wandering to my portfolio that I had on the table in front of me. At the end of the conversation he asked what the folder was all about. Then I told him that was the concept for his hi-fi studio. After looking through the folder, he asked when I could start. My answer: immediately.
The concept was based on the combination of three chains. A chain in the lower, one in the middle and one in the high price segment, which I wanted to put together according to qualitative criteria. The individual components should be selected in such a way that they could also be used across chains.
So I went to my first radio exhibition in Berlin. The exhibitors reacted quite astonished that I not only wanted to hear the components in the usual way and then also to hear them. During this time I dealt intensively with the components of Acoustic Research, AKG, ASC, B&O, Empire, Harman Kardon, Nakamichi, Pioneer, SAE, Toshiba, from these manufacturers I selected the usable components for my music playback chains.
In order to bring people closer to experiencing music, we organized the first in-house exhibitions in Duisburg's Mercatorhalle.
During my intensive work on playback technology, I realized that many manufacturers (all?) Did not take into account fundamental physical laws.
An example: the thin loudspeaker cables that everyone used at the time did not meet the requirements that I placed on a loudspeaker cable. So I looked for a manufacturer who could make the cables I needed. I received a single stranded cable with a cross-section of 4 mm from the Leonische Kabelwerke. This enabled me to achieve better music reproduction for my customers. My customers reported comments from many hi-fi gurus: What is this nonsense, the wall to the socket is only 1.5 mm away!
One of these customers was Rolf Gemein. After some intensive consultations and demonstrations and the continuous construction of his hi-fi system, the idea matured that something should be done together. We, that was Rolf Gemein, Peter Bode (an employee in the hi-fi studio) and me. By a lucky coincidence, I was able to get into the lease of a customer because he could not avoid a change of location. When I was working on the customer systems and working with devices of all quality classes, it quickly became clear to me where the greatest weak point of all systems was: the power amplifier. In the course of the work, the amplifiers with ML 2Class A technology emerged as the most likely target-oriented: the power amplifiers from Mark Levinson, those from Stax and M22 of course the M22 from Pioneer. The main weak point of these devices was an insufficient nominal power. This meant that they could not adequately control the performance-guzzling loudspeakers. So the talks began with companies that could possibly supply parts for the construction of a new power amplifier, the Kraft 100. The only material that could be used for the basic housing was that there was no need to fear magnetic distortions. So I got in touch with the largest case manufacturer, Knürr. The basic housing was designed with a customer service engineer. narrow
Now we were faced with the biggest problem: A heat sink in the performance class that was needed for power did not exist anywhere in the world. After exploring several companies, the Austerlitz company was found that was ready to develop a heat sink in this performance class. We now run a hi-fi studio at Luisenstrasse 28.
The first Kraft 100 was completed shortly before the 1980 HiFi exhibition in Düsseldorf. It was already too late to get a stand at the fair. What do you do in such a situation? I knew that power would most likely display its advantages on a loudspeaker that was generally considered difficult. I noticed the Electrostatic 1 Beverige loudspeaker from Harold Beveridge. It had the legendary reputation that with the highest quality level there would be no power amplifier with enough power for you, but that it would be destroyed if too much (uncontrolled!) Power. During a visit to the demonstration, I asked whether they could imagine an even better rendering of their electrostatic device and that we had a completely redesigned power amplifier in the car. They listened to the Kraft 100 and demonstrated with it until the end of the mass. There some experts heard our final stage and that was the beginning of the public history of the Vernissage Laboratorium from Duisburg.
To which I am committed to this day.
The combination of Kraft / Vernissage components also reached its own standard in the 80s.
Many greetings from Rainer