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Few more....

More found fun....

As the official patron saint of painters tape I appreciate the graphics but still feel like there’s room to grow there and that we should employ a kid with a Cricut to do you better. 😁

Yeah, pretty much. I was clearing up and found the broken X1's so time to do some tinkering. Sure enough, one driver started failing after an hour or so it's trash at this point... time for something drastic. I opened them up and nothing looks wrong so I just added some coating to the diaphragm, just a tiny bit. It's been an hour now and they sound pretty much balanced so this might have worked but it adds another issue, are Stax having coating issues 65 years in? Another thing about the X1, the drivers are wired out of phase as in the + signal goes to the back stator. Might be worth adding a cheater plug to these to reverse the phase to try out and the earpads on the X1 are clearly made by the same company as the 007S pads.

Work has been continuing to use photos that I’ve been shooting for publicity and Congressional communication so I decided that rather than keep shooting with my personal camera that it was high time to request a replacement. They asked what I wanted so I spec’d the following: 1. Body - Sony A7R5 - I’ve gotten used to the Sony ecosystem through my A7IV and figured what the heck, might as well have all the megapixels. I don’t need 120FPS so the A9 series was not compelling and while it would have been fun to shoot with an A1II budget was somewhat of a consideration. 2. Lenses - I’ll continue to shoot my A7IV with it’s 24-240mm so figured I should cover an expanded range with this rig and be able to shoot high(er) quality. So a 24-70mm F2.8 GMII and a 100-4000mm F4.5/5.6 coupled with a 2x teleconverter round out the bag. I’ve got the whole shebang with me on vacation to get used to the platform and find its limits (me) but sheesh, 60MP is a lot to work with. Initial impression is that it’s all very similar to the A7 but doesn’t shoot low light as well. That won’t be much of a concern at work and if/when night time becomes the right time I’ll switch back to my A7 for those situations. The 100-400 has as lot of pull and with the 2x, it’s pretty absurd. That was lightly touched in LR and just a quick handheld at sunset. I’ll have to contribute more to the HC coffers if I start pushing up 40MB drink photos. And 12,800 starts to get a bit noisy so I’ve reduced the max ISO to 3200 for now to see what I can still grab. And [EDIT] seems like the forum software intelligently down-sampled that image to a more manageable 5MB. It is wild what you can do for fun crops with this much real estate.

Turrboo has been given turboot.

Glad you find a way to adjust the offset. With EL34 as CCS, +400V and offset close to zero, I believe 1.5K gives ~23mA and 1.0K gives ~34mA.

My son has two cats. He also plays bass guitar, and has a monster loudspeaker with a massive port on the bottom. You can guess the punchline. One of the cats went missing. After a search of the house and outdoors - no cat. Lots of weeping and wailing. Was the cat dead somewhere? It had actually made a nice warm nest in the loudspeaker wadding. Only discovered when my son fired up the amp and did some playing. Cat shot out of the port. Mystery solved.

Another 2.5 hour treatise of Evangelion. I like this along with the other breakdown that I recently watched, they focus on different aspects and ultimately bring more understanding than either of them alone. Solidifying that the Anime kicks ass.

Begone AI spam bot!

No, as I believe he is SoCal, not NorCal, and His MicroCenter is Tustin, apparently

Did you see Jay and/or his Two Centz?

Visited the spiritual successor to Fry's in the Bay Area It did not disappoint

Italian food.

I'm closer to my favourite fish&chipster now, I should go back there. I miss a great fish&chips (oil so hot it flash fries the fish inside). The bulgogi is kind of bizarre for such a small place, but one of these days, I will try...nah. https://maps.app.goo.gl/ecRrPwnM6ToJyVxm9 Me, rn: sammich from Wegmans

Proper Fish & Chips, ordered from an Essex Girl @ https://www.scrumptiousfc.com/

Finished 11th out of 44 drivers at my last autocross. Goal was top 15 so I’m happy. Turns out putting better tires on the car makes a big difference. Who could have guessed? You can brake harder, carry more speed, and get back on power earlier. These aren’t even that fast of a tire too!

fin

Quick update: it’s 6 AM here in California and I just wrapped up some late-night tweaking. Someone PM’d me earlier asking how I solved the offset and balance issue, and I can finally say: done. Offset is now around 0.3V and balance is about 0.2V. If anyone else is running into similar issues, here’s what worked for me: 1.CCS Set Resistor: I kept the CCS set resistor at 1.5k, which gives around 22–23mA static current. You can try lowering to 1k if you want around 25mA, but I found 1.5k sufficient. The more plate current you have, the higher the offset you will get. 2.Cathode Resistor: Changed from 3300Ω to 7k–7.5k. A larger cathode resistor gives you a deeper grid voltage. I could only find suitable 7k wirewound resistors on Mouser – they’re a bit bulky but still fit. Note: Larger values will increase the offset, so some trial and error is expected. 3. Grid Pot: I replaced the 10k pot with a 50k, which gave me a much wider range to trim both offset and balance. Final bias: around 24–25mA static current, Vgk ≈ -75V. Hopefully, this helps anyone else dialing in the Megatron XL and happy tweaking!😊

Connie Francis died on July 16. RIP

Shirley & Company - Shame, Shame, Shame

The original is on the right... the left one is clearly a fake

sorry, I have one 100% original and 10 fakes, many do not know who the original is.