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Started setting up my apartment in oak ridge.

Change of plans... we're going to stay in our current apartment (got a bit of a concession). I'm still going to look at my options and appreciate the help. I'll keep everyone posted.

It is with great melancholy that I put fingers to keyboard after perusing your answer to my previous missive, as it is very evident that the vital information contained therein has either been disregarded in a most cavalier manner or disregarded due to the lack of sufficient education or desire to glean the freely provided data and so it behoves me to correct some of the most blatantly obvious mistakes and inconsistencies contained therein as well as your previous postings which are quite evident to those with even a smattering of technical and experiential knowledgeability especially when you deride a most well known designer and builder of enormous repute as well as deign to question his obvious expertise in these matters whereas you, it seems, do not even understand the rudimentary differences between an amplifier and preamplifier as well as the most desirable specificational requirements required to occasion their performance at the most elevated level in that which is known as high fidelity and can be found in this forum in copious quantites in a plethora of pertinent threads, and yet the most flagrant of disregard for truth in performance is evidenced in your complete misunderstanding as to what constitutes real hi-fi which terminology seems to be highly misunderstood by the great unwashed who sadly equate this term with "sounds good" whatever that means whereas even the least careful thinker who would care to apply the logical extension of the terminology used would realise that if the source material sounds rotten then anything that would make that sad situation more tolerable is of necessity not even close to high fidelity and, as the sad situation is propagated on this as well as other forums to misinform and demean those gullible newbies who take this situation at face value in the severely mistaken belief that their new-found knowledge which they are avidly imbibing in has not even a skerrick of fact in reality and it falls on myself to inform you that you appear to be one of these poor benighted souls who have drunk from the polluted pond of misinformation, scuttlebutt, hype and popular myth and then you severely add to the odious problem by regurgitating this technical and practical diarrhoea as if it is twenty four carat certified truth to be consumed and digested as well as regurgitated to the next generation of poor susceptible victims of all this snake oil, unicorn tears, pixie dust, hens teeth and lastly but not least of all downright dishonesty to the cause of better reproduction of the individual's selected choice in the reproduction of sound in the most felicitous manner.

Dogs in the morning. Kids in the afternoon. Great day.

Astro, perhaps, if you took the time to know somewhat of the topic you were posting about, and before you took it upon yourself to sarcastically call out those far more knowledgeable posters contributing in the various threads in this forum, you may not be the continual equivalent of soylent green and comic relief that seems to be your undeniable forte whilst you attempt to add to the tenor of this forum and this thread in particular, but sadly, it is my melancholy duty to inform you that your postings are comical at best, and asinine in general thus resulting in the many negatory replies to your posts, and, adding to the status quo, your total inability to, or perhaps complete disregard for the rebuttals your posts receive, you continue to chronically suffer from the proverbial foot-in-mouth disease, and contrary to popular belief, this post is not a diatribe against you but a rather belated attempt by myself to attempt, perhaps, not futilely, to educate and admonish you with the intention of rescuing you from further displays by yourself of your penchant to display your ignorance of the subject matter and it's context which is so necessary to the understanding of the postings herein contained, plus it also has the added benefit of ameliorating the comical content of the ever present contrarians who just love to point out your fallacious understandings which are so frequently proffered in your posts for their amusement and delectation but to the detraction of your personal prestige within these hallowed portals of knowledge and dissemination thereof, which has contributed massively to those here with the right attitude and resulting in their elevation of worth, knowledge and skills in DIY as well as other areas of social interaction as can be readily seen and recognized within this forum, and so I hope that this slight rebuke is taken in it's proper context as an educational expose which will no doubt be seen as negatively impacting on the fun factor by those who are awaiting every post of yours to ascertain what mileage may be derived from your ignorance which is overtly expressed in you posts and to be butt of ridicule and demeaning jesting from the more astute and enlightened denizens with a greater than modicum of humour and irony.

Went to a football game; my team won. Drinking wine now.

I still appreciate that he came out to say something, even if it didn't amount to much. Certainly a lot more level-headed than when cavalli stopped by to grace everyone with his presence. Maybe I've also been desensitized but I didn't even think people were being too "flame"-y about things either haha Also Lampizator is some sort of sick joke, all it takes is a quick peek under the hood. But it's magic, has to sound good right? To this day I wonder what the wood is for

The funny thing about astrolube is utter lack of understanding of anything. So tubes must the be the same as all other tubes, "cuz toobz be magical!!" As it happens and I've heard two of the top end Lapazitor dacs and what utter turds. Seriously, this stuff is so bad that you have to question the sanity of the people to claim this is high end or they just don't grasp the concept of high fidelity. You know, the annoying bit about the end result being as close as source as is possible... Let's not go into how Lapazitor is built or designed. One of the Carbon owners was adamant that this was the true solution to all DAC's and even sent me some of the correspondence with the owners. Yeah...their idea of a power supply design is to listen to two equally sucky versions and then pick the winner. Who needs to measure noise and shit like that? As for the MSB dac...well that is my dac in the pictures and I can safely say that everything he stated is utter bullshit. This unit was bought directly from a dealer and the only upgrade done to it was replacing the USB input as there was something wrong with the original one. The rest of it left the factory like that.

You don't know the people here if you think a large number of us can't afford stuff like MSB. We simply choose not to because your amp looks, at first glance, to be a somewhat questionably built $300 box of parts (not including the casing or main power transformer), for $37k. If you truly wanted to share with us "what is really going on" you would have posted pics of the underside of the PCB instead of ranting and telling everyone you're not going to post anymore about enlightening us. Given that you yourself have mentioned you have built something that was better than what you sold people, for $4, there seems to be a trend. Some of us used stronger rhetoric than others, but we gave you a chance to tell us what was really going on and verify your measurements from an independent party, and you decided to run instead. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

Fuck this noise.

Went to see this today http://www.nomanslandtheplay.com/ two titans of theatre - Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Awesome. The performance is being broadcast live to cinemas worldwide on 15th December for anyone interested in a typical Tom Stoppard Harold Pinter play.

Have a fantastic day! Don't think of it as two away from 30. Think of it as your first Birthday as a home owner. (I had to type home 3 times before not putting a second 'o' where the 'e' goes. Habits ya know.)

You can do this yourself. Just add him to your ignore list and, voila, you've banned him. There is a caveat here. Tapatalk doesn't seem to know about ignore lists. Mostly, just don't feed the troll and he'll go away.

Finally installed my winter/rallycross wheels and tires. Really happy with the look.

Back in the day, we got involved in building high field resistive magnets. The idea was that you would discharge a very large number of capacitors through a thyristor bank into a magnet. This was shrink fit into a thick stainless steel tyre to stop it from exploding as a result of hoop stress. Now that was a beast you did not want to share a room with; testing them was a bit of a game so as not to incinerate the test engineer 600V? Chicken feed. Here's a shot in a concrete bunker that this kit was installed. The blue things heading off into the distance were the capacitors.

Was at the game today at the Bridge and conseqwenrtly typing very careflly. https://my.mixtape.moe/afnsrr.mp4

Todd let me borrow the Utopia as part of his loaner series and these are the real deal! Total clarity and extremely even handed across all frequencies. Bass is scary good as it goes very deep but js also very fast. Layering is a strength but soundstage is not. Overall I would say these are the best headphone in or out of production (never was an R10 fan). $4k is a steep mountain to climb but these are worth it. I can easily live with my LCD-X forever but these are a clear step ahead in every area. PS the two headphones I regret selling are the PS-1 and pink driver RS-1. Dusty good luck if you sell your pair

A few years ago I managed to persuade my lady wife to accompany me to a high end audio show. This particular one was to showcase British Hi-Fi, and was in a hotel near Heathrow. We walked into one room, and a track that we knew particularly well by Marc Cohn was playing. Carole actually burst out laughing. I hustled her out with a hissed "Bear in mind that these guys have tried really really hard to design something that sounds that awful". Effort in designing a product is absolutely no guarantee that it will sound decent, and may actually sound acutely awful. One of the reasons that the infant (and not so infant) mortality rates in audio start-ups is to high.

It will surely be done by 6pm on Monday!! I'll look into updating the board a bit. Might change it all SMD and into stereo channels.

39 of them. And two transistors (both germanium). I have two (don't ask) one with the hernia inducing 175 high current unit (internal wiring is welding cable). First time I used it I stuck a random TO220 on it, and without much effort at all blew a red hot heatsink tab across the room in a hail storm of hot epoxy shards. I've just resurrected a 576 - a much more useful all transistor tracer. Tek went through a brain dead period when they stopped wax potting their HV transformers and went over to epoxy potting. Alas in the late 60's epoxies were not too well developed, and degrade. Transformer overheats and then crowbars the LT supply feeding the oscillator. Tek woke up to this issue pretty quick, and soon turned over to silicone potting, which worked much better. So I rewound it. Bit of a faff, particularly the 1400T of 40AWG wire on the 2.7kV secondary. I wax potted it, and the 576 now works perfectly - needs a re-cal though. Sawyers re-wind in place. Left over ptfe sleeved wire lurking around from my T2 build

It was Martin L. King Jr who said "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity". Now Astrowhatever, you're beyond dangerous and becoming nauseating.

Oh brother.

None of this is actually true. The problem with tubes in a DAC is that they are high impedance devices with low transconductance. That makes them less effective as buffers, and less effective as low input impedance devices for IV duty. They also tend to be a little noisier. Moreover they are lower distortion devices than transistors. They sound good in spite of any distortion they might add - not because of it. As a cure for digititis, whatever that might be, tubes will do precious little. Arguably they are useful to add some gain (perhaps in a DAC with a simple resistor IV) where they may be superior to transistors.

Sechtdamon, have you been to a headphone meet? First thing I always do is crank the volume knob way down before I listen to any gear. It's pretty eye opening how loudly people listen... pabbi1 is on a completely different level from most, but there's no doubt he has some level of hearing loss.

Found out today it is an easy ride from my house to two large cycling paths with 100s of miles of routes to choose from. Did a quick ride this morning including a bit of single track, which was a lot of fun.

I'm imagining some guy with a wrench, running around loosening bolts. If I found some asshole doing that I'd call him a loser.

RIP Ron Glass. I'm going to miss you Det. Harris and Shepherd Book.

My wife

There are ways around that problem, and also the tendency for distortion to increase significantly as you go down in frequency. Lundahl don't tend to mention this too loudly, but distortion of 0.1% at 50Hz and >0.5% distortion at 20Hz are not uncommon at higher drive levels (~5dBu). The way around this is to use the technique that Audio Precision do with their galvanically isolated inputs. This uses a very carefully designed transformer with auxiliary windings driven by an active circuit with negative output impedance. Patent is here http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4614914 . It needs very careful design, because if anything is out of kilter it can of course make a very nice oscillator.

Yes, I agree the embargo hurt innocent Cubans, but what's the alternative? Castro didn't leave us a lot of choice. Yes, America wants it's enemies, real or perceived. That's how the military machine stays in motion. It is very sad. War is business. He went far beyond that. Look up the firing squads. He made it clear immediately that he had no intentions of giving up power, or holding elections. Not only did he kill his opposition, but he had many revolution supporters shot as well, because he thought they held too much power. He ripped children from the arms of their parents at will. He stole property and wealth on a whim. He was your average megalomaniac dictator, nothing better. My point is that the mere passing of time should not lesson the actions of a tyrant. Let's just hope that Cubans can have a better future starting now.

I can actually answer that -- he doesn't read as well as he writes. The analogy I draw is Trump's tweets. There has been great backlash at his tweets, but does he change his ways? Nope.

Tragically, he committed suicide in 2011.

Turkey part deux.

Did a nice cold ride, forgot my new gloves, this morning around the Argonne National Labs. Bike rides great and I feel pretty good after being off the bikes for a long time. A quick shot of the bike after some cleaning.

I almost forgot the most important bit. djs welcome to headcase! where the woman are strong, all the men are good-looking and the children are above average were you going to say something or just repost my pictures? edit: needed to get the quote correct

I was going to write a long response, but it boils down to this: we need pics of the underside where you claim most of the semiconductors are, along with the heat pipes. All I see in the power supply are diodes, electrolytic caps, zener diode strings, bleeder resistors, and whatever those things are in between the caps. Also, since you are eager to share your measurements, you should be willing to send your amp to an independent third party for measurement verification. Some of these numbers seem on the iffy side, especially given what we can see. You certainly don't like excessive costs, as all the components are the cheapest you can find on Mouser. Even those trimpots don't look like real Bourns. If they are, I stand corrected. If your heatsink is dissipating 60W (it doesn't look like the one on the other side is connected to anything because only the main power transformer, low voltage supply, and empty module slot is there) why put the HV caps right next to them and then wedge your wiring right in between?

French Toast and Bacon Via:

matching the output devices not a bad idea board file posted, new software may not be compatible with some gerber viewers, I did it in rs274x although I can do the new gerber x2 version changed a number of resistors, its less than 1db down at 20khz. about 7.5 watts per board, 15 watts per channel, 30 watts total plus the power supply joamat i'm expecting you should be able to have this done by the end of the day

Sleepy Jax WTF did you wake me up for Jax

Amazing day on the trails. Xavier, two friends, a dad, and a friend's sister. The Garmin watch paused and didn't auto-start so I don't have the distance, but 6-8 miles of single-track at least. Some of the kids were getting tired so I took them to the parking lot via road whike the dad who was sticking with his little girl for miles got to cut loose and chase down the fast kid. One of my favorite mountain bike rides of all time. **BRENT**

I don't see the problem with a tubed DAC, just don't claim it has more fidelity than one without a tube. Tubes add a very pleasant distortion that nicely ...uh...counteracts? ...digititis. <-- See that word, 'distortion'? That's the opposite of fidelity. However, in small amounts, it can add euphony to a system, and that's certainly why I listen -- for the almost euphoria. Wink -- run on sentence much? There were multiple thoughts there, so maybe ... stream of consciousness much?

Calling Dan and his permanent shovel....

the big yellow caps are the output caps, the 2 analog devices chips are likely the dac chips (can't read the numbers) then discrete solid state buffer then tube output stage with what seems to be a current source for the plate. 2c51 a better choice than most tubes. only one resistor mod in the lower right corner. depending on how much it costs, possibly a decent deal.

i imagine astroturf endures being berated because people still give him information that he can regurgitate over at headfi, even if he doesn't understand it. it lines up if you consider how he's also reviving dead threads. or maybe it's just some weird martyr complex, either way the discussion takes a nosedive pretty consistently

pabbi1 at canjam2010 drove my T2 into clipping. you could hear it across the room. He was very happy. Everyone else was scared there were others that stopped by my office and roughly the same thing.

I can't find the power supply pics, but here are some of them. sloppy evidently going all the way back to 2007, looks like djs designed much of this too. definitely like the hand drilled hole on the preamp boards.

I never thought of Joanne as being short, but I had no idea.

He certainly wore the shit out of that ball-cap.