Leaderboard

Working +-399vdc 18.5ma bias lots of gain, power, noise free, good bass. aluminum plate 57C in center after 30min

My cat Pawl succumbing to his existential dread.

Kasia decided we needed a cycling snow man outside. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Talk to the hand. Well mine doesn't really look like that anymore, but you get my meaning.

Andrew got his second college acceptance the other day. And another near-$20k merit grant! And his first acceptance, which was mistakenly Early Decision with $22k, is now a non-binding acceptance with $27k! It REALLY is too bad these are his #3 or #4 choices! Still waiting on #1 and #2 choices to come in. Think he'll get in to both no problem, hoping for decent merit $ from them, too; would be very pleasantly surprised if near the above.

Bradbury was writing about totalitarianism and the forces of darkness. Of course he used Fahrenheit.

No I have not as I'm not retarded enough to think that this could be good. DHT's as output tubes in a DAC? Since when was 10% THD in the source a good idea? I could also pose a question to you, have you heard anything that is properly designed and doesn't sound like ass?

the flavor of the month is clearly r2r discrete dacs MSB,dCS,Soekris,Lampizator, T+A, Totaldac, DSC1 (an interesting variant),new audio-gd, Holo Spring and probably a bunch of others coming. the 20 bit multibit that schiit uses is the highest resolution monolithic integrated circuit part available. (no dsd) everything else is delta/sigma stuff

Don't do it ! Do cardio. Me: Bobby has been spending a lot of time in my lap lately . Not sure why. Perhaps he knows I'm sick and is the attending nurse? It's very comforting.

Seven inches of fresh snow is quite a workout. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Aphex Twin - Cheetah Dem beats

Chris, I recommend calling in sick today; this is what happens when we have a holiday gathering at work. Two different styles of cinnamon biscuits with a side of doughnuts. **BRENT**

So I traded in my Radiohead In Rainbows 2x45RPM and my deluxe box of The Smiths Complete for the above at my local record shop. Sex Pistols - Bollocks original pressing promo Radiohead - OKC original pressing Run DMC original pressing Pearl Jam - Ten original pressing (sealed) Pretty excited about the trade. That Smiths box was beautiful but it was fucking enormous and whenever I want to listen to The Smiths I reach for my original pressings instead of the remasters. And I don't like In Rainbows. Everyone loves it, I never got it. I actually like King of Limbs better than In Rainbows. I've been staring at that Ten original pressing sit on the high shelf at the shop for over a year. Of the above I've only listened to the Run DMC, and it sounds fucking awesome. Super clean, not a pop or click to be found. Which makes me worry I'm about to embark on a journey of buying as many clean 1980s hip-hop original pressings as I can find.

Kelvin FTW?

all correct people use Fahrenheit, celsius is crazy talk

that snowman looks just like you

well its 2016, soon to be 2017, and it might as well be 2009/2010 because lampizator is round 2 of singlepower. I was waiting to get a picture of the board so that I could disprove just about everything lampizator has said, and found it. here it is The balanced output board is more of the same, its clear that the output tubes are a common cathode design, simple diode rectifiers and cap for the filament power, resistor plate load etc. This is an OUTPUT stage! Not a I/V converter. Not anything else either. Output capacitors are connected to the board and mounted with left handed skyhooks (also known as air) to the output connectors. Some recent lampizator complete lies all but one completely disproven by pictures birgir has 1) the soekris dac is modified to be a current output dac, and the tube stage is the I/V converter OK, flat out lie, the pictures shows that the voltage output of the soekris module is wired directly to the input/attenuator board. In fact there is absolutely no way to modify a R2R ladder dac to be current output, you need a multiplying dac, or a stack of current switches. 2) the soekris dac is modified by removing the +/-4V power supplies and driven with a super fancy (as in pair of 3 terminal regulators) power supply, truth is that board up front is just a +/-12V simple power supply that also supplies power to the attenuator board. 3) the one I can't verify, that lampizator programs completely custom and proprietary firmware into the soekris. No maybe a few filter changes, but the bulk of the firmware, not a chance. But really, the chance that this idiot can program something like that, you gotta be kidding. TRUTH! The soekris dac is used as both pcm and dsd, its hard to call something chipless with lvc595 shift registers as the output switches. The output of the soekris dac goes directly to the attenuator board, the attenuator board goes directly to the tube output stage. unregulated High voltage power supply also reminds me of Mikhail. etc. and people are paying up to $20k for this, pretty soon some will be comparing the various kinds of wood used on the base of this thing.

Here is what I have to say for all dac's these days. Even though this has been going on for 25 years or more, there is still so much to be done for both the hardware and firmware/software. I'm sure that people 20 years ago that sunk >$25k in to the krell sbx64 stack are kicking themselves for doing so, as today's price on that pile is just about a giveaway. For R2R discrete dacs, you have your choice of 2's complement dacs (basically 1 ladder per channel per side) with associated issues with switching around virtual 0v and sign magnitude dacs which are twice as many parts, and can generate interesting new distortions when the 2 sides are not perfectly matched. then there is the firmware and associated iir, fir, closed form etc filters, everyone tries to make theirs proprietary, until someone open sources this, it will continue. So spending $5k or more on something that may have been close to $20k seems like money dumped into the trash can. Especially stay away from lampizator, in my opinion, the new singlepower. Buy a holo spring and sit on it for 2 years when all sorts of new everything should show up. or if you are pcm only and going to stay that way, buy a yggy. part 2 more and more people are doing upconversion from pcm to dsd128 and dsd256 and like me seem to like the sound a bunch better. Its so much easier to design one switch per channel (and match the rise and fall times and exactly control the off and on voltages) than it is to design 24 or 28 (2's comp) or 48 or 56 switches (sign magnitude) per channel, then double that for balanced.

Been holding off on this thread for a while - I was way behind on the races... all caught up in 2 days (4 races). Congrats to Nico -- ran a great season - and it went down to the last few laps - Hamilton tried all he could. I didn't hear the news about Nico leaving (good luck to him and the team). Brazil was incredible - the conditions - the racing of Verstappen (can see a future champion in there) - Crashout of Massa (and all the tears). Will be sad to see him go - and sad to see Button (I am a fan) go as well. Will be interesting to see the new cars/regulations for next year. Overall a good season (not a classic) - but kept me watching - and kept me as a fan.

Steak

After 3 days of absence, I've been missed... Sorry for the bad quality.

Lost in the '80s... Fleetwood Mac – Tango in the Night Prince – Dirty Mind

yep, upsampling. plus if you are going to keep the original samples you need higher resolution to extrapolate the pieces in between. so at least 20 bits. one of the main reasons is filtering. for 16/44, you really need a multi pole output filter to prevent aliasing, and all the analog filters that have been used in the past have significant phase shift among other issues. so you bump it up to some very high frequency, then a simple single pole filter way outside the audio band, say 100khz. then no phase shift at all in the audio band. and you make perfect discrete high power pure class A switches.

Today's been productive Tesseract - Polaris/Errai

Saw him with Carole around 25 years ago in some London arena (forget where), and maybe four years ago in Birmingham with Lizzie - front row seats right in the middle bang in front of the keyboards (20 feet away) and the laser harp even closer. Much longer ago a good friend made the trek out to London Docklands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtTsCbfXZuQ in the pouring rain for one of his greatest outdoor extravaganzas - I unfortunately missed that one. But that was a great heads up Dusty - cheers!

Well that was truly awesome - absolutely fantastic. Seen him live twice, and this was the next best thing.

Awesome! Thanks Dusty!!!!!

One more Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Hell or High Water OST Great stuff as expected

Bradbury didn't write no stinkin' Celsius 451!

I see your Casio PT-8 vs Virus Ti2 and up you the Adagio für Glasharmonika by Mozart. And sorry about the rubbish video.

yeah, I know, but still it is about -25F so not a huge difference, they get closer at that range sorry, I got that very wrong.... must be my mushy brain..... -20C = -4F You are right Dan. :_)

-40 is the convergence point. -20C is a lot warmer than -20F

You mean it comes in waves?

Very cool! Glad you two had brunchy fun. Brunch is mah favourite. Me: mah skillet started flaking, so I re-seasoned it. I scoured it first, of course. I then set the oven for 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and wiped excess first, so this time there is no stickiness, but now my apartment smells like burnt chemicals. I'm actually not sure that was the flaxseed oil, but maybe the cookie tray? Anyway, since I only did the inside of the pan, I'll do it without the cookie tray next time. But I still consider it a success. And then -- because I have something sinusoidal going on again (nose won't stop running), I had canned chicken soup. So my perfectly seasoned pan sits there, remaining perfect and untouched, which is fine by me.

For old PCM-56-63 dac you also have the Monarchy Audio 22A and B dac's, they should pop up for under 600usd on the US ebay domain, balanced and SE outputs, sounds great. I have one that I use. RE: Lampizator, I've been following Lampizator or in other words Lukaz's archive of projects since he started his old website many moons ago in the days where he would hack up various CD players and improve them by adding various tube output stages tapped from internal DAC IC's. When he migrated his old site to the new company he started called Lampizator when he use to sell on ebay and also sell Lampizator L1-L3 dac's as kits, the L4 builds he sold were never 100% consistent or the same. He basically used other peoples DAC boards, buffalo32 and various other ESS Sabre dac boards for his builds which he sold to other people. The only thing that made a Lampzator DAC a Lampizator is the tube output stage, nothing more. I've also seen and heard over 16 various Lampizator L4 of gen 1- gen 4 and while he has improved his internal build styles and layouts over time it is not a professionally built product and certainly does not warrant what he charges on them. When I heard the L4 roughly a year after it came out, I liked it but the absolute garbage build inside put me off from ever buying one. Lukaz is a great guy to talk to, certainly goes outside of the box of thinking for some of his designs but his more of a diy'er than a professional manufacturer. His early days motto (pre-Lampizator) was simply to build and improve on digital designs from big manufacturers and have it sound great without ripping off designs from another brand or over charging for something that is potentially a piece of shit. Now that Lampizator has become so successful he is doing the opposite of what he was against at first, using other peoples designs/boards and overcharging people with his products, I mean we are not talking about a few thousand dollar dac, his shit is $10k onwards nowadays. He claims to use good quality components internally but he doesn't, if you look at the picture that Kevin posted above the red film caps called Audiophiler, those are cheap Chinese generic film capacitors that you can buy on ebay for a few $$$ : http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_odkw=audiophiler+mjp&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR1.TRC0.A0.H0.Xaudiophiler+mkp.TRS0&_nkw=audiophiler+mkp&_sacat=0. I would've been more impressed if he used a beefed up Broskie cathode follower as a tube output stage than his typical SRPP and other half arsed THD 10% + designs.

Took the fat bike grocery shopping. These are seriously fun bikes. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Tyler is definitely a great guy!

I met with Tyler Abi today, we went to brunch. Was really funny day. He is a great, funny guy. I'm glad again, I joined HC.

Pokeroll Go!

Sorry for the loss of your good friend Pongo. May he RIP. I always tear up thinking about the dogs that have been part of my life but are no longer here. They certainly live on in my memory. Hope memories of Pongo bring you joy

In Dusty's words....yeezh! Stay warm, Ian and family!!

As if you're not used to having twice the meat ...

Steak, with a side of steak. So Colin!

Remembering Greg Lake (and Keith Emerson)

Return of Kaiman Wong. After leaving DigitalRev

Cat and mouse. This is daughter's cat Cheese, that we have adopted (1) while she was on tour and (2) now she's gone to Aus

I was looking at Umut's pictures and I found these pics: I found him on the walk side, It was winter and pretty cold, he got deep teeth marks on his chest and I took him home to cure his wounds. Umut, when I brought him home: Umut, after few months (like before/after pictures): And him, sleeping like hoomans: My familiy started to love cats with him and started to care street animals. Moral of the story: Never judge street animals by their looks.