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S&M Avocado Toast. Sonja and Mikey have something here.

Ehhh who hit you with the stupid stick? I've lost count of how many tube amps I've designed so I'm well aware what tubes can and indeed can't do. Nothing to do with my amps either, some of my customers have Lampi dac's which is why I know they are such utter shit. Now, since you know so much about tubes...are tubes less noisy than transistors? Are they better at amplifying low level signal than transistors? Are they superior in terms of distortion and other artifacts that deviate from the original signal? Nope, fuck no and hell no respectively. What you fail to grasp is how tubes are used and where they work the best. That sure as shit isn't a tube output stage of a DAC which is ironically fed by a current output dac. Also since you bring up the T2, I'm well aware of it and I'm even revising the circuit boards now to hopefully increase its performance so let's dwell on it for a bit. Is the T2 the best amp there is for electrostatics...nope, it isn't. Would it be better if you replaced the front end tubes with fets and the output tubes with SiCfets? Yup...by quite a bit actually. That has nothing to do with "tube magic" or other such BS claims based on not having the slightest grasp of what is going on. The fet's are simply better devices, made to much stricter quality standards. What tubes do well is simple circuits, even silly simple sometimes and they are forgiving of "designers" who don't know what they are doing. It's hard to blow up a tube...though some people have tried their best to do so. Ohhh and they were excellent for HV output duty but the SiC fets are clearly better. As for these super qualities which are now just coming to light...is there anything to back up those claims or just your own BS? I take it the GG is still using a Soekris dac fed by an off the shelf PSU from ebay and another ebay special USB input. Well shit...I have all those parts...hell even two Soekris boards so I should throw something together and charge somebody 40K$ for it. I have some DHT's too so let's make it super exclusive and throw a tube output stage that does fuckall but looks super cool...ohh and fuckups the sound for good measure.

RyJ Ex4

I'd suggest adding bacon to the cornbread ... Lots of Bacon ...

Are your family members running Windows 98 on their phones?

I just saw Ne Obliviscaris destroy everyone's brain in Winnipeg. They're heading south and east. You in their path need to check them out.

I hope so, or I'd never get any dates!

Hmmm.

Pet Shop Boys "Fundamental"

Happy Belated Birthday Mikey!

I think it comes from 2 things. One being a fundamental misunderstanding of what tubes are and how they should be used. I blame this on a bunch of cheap tube amps designed to overtly emphasize negatives of tubes as positives. Then people assume this is what tubes should sound like. Add to that that many high-end amps have had tubes in the design, when this group of people go to upgrade they want to spend more money because you know that means better stuff? And we end up in this situation. These are the same people who when they listen to a good tube amp come away remarking that it sounds like solid state.. Argh

Exactly... Buy a cheap TDA1543 dac off ebay with some hacked together tube outputstage and see how you like it. For me it is just baffling that this garbage passes off as high end. I mean isn't the whole purpose of high end sources to be as transparent as is possible and have as little of a character as you can get away with. This sure as shit isn't the road to get there...

A belated Happy Birthday, Mikey!

Adele - 25

Wilco - Being There They haven't released anything I've cared about in more than a decade, but man their old stuff is still so good.

I don't think my phone has been hacked but every version of iOS 11 has made it substantially worse. Final straw may have been 11.1.1 which rendered the battery life as catastrophically bad with a side of instability thrown in for good measure. Example #1: went out for a MTB ride this weekend. Started the ride w/ 55% battery, rode for about 35 minutes and had been tracking the ride via Strava. Stopped to take a picture, noted that the battery had dropped to the mid 40's which is a fast drop rate, but not the worst I'd seen lately. Snapped one pic, decided to take another at which point the phone shut off. Like all the way off. Wouldn't reboot, restart, etc. Got pissed, chucked it back in the bag, finished the ride. Got home, phone tried to power on and told me that it had 0% battery (just flashed the battery/plug-me-in icon on the screen). Plugged in the phone, booted up with 4% battery. So basically using the GPS and one app nuke 50+% of the battery in a little over a half hour. I'm surprised it didn't catch fire. Example #2: Just to show Ian how bad this was at work today I charged the phone to 100% (it dropped 20% on the way to work just listening to podcasts) and then proceeded to lightly use the phone for approximately 40 minutes, mostly just browsing the web and sending a couple text messages. It dropped 30% during those 40 minutes. So tonight I'm giving it one last go, wiping the phone and doing a hard restore of 11.1.1 through iTunes which is allegedly the most complete flushing you can do of the phone's OS. Here's to hoping.