Leaderboard

RIP Al Jafffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Fold-in https://13thdimension.com/13-mad-fold-ins-an-al-jaffee-birthday-celebration/ https://www.cc.com/video/k79bmy/the-colbert-report-sign-off-mad-magazine

Built a box out of quarter sawn oak. Drawer faces just sitting there waiting to be mounted. Now comes legs. Only took a couple hours to make a simple box 🙄

A few more autocross shots from my event Sunday. Loving autocross. It is like cars and coffee and racing in the same day, only the folks all actually drive their cars they way they were meant to be driven!

Agreed, Craig. I used to love to pour through my dad's copies of Mad.... To this day, I still remember one cartoon that I repeated to my son. A kid is bugging his dad and keeps saying something like, "Dad lookit....lookit what I'm doing....lookit, lookit, lookit....!" And the dad then retorts, "I'm lookiting!!" Don't know why that stuck with me, but I still use it occasionally.....

Mad even got across the pond. I'm astonished that the responsible cartoonist was still alive and drawing at 99! 102 is not a bad age.

Does your camera have a car mount?

Going to use walnut for the legs.

Who doesn’t love the smell of burning exotics in the morning?

The Topping EHA-5 was released today and I've naturally bought one. I don't have high hopes for this though as of yet, no good electrostatic amp has come out of China - just different shades mediocrity. We are currently taking bets as to what's inside, I think it is either a Koss clone or a speaker amp driving a pair of transformers. That or the SRM-001 circuit (yeah the portable one) is about as it good as it gets from China. Speaking of China fucking things up, I've been trying to source some Stax parts recently and everybody has the same story, Edifer has fully taken over Stax and fucked it into the dirt. Maybe they are just trying to get rid of the old distributors to do it themselves but yeah, nobody is happy with the way Stax is run now. I fear we may be heading into a very dark time indeed, similar to what happened to Quad back in the day.

A Tiny Desk showing me why I like Tiny Desk so much.

She was a huge talent capable of an emotional connection to the music that only a bunch of singers managed, to my taste, of course. I've listened over the weekend a couple of albums by a spanish jazz pianist whose music I didn't know, just his name. Pretty good I'd dare say: Abe Rábade - Ghu Project Vol.1 and Open Doors (Ghu Project Vol.2) Not extraordinary nor unique or ground breaking, but very enjoyable. They're on Qobuz too. It's funny that all streaming services, even Odesli, get wrong that Open Doors is Ghu Project Vol.2, not Vol.1 as they all wrongly display.

Here is 1 channel of a blue hawaii running on +/-100v instead of +/-400v, with a single 6as7 dual triode for balanced output instead of a pair of EL34. The tube current sources have been increased from 20mA to 75mA, resulting in a grid voltage of about -30 or similar to the original design Feedback resistors reduced to drop gain from 500-1000x to about 20x into a high impedance load i tested 1khz/50Vpp out at .008% thd in order to meet "today's standard" of 15W into 50 ohms balanced, I'm estimating 16x 6AS7G tubes per amp?? Sennheisers would work nicely with a baby blue Hawaii but IDK of any protection circuit that could be trusted to run no transformer or capacitor coupling into a dynamic or planar headphone!! That's why I think this may be a better project for the purpose of phase splitting/inversion, voltage gain, and buffer driver. For example, Kevin's 'tube input unbal/bal' board with the 6922 is basically the first 2 stages of all of the SS/Hybrid e-stat designs at lower voltage but a 6922 itself can't do the job completely if the job is to get to a low distortion 100Vpp balanced output to feed Uber-buffers to get the 15W into 50-ohms but you could use this baby BH type design, such as this with a single 6AS7 per channel or maybe 2x with the sections paralleled for more power, if wanting to have the ability to drive "Hi-Z" headphones directly with a very very good protection circuit, or maybe more realistically, a large film cap

Yeah, if I fell off a chair I would make up a story also.

We did release the full schematics so yeah... it might be a clone. A clone of a terrible amplifier...

RIP Mr. Jaffrey. I remember MAD fondly.

Al Jaffee, Inventive Cartoonist at Mad Magazine, Dies at 102 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/arts/al-jaffee-dead.html