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It´s not a Rudy record but... I wanted to listen to Bill...

Black Flag. not recording this time

Willie Nelson & Sinéad O'Connor - Don't Give Up

There's an inn in town called Relax Inn that I jokingly refer to as one of four Miles-Davis themed hotel/motel chain. (There's also the Twi-Lite Inn which I jokingly say inspired a book series about vampires, but that's irrelevant...WEEEELL, they bothj are.)

Baldur's Gate 3 I was sick with a summer cold last week and had some time to sink in to this. I have never played Dungeons and Dragons before, but I spent the last few weeks studying up on it in order to be ready for this game. It is not often that less than halfway through something I can already tell it is going to be genre-defining. This is one of the ten best video games I have ever played and I am less than 1/3 of the way through it. Take the rock-solid systems of Dungeons and Dragons polished by years and years of iteration by great game designers as a foundation. Add a truly gigantic world with insane depth and attention to detail. Have every dialog in the game be fully motion captured and voice acted. Oh yeah, and have a PC client that looks truly stunning in HDR with everything cranked and runs smooth as silk. This feels like an all-timer. BG3 is something special and I don't give out this kind of praise lightly.

John Coltrane; Live at the Village Vanguard

I just pre-order this:

It lives! the son of the mostly modern (RIP) T2 was powered up for the first time this morning (not in a case and with cheap valves) and looks good. All virtual batteries within 0.6V of 740 volts with no adjustments to the trimmers. DC offset after warm up <4V without any adjustments to the trimmers. DC ballance <0.03V power consumption as expected. I did have a bit of a scare. When powering on with my variac for the first time the led next to the EL34 was very dim compared to the others and all the leds where less bright than my original build. Then I remembered that I used different leds in this build and they are in general less bright. I don't think I can be bothered to remove these leds and replace them with the same as the RIP T2. Latest update in the rip T2 troubleshooting, diode testing and comparing the silicon to the son of T2 it looks like one of the J79s is dead... which is a pain since I have no replacements. This dead J79 is on the same channel as the failed 6922. The op-amps and voltage references tested fine. This does not explain why the other channel also had a massive ballance issue between + and - outputs but at least its some progress.

its easier to do the board, then let the software turn it back into a schematic update: should be final schematic. that is a 3 pole (18db) low pass filter at 18khz. part of schematic now. nfca3.PDF

Via this Zillow listing for possibly the least cozy looking house I've seen in my life. That's a Clearaudio Statement being used as a backup turntable.

^^^ Liked for the view, system doesn't do it for me....

Sinead O' Connor - I'm Stretched On Your Grave (live)

I bought the Topping and got it this week, with hopes it could be a second or extra Stat amp. I was even planning on doing a "bargain stat amp" feature at my new journalistic home "Positive Feedback", where you can find my review of the Audeze CRBNs, for example. Anway, I'm not going to publish, I don't like to publish reviews of bad gear 😞 What a disappointment this amp turned out to be. My disappointment came in stages. The first stage was an optimistic listen: "Hey, not too bad". At that time I was listening to some simple classical and folk arrangements: with solo voices and guitar, the weaknesses of the Topping circuit are not immediately obvious. But as soon as I played more complex music, full orchestra, rock band, you name it. Where it starts to get real harsh, bloated, lose dimension is with complex music, full orchestra, rock band, you name it. The more I listened, the more I started to hate this amp. I WILL BET THAT THERE ARE MEASUREMENTS THAT WILL REVEAL THIS AMP'S WEAKNESSES. You just have to know how to find out where the bodies are buried. I did find some that clearly show its weaknesses. Attached below. Frequency response (with a 100 pf load), Output level just before clipping, THD at various frequencies at normal levels and just before clipping (spectrum and %), IMD (19-20 kHz) (spectrum and %). The one thing I should have measured is a special multitone signal I use, I bet that would show where the bodies are buried, and tell us why the amp falls totally flat the more complex the music you put into it. But I'm so disenheartened and disappointed by the sound of it that I don't have the energy to bring it back to the test bench. I like to display an amplifier's measurements in equivalent SPL, based on Stax 007 and CRBN nominal sensitivity of 100 volts RMS = nominally 100 dB SPL. It helps bring a real-world perspective to amplifier measurements. Topping Factory spec for max is 700 volts RMS (I suppose the factory took this a cat's hair below clipping and only at 1 kHz). I measured maximum output at 1 dB below clipping at 630 volts RMS at 1 kHz, equivalent to 116 dB SPL. But When performing the 20 Hz THD test, the amp's DC protection circuit kicked in and the most I could get out of it at 20 Hz with a continuous sine wave was the equivalent of 105 dB SPL, 177 volts RMS before the amp shut down. So the lower the frequency, the worst the amp's headroom for transients. Plus, the THD at low frequencies is pretty bad, the transformer saturates very strongly. To see where the skeletons are buried in this amp, take a look at my measurements. The measurements to really study is a comparison of the Mjolnir KGSS HV Carbon and the Topping at nominally 90 dB equivalent SPL of IMD 19-20 kHz 1:1 ratio. I think that lurking in that measurement is at least one of the reasons why the Topping sounds so harsh and the Mjolnir sounds so pure. The primary difference tone at 1 kHz in the spectrum does not tell the story. Notice the high frequency side bands near the 19-20 kHz that begin to reveal to us the Topping's nonlinearities. There's more in the attachments. I'm sorry that I didn't do the multitone, I will some day, when I get around to it, and I'm sure it will reveal the skeleton underneath the "golden glow" of this amp. The date in the Fluke scope pictures is wrong... it's actually yesterday, 7/28/23. I have to fix the date in my Fluke Scope. Every time the battery dies, it loses the date 😞

Went to the retina specialist Got shots in both eyes. Too much Fun for one day.

Godspeed, Robbie Robertson.... https://variety.com/2023/music/news/robbie-robertson-dead-the-band-1235692172/ HS

RIP Sugar Man....what a great story.....but sad he didn't have his fame earlier in life. https://www.news24.com/life/arts-and-entertainment/celebrities/legendary-sugar-man-singer-rodriguez-81-has-died-20230809

William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection director) dead at 87...