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NYT's Chicken Tikka Masala

Chicken Tikka Masala

The Mucky Duck....#WINNING! I haven't been in soooo long. We got to see The English Beat (label in the U.S.) with General Public at the Bayou Music Center last weekend. I have to say Dave Wakeling is still jamming well. The two bands put on a great show IMHO. Adam Ant....well, let's just say he has a good band. The percussion section was impressive. HS

For me, Stax simply lack focus and I'm not sure how much that is due to the new higher ups or Edifer. I certainly don't agree with the design decisions of the 009, X9000, Lx00 lineup and some just don't make any sense. They are clearly pushing boundaries in some ways with more advanced drivers but major steps backwards with basic stuff like earpad quality. It's not ok that earpads for the L500Mk2 last for a couple of years before they fall apart. Some of the products were just arguably crap, the D50 was so bad it was never sold in Japan. The D10Mk1 was utter trash and I just got a D10Mk2... it's improved in some ways but it still sounds terrible. The SRM-400S is a "what the fuck were they thinking" product and on the whole, they just took the original circuits and doubled the price.

Taking a photo of new boards before blowing them up later tonight they are: top - 2x 5V linear supplies 300B/20B cathode/plate cathode servo +/-12, +12 linear supply 2x GRHV

There are people on this forum who I believe could design such a speaker. I probably shouldn't name names, but one chose a certain pipe tobacco as his name here. 😊 Building the speakers once someone much smarter than myself designs it, would be the fun part for me. My monitors that Marc designed are absolutely brilliant. I would still want the AMT unit atop the speaker in a dipole fashion.

There has been this push to make the drivers more open when it can work against the overall design. Perhaps it is just fashion/trend or the designers don't understand the air-damping and now to apply it. With Stax looking to the past so much... I feel that they just don't know. I've often used Quad as an example of what happens when the main designer retires and those who come after him... have no fucking clue what they are doing. The ESL2912 is a ESL63 with all of the same issues but extra panels tacked on and higher bias, which makes them fail even more. The panels still de-laminate as they did in 1982, how hard is it to use better materials now.

I don't understand why they abandoned the 007 driver design. By removing holes from the electrode, they were able to actually give the headphone proper low-end. I'm sure in 5 years we'll all roll our eyes when the x9000 "S" drops and it's simply a side-step.

There is a podcast called The Julia La Roche Show. It's basically a series of interviews dealing with macroeconomic and market issues. The host is not particularly good as an interviewer, but that turns out to be more feature than bug as she tends to have smart people on her show and she just lets them talk. Anyway, this is not a recommendation for the podcast in general as there are better ones on the same topic. However, one recent interview is worth a listen. It's with Scott Galloway (a B-school professor at NYU). I don't think he is right about everything, or really anything in particular, so this isn't an endorsement of his views, but I think what he has to say is interesting and worth listening to. The first few minutes are pretty banal middle class investment stuff, but it gets more interesting.

Anthony Garcia & Los Diablos Tejanos: Apparitions Live at the Mucky Duck (Houston)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HO8e85DwrvA_BJq_Fck4j_iqTMR2odbc?usp=sharing

A Symphonic Celebration - Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki by Joe Hisaishi (2023) https://album.link/i/1680459073 Example: A good set of recordings by DG of the great Joe Hisaishi. I normally don't prefer mixing various works from various movies. But for the most part this works. It mostly groups them together by movie. And of course the recording standards are very high. Makes me want to watch some movies.