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Record show pick ups! the cures and portishead are originals! The 4 on bottom were $5 dollar bin specials

Grahame and Joanne went all in and all out for a lovely evening at Chloe the Cat's house. And the banana actually did work well with the curries, especially when doused with lime pickle. Thanks again!

I've listened to a few frankly pretty lame mystery novels set in Ohio Amish country and they often include references to Amish white bread. While listening to the audio books I often think that I should bake some sometime, and whenever I think about it I hear "Amish white bread" in my head like the chorus to Foreigner's "Dirty White Boy." 🤘🏻 With that background, here's my first attempt which turned out pretty good and made the house smell wonderful. Small pieces with butter, with homemade tart cherry jam and with homemade apple butter all were tssty. I'll try a sandwich at some point soon.

Breakfast sandwiches. Sorry Brent. I used my new biscuit cutters to cut the biscuits, cut the cheese round and even to fry the eggs in.

See Just a few things. For some special guests.

This place? They also serve dessert.

Guess where I'm having a curry...

Caribou by Elton John (1974) https://album.link/i/1440912739 Example: I have to say I am a little mixed. Some top tier songs on this album, mixed with some that did nothing for me. May be could have not been a double album? Just saying. But I will accept it for the highs. Eldorado by Electric Light Orchestra (1974) https://album.link/i/1054523537 Example: ^^ one of the better non-Beatles Beatles songs.. Jeff Lynn and the team doing what they do...

I think I'd clip each of the leads coming out of the switch close to the switch body. They should be easy enough to pull from the board one by one at that point. Then you can jumper the pads to make it always on. Alternatively you can add some small jumper wires to the switch leads but that's a lot more fiddly.

I had a lot of veggies hangin' round, so I bought some chicken thighs. Browned the thighs in olive oil, set them aside to cool for shredding, added butter to the oil and fond, then plopped in my diced onion and carrots. Sweated those, added chicken stock, red bell pepper, green beans, zucchini, cauliflower and little red potatoes. Let those simmer for a bit, then added a pound of little pasta shells. Cooked for 10 minutes. Now I'll portion and freeze much of it for lunches.

It was delicious!

I'm not sure if they have been posted out in the public yet but should be soon.

There is the EX-1a too: https://www.eslabhk.com/ex1a The prices are also very fair and I will be buying both.

someone asked for this, so here is the amp board. working on power supply board now need to find a suitable chassis. power supply board in progress. cfaelectrostatschem2-4 - CADCAM.ZIP cfaelectrostatschem2-3.PDF cfaelectrostatschem2-3ps - CADCAM.ZIP

Another KGGG alive. I separated the GR power supply and the GG amp into two chassis, making it easy to reuse the GR power supply for the next project. The four holes with the rubber blocker on top of the amp are for balance and offset adjustment. I made a side mount board for the 10M90S instead of using the L bracket. The side mount board is attached if someone is interested in it. It is a 450V version, The tail resistor near the offset pot is 200ohms to track the offset voltages down to 0. To make the servo work, offset voltages must be higher than 15v. The power supply comes with a soft starter of about 50s. I don`t want to talk more about the sound since many comments were mentioned. Pretty decent with my Omega and 009. Thank Kevin Gilmore for bringing the project to the table. SideMountV3.zip

Have been tinkering a bit with the XL'ish. Build one based on EMS 20Bs and another based on EMS 300b (picture) A major improvement to the Megatron for sure. Really enjoyable to listen to, toe tapping. Whether 20B or 300b I found those pretty similar sounding in this configuration.

Maybe I’ve got an outlier, but the specimen I have measures only 10.459mm between L- and R+, center-to-center. The distance between L+ and R-/BIAS has similar error that I can visually see it when placed head-to-head with a Stax plug. Without tapping into the proprietary design data of your plug, could you tell us how the Stax plug measures on your end?

Thanks MLA and Kevin for your help. I got the player up and running yesterday first using the variac to slowly ramp-up. Later tested it without the variac and, fingers crossed, it's working fine so far. The device in question is a Marantz SA-1 SACD/CD player which uses linear power supply based on what I can see in the service manual. To expand on a long story made short, it powered up but was unresponsive when I first took it out of the box. After consulting with the service manual I dissembled the unit and found a blown fuse inside. Instead of the factory spec'ed 1A/250V slow-blow fuse, whoever last serviced the unit put in a fast-blow 2A/250V fuse. Which likely explains why it's blown upon turn-on. I replaced it with a proper slow-blow 1A/250V fuse. This is when I posted my question thinking I should play it safe given the age of the unit and suspecting why the last person serviced it put in an out-of-spec fuse. By the way, this thing is beautifully built like a tank and getting to the fuses take some work. A few photos from the web and of the exact unit. It's wonderful sounding especially with the SACD.

Finally, I’ve had some time to sit down and dot down my final thoughts on the CRBN. They’ve been here for a couple of months, but I really wanted to have a Carbon CC up and running to try them on before I wrote anything final. I rustled up some pretty ghetto front and back panels this week, so I finally have one for my own system. Feeding it is a Denafrips Terminator DAC but I’ve tried it with a number of other sources plus whatever amps I’ve up and running at any given point, KGSSHV, KGST, CCS modified Stax amps etc. Now I want to start with how it’s been living with them for the past two months, in a word flawless. No issues at all with this second set, no imbalance, noises from the drivers… nothing like that. They are also supremely comfortable, and I’ve worn them for hours on end with no discomfort. Now this is Iceland so not exactly warm and the all-leather earpads might be an issue in warmer climates. Audeze might make hybrid pads like the Sennheiser HE60/90 but here I just open a window to cool down... 😉 Also, a word on driving them. They are inefficient and do need a lot of power. Anybody claiming otherwise is just full of it and thinks gain and position of the volume knob has anything to do with power levels. They are not quite 007 bad in this regard but they do reward a more powerful amp when pushing them. Baseline for excellent performance would be the KGST/KGSSHV line but even with the CCS modified Stax amps they work well at moderate volume levels. Push them though and yeah… you need power behind them. So how do they sound… well TLDR, how I’ve always wished the Sennheiser HE90 should have sounded but never did. These were my first impressions, slightly oversized soundstage and not as precise as others but far from the mess that is the HE90. Plenty of deep, well controlled bass too but not quite up to the 007 level. They can get bright when the source calls for it, slightly excessively so at times, but far from the forward nature of the 009’s. The soundstage is a bit larger than life, but it makes for plenty of presence and separation so while not pinpoint accurate, they are very close to it. Overall, they are just so balanced and pleasant to listen to regardless of what you feed them. Now for the only real issue, the damping is something which has annoyed me more and more. Now as some might know… I’m a bit picky… just a tiny bit… 😛 and while it is not always apparent, some songs or parts of them just sound off to me. This generally true for every headphones I use so I remove all damping when I can. Also, a large part of why I like the 007’s so much due to their innovative air damping. Now on the CRBN the damping is damn good, but I can still tell it is there. This is not like the Sennheiser HE-1 for instance, where that bloody amp with its mosfet based output stage and joke of a front end just spreads its dirty fingerprints on everything. This is far more subtle and only affects some tracks so for instance, it is too closed in when it shouldn’t be, bass has a twang to it that shouldn’t be there… something like that. This is a very minor gripe, and this is me being super picky so take it as you wish. Still, I’d love to try these drivers with less damping… 🙂 So, this aside, there is so much to recommend here. They are certainly not cheap but just holding them you can see where the money has gone. Plug them into a good amp yeah, they will impress. The only issue for me it they have rekindled an old project, take some LCD-2’s and fit them with custom electrostatic drivers. Anybody know of a cheap set I can buy? 😉 Now I’ve not received my SR-X9000000000000 yet so I can’t compare them but on its own the CRBN is a great product. They are not perfect (what is?) but as a first stab at making electrostatics, they are damn impressive. I’m adding this set to my collection, and they are certainly in my top 5 all-time greats. I really must say they are a breath of fresh air as the releases over the last few years have been such a disappointment. It really has been a 10-year slump now so here’s hoping we get something excellent over the next 10 years.

I swear I don't just log in here to report medical mishaps. Yesterday was a banner day by anyone's standards. MV is an expensive place to live. There's few doctors on the island because full time general practitioners cannot afford to live here. Mum doesn't have a doctor and neither do I. She had a followup phone call yesterday from a nurse practitioner. When mum went to the ER on Christmas day because of covid, they detected what they thought was a heart murmur. Mum didn't see fit to mention that to me until yesterday, but that's another matter. The fallout of all of this was that I had to drive her to the hospital yesterday afternoon. After many hours there, they determined that she has Lyme disease from a tick bite this past summer. That is a recurring theme here on MV. I am cursed to spend my whole life in places that are hotbeds for tick borne diseases. Still, much better news than actual cardio problems. With that in mind, I've mentioned the Dreyer family here on MV before. They're a nice couple in their 80s. Peter is a photographer, who shot 4x5" for decades. Adele is a piano teacher with a Steinway. They're both in as good health as any member of the silent generation. They have a daughter named Gwen. She's my age and in far better shape than I am. Yesterday she was giving blood and fainted. The staff could not revive her and she ended up in the ER. A blood test revealed high levels of troponin. TIL (or more to the point, YIL) troponin is a protein found in heart muscles and a high percentage of it is in the blood stream, that most likely means a heart attack. I repeat, Gwen is a healthy woman in her early 50s. The MV hospital doesn't have the necessary equipment to perform the required heart tests, so they doctors ordered Gwen be sent to MGH in Boston. There were no beds there, so she had to be sent to Mass General Brigham. She was to travel there by helicopter, which arrived sometime after 1AM. At 3AM, the helicopter had to make an emergency landing because of instrument failure(!) It wasn't until 6AM that there was another one available (as of yet I have no idea where the copter touched down) so Gwen spent a number of hours in the early morning (and COLD) waiting. I still have not heard what the tests performed at MGB revealed. I did learn that one of her cats has been keeping vigil on Gwen's bed during her absence. It's been quite a 24 hours.