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And so it begins...from my wife's grandma's attic, RIP

Laurie Spiegel 1971. Ronda, Spain Abandoned House in Nova Scotia. Sautens, Austria. Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park. A lone surfer in Rio. Thórsmörk, Iceland. Positano, Amalfi Coast, Italy. Bridge to Ronda, Spain. Salar De Tara, in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Rural Colorado stream. Mt. Rainer peeking through the clouds. Lake Pukaki, New Zealand. Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite, CA. Clocaenog, Wales. Snow Covered Mountains in Napp, Norway. Colorado Mountain Valley. Lake McDonald. Hocking Hills near Logan, Ohio. Raven Crag overlooking Lake Thirlmere, English Lake District. Sunrise over Mono Lake CA. River Mondego in Portual. Hamnøy Norway. Lofoten Islands in Norway. Blue Mountains, OR.

Over the past few weeks I re-read the Foundation trilogy for the first time since my freshmen year of college. I suggested them to Brent and he said he didn't like the first book and gave up on the series. After going through them again I'm amazed how well they still hold up. Yes, the first book isn't the best, but the second and third totally redeem it. The trilogy is one of the best things to come out of the golden age of sci-fi and stands with the Robot novels as the best things Asimov has ever done. 5/5. Obviously. Brent, you are an idiot.

You can do single ended if you simply ground the other "stator" which makes them pseudo push pull. The Koss ESP6, 7, 8 and 9 do it this way and so do the odd Philips electrets from the 70's. Now how this is done is very important as to how well it works but it is never the equivalent of simply using a pure push-pull setup. I agree that this is basically what Beveridge did back in the day and relies heavily on bias with all the issues that entails. I'm highly skeptical of all of this but hey, let's take one apart and see how it works.

Not today, but I start back to work tomorrow.

pretty....

http://songexploder.net/arrival Here's Johann Johannsson talking about creating some of the music for the film Arrival. If you haven't listened to a Song Exploder podcast before, they can be a little "nuts and bolts", but still very enjoyable IMHO. I'm pretty sure I've posted other episodes here before but, be sure and check out the episodes list. You're sure to find a fav band/songwriter/composer talking about their craft. One of my favorite things to listen to while munching down lunch!

My initial impressions: Oooo! Orange! Hexagons! Cool...uh...er...something grill...art deco wavy lines!

A few patent landmarks

Yep, unpaid vacation. I probably lost 6 BAI.

Parker Beam was a true gentleman. I met him at a liquor store and he signed Heritage bottles for me and Naaman, I believe. RIP Parker. And fuck ALS!

This is the headphone version of beveridge. 1350 volts bias, probably a couple hundred volts of music, single stator.

Took me a while to understand the perspective, then I realised that it was a view from the *top* of Raven Crag looking roughly North down Thirlmere (note - not Lake Thirlmere, because a mere is a lake. So it is simply Thirlmere. Pedantic mode = off). So on the left are the slopes of the Helvellyn range. In the left middle distance is Seat Sandal (and above it the shoulder of if Stone Arthur and Great Rigg. And facing Seat Sandal on the right (with the concave shape) is Steel Fell. In the gap between the two is a low pass called Dunmail Raise (Dunmail was an local chieftan). Just to the right of the view point is Bleaberry Fell and High Seat. In the far distance you can see Loughrigg Fell - the subject of another of Knuck's postings. Incidentally, it is one of those trick questions - how many Lakes are in the Lake District? Answer - one. Bassenthwaite Lake. All the remaining fifteen bodies of water in the Lake District are Meres, Waters and Tarns.

Wat....??????? Translating the original blurb and filling in the necessary techy gaps, it comes out as follows..... Due to the miniscule gap between the mesh grid, spacer and laminate, it has been necessary to address the problem of quantum foam propagating between the elements. This is done by designing the mesh grid to allow the ingress and amplification of Kreger Waves to dampen out the discontinuities in the aether caused by the quantum foam as well as the occasional Cherenkov radiation caused by the ubiquitous Tau Neutrinos emanating from the sun and various supernova. Even though these discontinuities only exists approximately -250dB below the noise floor, and therefore normally of no practical consequence, there is the butterfly effect that needs to be addressed. This butterfly effect is a runaway phenomenon that increases the original purturbation to many orders of magnitude that is only dampened by the atomic pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. It is this very phenomenon that causes most of the noise in the physical and electronic disciplines such as the noise in Josephson Junctions and the more general quantum noise phenomena. Thus, by proverbially clipping the wings of these mythical butterflies, the butterfly effect in totally nullified and negated resulting in a practical 23dB reduction in noise floor occasioned by transducer malformations over the entire frequency spectrum of it's sonic reproduction capabilities. And. so Hi-FI becomes Higher-Fi. I hope this helps.....

I mostly buy NM vinyl from the 60s, but I also mostly listen to jazz. Discogs is great. I clean records by hand. You can get great results, once you get the hang of it, though it's slow and messy. You basically just have to do it once, though.

In other words, it's single ended. I wonder how they manage the distortion inherent in a single-ended device?

The only thing whippersnapper about you, is the fact that you still need training wheels on your bicycle!

I had a ball cap and raincoat hood on and just didn't realize how close it was. Not going to mess around with it anymore.

Tidal Masters sounds good to my iron ears so far. Might be placebo, might be just being high but as long as it pleases me, don't really care about the fine details.

for me vinyl's not about nostalgia, but about slowing down. I don't want to slow down my shopping experience, I want to slow down my listening experience.

Another interesting and relevant post is from a recent Tyll post: http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/paper-review-effects-mp3-compression-perceived-emotional-characteristics-musical-instruments#FGmflv70J55LFrjL.97 As usual, the scientists who wrote the paper have no idea what they are talking about, but Tyll and some of the comments on the page get more to the crux of the point. That is to say, red book and even lossy versions of red book up until a reasonable point, are NOT the bottleneck to good sound. There's so much other shit that people can and do get wrong that exceeding 16/44 is pretty laughable on a list of things to improve on audio. Remastering or swapping headphones/speakers offers infinitely more change in sound than going from 16/44 to 24/96.

This thing feels to me like it could be pretty significant. Put aside all the conspiracy theory nonsense and what you've got is a distribution format that allows streaming good quality at a reasonable bandwidth cost. Considering that all music nowadays (more or less) is all distributed via streaming. That's huge. Yeah, MQA fake 24/whatever might not be quite as good as real 24/whatever, but that's not the point. With truly lossless encoding, for each itty bitty little increase in quality you have to pay double in bandwidth. Streaming services at real lossless 24/92 (or whatever)? Faggidaboutit. It's a 95% of something vs 100% of nothing kind of thing. DSDs and hires downloads might be wonderful but they only exist in the audiophile fringe niche. The music you really want to hear is rarely available that way. If streaming services can stream something for us that sounds more or less like, say, 24/96 from the same distribution file they use for deaf millennials, that's something that might actually happen and I'm down with it. Archiving is the same story. Harsh reality is that digital assets, whether pictures, video, or audio are stored in their distribution formats in any kind of archive that you snd I are likely to have access to. The original photographer may have the RAWs and the engineer may have lossless masters, but fat lot of good that does us. What matters to us is archives we can actually get to. (Like when each streaming service dies and orphans a lot of music.) I'd rather have almost hires than exactly Red Book. Now, we won't know if any of this magic is for real until we've had a chance to live with the format for a while to know if it's not flawed. All we have now is first impressions and hokey A/B tests that aren't worth spit. We can't pass judgement until we've heard music we care about, long term. And for that to happen, the product has to gain traction in the marketplace. And for that to happen, some hypesters have hype their asses off and actually sell the shit. So we shouldn't fear the hype. Be one with the hype. Grahame - I only made it through the first link in your posts. I couldn't go on. That guy had me screaming at the walls halfway through. Good lord! I propose we start a charity that provides free line and copy editing to financially or intellectually impoverished bloviators. Some of these people need some discipline, dammit. Maybe instead of green eyeshades our charity editors come come in leather and studs. They could carry whips.

Interesting thought. There's a reason you're my lawyer.

Quoted from elsewhere " Apparently Tidal are streaming a handful of tracks with MQA coding, it seems largely ancient 1970s pop songs which could be adequately coded with 13 bits at 32kHz sampling.The HitchHikers Guide to Meridian is humming with rapturous reviews. It's worth looking at for a laugh.http://www.meridianunplugged.com/ubbthre...740&page=6I especially like this bit:"MQA is completely different. Leaving aside the technological machinations, those old albums now have a life and an energy that instantly dragged me back to the first moment the stylus hit the vinyl and some new band exploded into my teenaged bedroom. So I've been working my way through the (limited) back catalogue on Tidal and the effect is the same, no matter how much of a muddy mess the original album was"So MQA has magic powers - it can bring back your youth. "

A couple iPhone shots I took yesterday morning after the shift on Xmas Eve Pretty heavy fog.

Return of Kaiman Wong. After leaving DigitalRev

I just made my own. Photographed the logo in an old manual and then cleaned it up. Some progress and now it is ready for testing. Still missing the normal bias supply but that is trivial at best: It is a very, very tight fit and would be an absolute dog to take apart again...