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BA 113 will be pushing back at Heathrow shortly and I am pleased to report that the champagne service has commenced at the nose end. ?

Indeed

First time ever staying in Times Square, fuck me feel like a tourist Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Drinking with JP.

Pregaming with an Irish. Looooong time before I get on the plane. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

NM 007 will be departing at approximately 0800. Coffee is currently being served, adult beverage service is not an option.

Sent a pm to one of the mods over there regarding this (didn't know which "jude" was jude.) Banning imminent I suspect Also, I assumed that no one ever asked one of the Fla. crew for their permission to use the name? Sorry, this has bothered me for quite some time (1st world problems, I know...)

Couldn't make NY due to new job, but I had some pi to celebrate with you in spirit. **BRENT**

Likewise my Amtrak leaves at 0852, see you in NYC! Sent from my LG-US996 using Tapatalk

coffe in process - Amtrak departs 0933 - see you all soon

How many Diet Cokes is Grahame allowed to have before the flight attendants cut him off?

The fun has already started at 34990 feet

VX 12 departs in 20 with Mr. and Mrs. Graim and yours truly. I guess I could order champagne from my screen in a bit.

I am trying to convince my buddy to take a few days off in October and do a road trip to Road Atlanta for Petite LeMans (via Tail of the Dragon)

OMG the long thought extinct Monkey has been sighted!!!!!!!!!! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Good times Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh snap, Dinny and Peter are in the house.

only when compared to you

Dowdy kitchen man is here. Rumor is the beard and others will arrive within the hour.

Finally found some resolution. STAX USA never replied to several calls and emails over 3 weeks. What a fuckhead, as I had bought a SR-007 Mk2 from Yamas earlier. ElectroMod did not reply to one email sent. A forum member here wrote to me that Mark there might be on vacation, so I continued to look elsewhere.. ECT out of Hong Kong replied and after much back and forth, Audrey there told me that they could not sell the cable separately. They are still out on the long CNY/Spring Festival holiday there, so nothing more to report. So I contacted the Canadian STAX dealer, Plurison in Monteal. Great response and communication. After supplying them some requested info (where bought and serial number) and also supplying a video showing where the cable was shorting with a DVM, they contacted STAX in Japan, received a quote back and arranged A&M Enterprise LTD (handles all STAX export shipments to dealers) to drop ship me a replacement cable from STAX Japan. FOB cost of the cable was JPY28700 (~$254), EMS shipping was JPY2900 (~$26). I forgot how archaic doing business was with Japanese companies..... requiring a bank transfer. $40 added to send and another $40 to receive on their end. Argh! Luckily I did not have to FAX them the info. As of today, A&M has received the money, will ship and forward the tracking number as soon they get the cable from the factory. So probably have the cable in hand in a week or so. I can highly recommend Douglas Ip at Plurison. Had a first rate experience in dealing with him. Straight forward and no bullshit.

We've added the beard and Kerry.

Happy?

Leg of lamb and cheesy cauliflower. I made a pan sauce with some of the wine from earlier too, but that took a few minutes more and I couldn't wait.

Cuban sammich. 18 hr sous vide pork roast, + ham, pickle, mustard, and swiss, unfortunately on a sub roll instead of cuban bread which I haven't found here yet.

Dan is Mexican now? **BRENT**

What you do with the Dragons tail is between you and the dragon (and your buddy too it seems?).

Challenge accepted!

CanJam room is a sea of psychedelic jellyfish. I am heading to gingerman.

Rock on NY-HC travel team - have a great weekend. (when HC is in town)

Currently at Ginger Man. Awaiting the tall man and the west coast crew.

Meanwhile...

There seems to be some consensus on the voltage requirements for electrostatic headphone amps. Nearly all of the commercially available designs put out between 1000 and 1600 volts peak-to-peak, a range of about 4 dB. The legendary Stax SRM-T2 was specified to put out a bit more, close to 1800 volts peak-to-peak, which is 1 dB higher. This would be equivalent to almost all loudspeaker amplifiers putting out between 50 and 125 watts, with the T2 being like a 160 watt amplifier. However, there hasn’t been much discussion on the current demands for electrostatic headphone amps. Output stage currents in commercial amplifiers have run between 2 mA/channel (Koss ES950) and 36 mA/channel (Blue Hawaii). Back in 1978, Nelson Pass published in The Audio Amateur (issue 4, p. 12) some measurements he had done on the slew rate of music signals. He tried out various cartridges and LP records, and using a 100 watt amplifier with a 30 volt/microsecond slew rate, reported that the highest slew rate he found with music signals was 1.5 volts/microsecond up to clipping levels. The late Peter Baxandall also published some years ago in Wireless World that music signals required an amplifier slew rate sufficient to drive a 6 kHz sine wave to clipping with low distortion, which works out to pretty much the same thing. A 100 watt amplifier has a peak-to-peak output of 80 volts. The Blue Hawaii, to take a current state of the art amplifier, has a peak-to-peak voltage at clipping of close to 1600 volts, which is 20 times higher, so the fastest music signal would have a slew rate of 30 volts/microsecond when the Blue Hawaii is driven to clipping. So how much current does an electrostatic headphone amp need to produce a slew rate of 30 volts/microsecond? A typical electrostatic headphone approximates a load of about 100 pf - Stax specifies most of their current models between 94 and 120 pf. The amount of current required for 30 volts/microsecond into 100 pf would be 3 mA. This is the amount of current that the amplifier has to supply to the headphones alone in order to play the fastest music signals up to clipping. Since amplifiers don’t sound their best at the very limits of their capability, for any real amplifier, there should be additional capacity in both slew rate and current over the bare minimum required. John Broskie has suggested on his TubeCAD website that for low distortion the maximum signal current demand on a tube be a fifth of the standing current. This calculation also assumes that the amplifier itself does not consume any signal current. But that is not always true. Take the Egmont, a basic, inexpensive tube electrostatic amp circuit. It uses 66k resistor loads in its output stage. With +/- 260 volt supplies the output stage runs at 7.9 mA current. If we drive the headphones to 1000 volts peak-to-peak using our fastest music signal the headphone consumes 1.9 mA, but the resistor consumes 7.6 mA, using all the current the output stage is theoretically capable of supplying. The reason that an amp with a total current of 7.9 mA can supply both 1.9 mA to the phones and 7.6 mA to the resistor loads is that the current to the headphone is approximately 90 degrees out of phase with the current to the resistors – remember the geometry of a right angled triangle? The headphone and resistor compete for the available current, and since the resistor is lower impedance than the headphone, the resistor hogs most of the current and the headphone is left with the scraps. Furthermore, the amount of signal current soaked up by the resistor depends on the magnitude of the signal, whereas the amount of current going to the headphones depends on the speed of the signal, so the ratio of 1.9 mA to the phones and 7.6 mA to the resistor is even worse almost all of the time. In fact, this is a problem for any electrostatic headphone amp that uses resistor loads in the output stage since the resistor sets both the standing voltage and the standing current. Massively increasing the voltage and current so that no user will ever come close to reaching its limits doesn’t really solve the problem, it just pushes it farther away. And then, a further problem is that devices and components which can withstand that amount of voltage, current and power are expensive, which rather defeats the goal of an inexpensive design. Now, take my revision of the Stax SRX tube design using current loads. The output stage runs at a higher current and voltage: 14 mA current with the power supplies run at +/- 325 volts. More importantly, the cascoded current loads on each plate measure over 160 megohms impedance, thus requiring a mere 4 microamps to drive them to clipping, so 99.9% of the total standing current is available to drive the headphones. The maximum current required to drive the headphones at clipping is about 2.4 mA, less than a fifth of the current available. To further illustrate the value of a good current source, let’s go back to the Egmont. With the output tubes in that design delivering the same peak signal current of 2.4 mA, it would produce about 300 volts peak-to-peak with about 2.3 mA going to drive the resistors and 0.6 mA to the headphones. For the same signal voltage into the headphones, the Egmont output tubes have to produce 4 times as much signal current. Now these are “back of the envelope” calculations. But at least, now we have a reasonable estimate of how much signal current an electrostatic headphone needs to faithfully reproduce the fastest music signals. And, it is clear that replacing resistor loads with current sources is a much more efficient method. Finally, let me make a brief comment about a related matter. It is sometimes said that electrostatic headphones require voltage but no power. This is false. It is true that electrostatic headphones resemble capacitors, and with a capacitor, the drive voltage and current are 90 degrees out of phase so that no power is consumed. However, remember that a capacitor is a simplified model of a stat headphone. In fact, electrostatic headphones have to consume energy, because we can hear the sound they produce! Sound is a form of energy, and by the law of conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental laws of physics, that means the headphones have to consume energy.

Pics!!!!

Well if I actually do it yes I will obviously invite the Mexican hillbilly

I am at Penn Station. Have some setup to do, and I will join you guys there Sent from my LG-US996 using Tapatalk

Are you at the Marriott? I can be there in about an hour or so

Dealing with Yamas is the single biggest reason I don't own electrostats anymore. I'm glad the Canadian dealer is much more on top of things and that you were able to find a resolution.

I have a line on a pair of populated SEN I/V boards. Gonna see how this plays out

Have fun in NYC all! And avoid the red vodka Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Have fun guys!

Had to look up Judge Norris, but he sure looks like he was one of the good guys. RIP Judge Norris.

Yeah, I think a lot of people do that because there's just way too many regular season games to really follow even a single team properly. I usually just watch highlights the next day or two, and even for an actual game I only usually watch one half. Only a few more months until playoffs, though!

The dark horse that I think realistically has a chance to win it is Houston. They have the firepower to play with anyone when they are rolling, including GSW. In the east I like what is going on with the Wizards, but I just don't see how anyone gets by Cleveland in a 7 game series if the King is healthy.

So many people are balling out their minds this season! Harden and Westbrook of course, Curry is now back to last year's MVP form, Isaiah Thomas, KD, Giannis, Embiid would have even bigger numbers without a minutes restriction and he's technically a rookie. Since the Lakers are still a dumpster fire, I need a team to temporarily bandwagon.

Thanks! I will probably bring my Concept CE-H and ECR500 then, because most likely there won't be any others there and redundancy sucks.

That's what I was going to say, so I will. RIP Judge Norris.

Haven't picked up a watch in forever and I guess I have been talking about them a lot lately as I have gotten two this week for gifts. Had looked at Shinola quite a bit in recommending them for friends but never picked one up for myself. Seems like a decent watch. Also got a fancy Apple Watch that I need to open up. All blacked out with metal link band so I need to decide if I like the Dusty treatment or really need an Apple Watch. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That is true, but lower bandwidth is a result of greater leakage inductance, which means more radiated interference. It is not clear that there is a perfect choice - toroid or EI (or R-core) there are compromises with all of them in different areas.

Citrus Salad

You don't need to buy a new car to justify pampering yourself, Jacob. Wear the clear bra now.