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I'll try to keep that in mind for the next time he dies. Poor bastard.

“Morning Bob, how was your weekend?” “Um ...”

Yesterday was a day at the races.

I just finished building the uTracer 3+. Works nice. Needless to say I spent the day yesterday measuring tubes.

Decreasing the gain can reduce noise/distortion - however, that is not a problem with this design. It can also increase the risk of the amp oscillating. In case you don't know this, oscillation is NOT a good thing. Further, decreasing the feedback resistors means more of the signal current goes to driving the feedback resistors rather than driving the headphones, which is the whole point of the exercise. In case you can't take the hint from spritzer, here's the bottom line. Unless you think the designer didn't know what the heck he was doing (in which case, why are you building his design?), I would ignore the suggested changes, and build the amp as designed. And this comes from someone who has done a fair amount of circuit modifications.

seeing only a few people have signed up for Carbon boards. I have some version 6g from PCBNet 2mm/3oz, that I don't mind departing from (16.75USD/ea). If interested shoot me a PM.

don't build the DHT one unless you plan on spending piles of cash on tubes

Have a Great Birthday Naaman! We have lift off!

Decided to try a breakfast that I've been pondering for a while, Huevos Empanadas. Everyone seemed to enjoy the results.

I'm fairly conservative when it comes to knives. I've never had the money or the desire for "designer/custom/collector" products, so all my knives are mass produced. Just as an example, you could get the Sypderco Tenacious folder for about $45 from Amazon and you wouldn't have to worry about it: https://www.amazon.com/Spyderco-Tenacious-Plain-Folding-Knife/dp/B007CK1MNU/

I think these are the latest gg Gerbers. I will add to the spreadsheet. Since tubed, I will spec 2mm board thickness. gg.zip Yes, these work well with the BH. Good clean power with the ability to add timer function for the HV section. This allows the tubes to warm up for about a minute before the HV kicks in. The only real question is whether to use the on board Low Voltage which the GRHV provides, or whether you want to go with separate GRLV board(s). I used the GRHV on board LV supply and it works fine on my BH-BJT.

haha - NICE!... Much better the second ending... Looks like a nice bit of walkway - and a lot of fun...

The titanium frame makes it worth more, and the blade steel (RWL34) could perform reasonably: https://www.spyderco.com/forumII/viewtopic.php?t=70461 Ultimately, it's up to you if you like the design. You can buy a useful every-day-carry knife/utility folder for much, much less. This looks more like a gentleman's knife than a hard-use knife (e.g., the handle looks slippery), but the materials and fit and finish look good in the pictures.

Recommend the album, which is a coherent thing, which is kinda rare these days.

Vance Joy -- Nation Of Two Fun album. Lightweight but well done, with feeling.

Last night Stretch and I met the elusive @riceboy at SFJAZZ for drinks and a show last night. We saw Abdullah Ibrahim do a tribute to Hugh Masekela's band Jazz Epistles. The octet last night did two hours and fifteen minutes straight with many solos, repeated refrains, and Ibrahim just didn't seem willing to stop, even his insistence that all the other members took multiple bows at the end. It was good stuff from great musicians and not one word was said. We had a snort of Laine's smooth as silk Glen Grant 18 you while walking down the street to Absinthe for a late supper to cap a very nice evening. It was great to finally meet you Laine! Now don't be a stranger virtually on HC or IRL!

The last part finally came in so here is the finished build. I did run into a weird problem using the Cronus/Hermes/Amanero with this DAM1021 - the combo plays music through Audirvana fine but had serious dropout issues when playing YouTube and Amazon videos. I was able to find a few Amanero CPLD/CPU firmware combinations that seems to have addressed the issue. I started a thread over at DIYAUDIO on this topic. Right now I am using CPLD firmware "slave_for_1080" and CPU firmware "CPU_1099c". Even though the DAM1021 has its own isolator and re-clocker I feel subjectively adding the Cronus/Hermes is an improvement over using Amanero alone.

L?k, it’s a soot sprite.

An oldie but longtime fav...

don't worry, it's nothing compared to the electricity that bit coin miners are wasting

Had a chance to play with HomePod yesterday. Some random impressions: It is really small. I knew it was going to be small from reading reviews, but it is even smaller that I thought. It is about the size of a cantaloupe. It feels like a bit of a beta product. We had a bunch of Airplay drop outs when we navigated away from the music play apps on our phones. Neither of us had Apple Music, but the iOS Tidal and Spotify apps worked fine over Airplay except for the occasional dropouts. I imagine a lot of this will get fixed with updates. This isn't replacing anyone's two-channel system. As a smart speaker, it is impressive and possibly the best sounding smart speaker I've heard. That being said, we tested it in a larger room and I thought it struggled. It is solid for what it is, but there is only so much it can do in a decent sized room. Apple really needed to have stereo functionality with two HomePods at launch. A bunch of reviewers mentioned that Apple demoed the stereo functionality for them and that it sounded great. I believe them and I think having a second HomePod in a stereo configuration might help a lot. One HomePod sounds big for a mono speaker, but it still sounds like a mono speaker. Overall, I'd say I'm lukewarm about HomePod. It is impressive for what it is, but don't go expecting a $350 smart speaker to work miracles. There is only so much it can do sonically in a moderate/large room, even with whatever DSP tricks Apple has worked into it. I get the impression that a lot of the reviewers who gushed about the sound quality don't know what a proper stereo rig can sound like. EDIT: Looks like Apple's staged tests for the media that the HomePod easily won against the other smart speakers might not stand up: http://pogueman.tumblr.com/post/170722337727/head-to-head-does-the-apple-homepod-really-sound

Pregame meal should be acceptable.

So balanced electrostats have a linear response with respect to the amount of movement of the diaphragm vs voltage. That is because the dual non-linearities of each stator balance out the position of the diaphragm with respect to voltage. single ended electrostatics do not do this. So higher voltage swings result in more distortion than lower voltage swings. pretty much an exponential curve. throwing piles of dsp at the problem likely only fixes some of the problems, and then is subject to temperature and humidity of the room. The only known version of this that was ever successful was the beveridge loudspeaker. And the acoustic lens allowed for very small movements in the diaphragm to generate substantial sound levels. Which is what happens when the diaphragm is 6 feet x 1 foot. this is going to be epic fail.

Yeah, it was a lot of effort to just try and tame a really, really unruly driver. Better spend that on dynamic headphones rather than lock it into a system like this.

Yup. They had to squeeze everything they could out of that thing to make it work...and they just couldn't squeeze hard enough to get it to work above a certain level. I wonder if they're going to be satisfied or go back to the drawing board, put in a front screen, and drive it like a normal electrostat. Actually I think the best move that could be made is that the Sonoma digital dudes start building a regular headphone amp with DSP and start making a library of headphones to compensate. If they didn't have such a bitch of driver they had to work with I think their digital chops would shine through. PLease don't quote this elsewhere.