Leaderboard

Good news, two more KGSTs now live and play music. PSUs are set to 400V, so there's plenty of ventilation. I did have one channel with some hum, which turned out to be the tubes. Not sure if it was a bad tube or if the legs just needs some cleaning. Either way I swapped in some RCA 6S4As which worked like a charm.

Happy 21st birthday to my daughter Zoë! I know I've known a lot of you since she was around 2-3 years old, and somehow she made it through to adulthood. Here she is at her birthday dinner with her future MIL, having her first legal drink! (And one of the very few she's ever had.) I'm really proud of her, and she had a good day. Her past two birthdays have been bad (tested positive for COVID in 2021 during her fall break an hour before she was leaving for the airport to fly home, and her now fiancee (Michael, above) had just driven home to CO, so she wound up in AZ all alone on her first birthday away from home. Today? Today started a new trend in her having good ones. ❤️

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton: Knives Don't Have Your Back

Nameless Dominique Fils-Aimé 2018 https://album.link/i/1328997132 Example: New Artist to me. Going to be going very high on my audiophile testing playlist. VERY well recorded and a great set of tracks.

Happy belated birthday, Bryan.

Example:

It’s likely that large amount of AC could mess up with DC measurements. The T2 amp stability is a bit tricky. If my simulation is correct, its loop gain 0dB crossing happens with a -40dB/Dec which is unusual. Taking out the 5pf would most likely cause the amp to oscillate. The question is whether your amp is/was oscillating with them in place. An oscilloscope would be needed to make sure of that. With a scope you can also trace back and see where the oscillation originated. Well, the last T2 builder whom I criticized for not having proper equipment shied away, so I’ll refrain from saying anything further. Also in my simulation the C1/R5/R92 compensation network doesn’t have much effect to the stability since their corner frequency is quite low. Even lower is the corner frequency of the balance servo. So they probably don’t have as much effect as the battery voltage. It may have just happened to me that the unit I worked on has 740V well in the middle of the ‘stable zone’. You could test the CCS as individual blocks. Remove the EL34 and connect the anode pin to ground at the socket, then you can test the CCS at equivalent to idle condition. If you’re less confident about your CCS, connect output+ instead of o+ to ground and the 5.1k output resistor will offer some protection. The 5pf cap and the 100k resistor form a zero at about 318kHz. If you increase the cap slightly it may give you a bit more phase margin. But if everyone else’s amp work fine with 5pf, you should not need more.

Keep it down you hooligan!

Karen has been bugging me a bit about my speaker volume, so getting a tiny bit back into some headphone listening. I ended up ordering one of these....coming this weekend I think. My Orchard streamer (newer one using AKM chips) has RCA and XLR outs, so driving a small Stax setup RCA, and will use the Midgard via XLR and drive Sennheiser HD660 v2's via the Halo XLR output. This amp is getting some pretty good reviews, especially at the price. Thinking the Halo feedback process will work well with the Senn's.

I visited my Mother for Thanksgiving and she's offloading. She gave me a decent Nikon digital camera that she gifted her Husband. But both of them are legally blind now, so photography is out, as well as game playing. My family has always enjoyed playing games together. In Texas my Mom, her Husband and I had several Winter Texan couples as friends. They all lived in motorhomes/fifth wheel trailers in RV parks. There was a game popularized in RV parks called Pegs and Jokers. It's kind of like Sorry, but played with cards on homemade game boards. I thought the original boards were quite fugly, so I designed my own version. The boards join together, so you can accommodate different sized groups. These are the original style boards, that are usually made by retired RVers. Anyway, she gave me the board set that I made for her, which is the first set I ever made. I've made dozens since then, but still like that set a lot.

These guys are so good.....I need to listen more often....

https://folkways.si.edu/pete-seeger/the-complete-bowdoin-college-concert-1960/american-folk/music/album/smithsonian

RIP Shane MacGowan https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2023/11/30/shane-macgowan-fairytale-of-new-york-singer-dies-aged-65/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/arts/music/shane-macgowan-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare