CarlSeibert

Plane tickets purchased. I arrive Thursday. Have to be downtown doing work-like stuff on Thursday. Will make my way out to O'Hare Friday. Are there any great vinyl shopping spots I should hit on Friday before setting out for the meet hotel?

Hmm. Ton of vinyl. Me too.

Hey, that stone is just a brick, more or less. A two hundred dollar brink, I grant you, but still, what's the fun in a brick? I want the stones you scotch tape to your cables! Disclaimer 1: Putting something heavy on top of a cabinet, particularly a flimsy one, is often a good idea. Disclaimer 2: Far be it from me to imply that the psychological effects of scotch taping rocks to one's interconnects couldn't make a system's sound, which is perceived after all, better. For a while anyway. It's just that, well. Scotch tape! Rocks! Hmm. Scotch. Rocks. Maybe there is something to this power of suggestion stuff......

Bonnie found steel and zirconia balls here: Bearing Balls:Ceramic,Miniature Ball Bearings

Yipes! Mine are three runs of cat 5, split into positive and return (so that there are 12 strands, which works out to about 16 or 14 AWG IIRC.) I didn't run into anything that would suggest a big increase in resistance. (With a low power amp and pretty sensitive speakers, granted.) About the only differences I heard, compared to 14 AWG stranded, were better resolution and top end extension. I braided the cat 5 cables whole, then split each positive/negative pair and aggregated them to make the ends, by the way. Next time, I think I'll still braid the three bundles, but I'll take off the icky vinyl outer jacket and wrap the whole affair in Teflon tape so I'll have all Teflon dielectric. Compared to the really anal ways to make a cable out of cat 5, it's pretty easy.

What are the things is the photo?

That's easy for you to say I was thinking sort of the same thing, but filling the back side of the negative lens with JB Weld. That should (hopefully) support the glass well enough to keep it from breaking unless the load gets pretty large. Hmm. I wonder if epoxy would be hard enough? You could mold a positive lens - or anything convex - repeatedly into epoxy to make multiple parts. I wonder if you could achieve the same result by hanging the load from short cables or fancy high-zoot fishing line? This thing seems fairly pendulum-like, so why not try a real pendulum? That might be better suited to an application that wants an isolation platform, rather than feet, but it's a thought. And I just noticed I somehow thought the OP was morphsci. Humble groveling apologies.

My thought was the flat plates (in addition to being easier to source) would provide no resistance to lateral motion, which seemed at the moment to be the idea, while being solid up and down. I figured the o-ring would prevent the whole affair from walking off the plate. But then I guess it might just walk until it hit the o-ring, in which case you would have a resistive/reactive affair based on the elasticity of the o-ring being squashed under the ball. Now I see that the idea is more like a pendulum. As the system displaces sideways, it lifts whatever is sitting on top of it and a moment later gets pushed back to its neutral spot. Which suggests that choosing and then achieving the right resonant frequency is the trick. Which, in turn, would require math. Oh dear. That brings us back to Jim's original method - find parts of the same dimensions as an example that already works. I like Ari's idea. Glass and ceramic objects can be concave and they're pretty hard. And who doesn't love Ikea? How about a negative meniscus lens? Eyeglasses are almost all plastic nowadays, but maybe at a place like Edmund Scientific? I don't know how hard it is to make ceramic objects of the hard sort of material, or if it's really hard to hold tolerances, but a school with potters might be a resource. I asked my wife to inquire around her jeweler friends to see if zirconia spheres are reasonably priced in that market.

While I've never taken the effort to measure it, I doubt like all get out that one set of eight conductors by 30 feet would be a capacitance problem. Most Cat-5 speaker cables have a ton more conductors. By the way, with some looking you can find plenum grade network cable that has Teflon dielectric, at least on the strands themselves. If you, ah, obtain a reel of such, there's all kinds of possible configurations for speaker cables.

Do they have to be concave? Could you just constrain the ball between two plates and pen it in with an o-ring glued to one of the plates?

Sorry to hear that cat wasn't yours, but it sounds like things will work out, one way or the other. One of my wife's friends lost one of her cats about a week and a half ago and the critter found its way home yesterday, thin and bedraggled but basically in good shape. So that was a happy ending. Meanwhile, I'm counting the french doors on the inside end of our front hall as one of the best investments I've ever made.

Ah. I think you're right. A friend of mine has a P3/24. His platter is like mine. I know Oswaldo sells the P1, but I've never touched, or even looked that hard at, the platter. It could well be acrylic. Hmmm. I just looked on Rega's site. (a little slow moving on the keen investigator thing) Says the P3's platter is glass and the P1's is MDF. Most interesting.

Yeah. After saying " aw, that belt's OK for a little while more" for way too long, I replaced the belts on both Regas a little while back. There's no tension adjustment on the Rega, but a new, non-stretched belt make a pretty striking difference. Glass? Shows how old I am. I thought all Rega platters were glass. Has anybody heard the GrooveTracer acrylic platter? (which is supposed to have the same mass as the glass one, but takes the disk directly on the platter - no mat). Now I wonder original glass vs current acrylic vs the fancy GrooverTracer acrylic??

Any word on getting the mobile theme operating again?

Good luck. That's every pet owner's nightmare. I hope he finds his way home.

I installed the GrooveTracer sub platter on one of my Regas yesterday. Holy cow! It's amazing the difference a half pound of metal can make.

Did Lake Watch water sampling in the creek. Then waterway Clean-Up Day. Landed a barnacle-encrusted traffic barricade and a car tire in the canoe. It was big game time. Then spent Sunday celebrating wife's Birthday. Now I need a couple days of to recover from my weekend.

This Parts-Express.com: was in the Parts Express flyer that came today.

Egad. I wonder if the awful economy has "driven" more people into scamming, or if tighter online communities are just spreading the news more widely. It seems like we hear something like this every week lately.

Can't kick about the price, either.

George Clinton rules!

I've had one of these for a long time. It seems to do all the things - well, the one thing,actually - that a heat gun does with no problems. Amazon.com: Milwaukee Heat Gun MIL-1220HS Milwaukee Dual Heat Gun: Home Improvement

From the newspaper story it sounds like she was using a personal credit card, although I'm not sure a reporter would be savvy enough to understand the significance of that detail. If it was a company-paid card, there would be a very granular filter on what could and could not be done with the card. Charges would be declined if they didn't meet the specifications. Back in the day, before our credit rating became lower than snake poop, I got caught out one day when my super-high-day-limit company Visa card got declined when I tried to charter an airplane with it. It worked fine for helicopters, but an airplane was considered "travel and entertainment", which was the province of our other credit card. A quick note fixed it, but I was shocked at the granularity of control. On another day, I got a phone call from the credit card company asking if I was aware that companies of a certain sort that sometimes might be associated with money laundering. (yes, I was aware of that) When companies - and they all seem to - get stung by an executive with a credit card and a taste for the good life and cry innocence, it's BS. They deliberately set up the accounts to be abused. On the other hand, if it was a personal card, I can see how the credit card companies would proceed cautiously. (frankly, if it was my card, I would hope they'd think twice before accusing me of something) There would have privacy concerns. One can assume those to be very real with a customer who obviously has the means to be litigious. And there's the moral hazard - they would be kicking away a lucrative customer.

Free-ish vinyl? My guess is you'll be mobbed. Speaking of vinyl, aren't there some kick-ass records stores in town? From a previous visit I seem to remember one that not only had vinyl, but a band that I actually had heard of playing the back room.

Wow. I admit I haven't set foot in Palo Alto in about 20 years. But who woulda thunk it.