CarlSeibert

I actually have an Ace, which I haven't yet mounted. But people around here seem to love 'em. A record cleaning machine like that Brazilian one is a very do-able DIY. I built mine when I lived in a little apartment (no shop, but I had a darkroom!) It uses a Rat Shack project box as the case and has the vacuum lips underneath the record, a la Nitty Gritty. (I sized it to use Nitty Gritty replacement felts.) Maybe $30~50 in parts at today's prices. If I was to do it again, I'd do the vacuum wand on top and use a Pelican case. A gearmotor to turn the record might be a nice touch, too. Anything in the Pelican line can be bought very reasonably from GMPCS, the satellite phone outfit, BTW.

My 840s are broken in. They changed a lot in break in. I don't remember a period when the upper mids were too prominent, but rather the opposite. I suspect that the ESW9s are actually better, though. They ought to be, given the price difference. We can compare at some point. But the two cans also serve somewhat different purposes. The Shures can take some pretty rough treatment. The 9s may be the sturdiest headphones ever made, but I can't imagine ever treating them badly to find out.

Speaking of Oz, has anybody invited him?

Indeed. Happy belated Birthday!

Shoulda ordered those transformers before I started building the box. The nice fellow at CineMag says they're out and they have to build some. And it didn't sound like a Plitron wind-everything-to-order-so-it's-no-biggie-and-only-takes-a-couple-days kind of thing.

I find the notion interesting as I (and some others) have noticed slightly better/different performance from Squeezeboxes, depending in whether the compressed file is decoded in the Squeezebox or on the server. Given that the SB's processor is an itty bitty little thing, it's an intriguing point. Since I have no convenient way of setting up a test in my own rig, I'll just wait till somebody does and lets us all know. In the meantime, I just set the work to be done server-side and I don't worry much about it.

Interesting old threads. I built a box to house a pair of SUTs in and somehow have not gotten around to ordering the the transformers. I think I'll call and order a pair of Cinemags tomorrow morning. Then I'll be able to use low/medium output coils in my den/headphone rig.

Count your blessings. For one of my friends, it's a normal but kinda bad flu. The other is one seriously hurting puppy.

I've ridden in those hills. That ain't my house to the Lake Worth pier and back. They have real hills up there. Good going Chris.

Indeed it was. It got off to a bit of a slow start. I think everybody, probably including Cohen himself, was a little nervous after the unpleasantness in Spain. But once some momentum was achieved, it was a truly awesome show. Best sound I've ever heard in an arena show ever, as well. It sounded like well done sound for a rock or pop act in a concert hall if that makes any sense. Bank Atlantic Center is a hockey arena. That's an accomplishment. People were going to the sound booth and congratulating the sound men after the show.

Leonard Cohen. At intermission now. Most excellent so far. It's the show that's on the Live in London record.

Called my doctor's office to find out about swine flu (none of this "H1N1" stuff since we found out the pork industry's flacks were pushing the media to use it. All flu is "H1 something". It's swine flu, dammit. Oh sorry. Off my meds. Where was I?) Oh yeah. they'll know if they have any vax for non- kids, oh, along about the end of flu season. What a system. Two of my friends have swine flu now. It truly sucks.

No prob.

Wayne/Matt? I trust the HE5s will be at Mike's meet? If they happen to make their way to Gene's, I'd love to hear about how they do on the WA6SE. Otherwise, my 6 SE or Gene's or both will likely be at the meet.

I was too busy being a smartass in the post where I was supposed to be saying that I would attend to communicate properly. I'll be there.

Wait a minute. You mean that tree in the front yard I secured against the wind with zip ties.... I shouldn't have done that? Oh fudge. Oh, and I'm in for the meet, for sure.

Indeed. "Can they be driven with [whatever amp we might have]?" is the question for me.

When Enigma used to go outside and get in fights - which she often lost - it seemed that antibiotics worked really fast to clear up the inevitable infection. That's the good news. The bad news was that it's really important to finish the whole course of pills, which means more opportunity for fantastic kitty-vs-pill mayhem. I think they understand that we take care of them. On some level, I think they appreciate the concern that drives us to commit our various tortures like pills and claw trimming.

Hmmm. I'm more or less in wait and see, er, hear mode, too. Although I really liked them at CanJam. They reminded me of my planar speakers. Maybe. How much money is in my PayPal account?.......

Hifiman HE-5 Orthodynamic Headphones - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio

Makes my day whining about having to go back to work after vacation sound a lot more attractive. Hmmm, whilst walking back from FourBucks this evening, I saw two cars sideswipe each other. They were civilized enough to pull off instead of chasing each other a few laps around downtown. Maybe it's just the back-from-vacation cynicism, but I found that surprising. (I guess technically speaking, one driver was doing the sideswiping and the other was minding his/her own business.) You just got back from vacation, too, right?

Mixed and somehow manipulated concrete for what is turning out to be the most over-wrought small speaker stands in history. Concrete is strange stuff.

Good god! That's shit that only happens to other people. I'm really happy you and that creature didn't come to blows. Or to be more specific that he didn't do well in the fight. I assume you squished him. Oh, and perhaps now I should mention that the Miami-Dade government is talking about de-funding the fire department's anti-venom unit. That wouldn't matter to anybody outside of south Florida except that through one of those "you couldn't make up anything this twisted" scenarios, for bites from certain unsavory critters, the only person in the southeastern US who can legally (or physically for that matter, since they possess the juice) give you the anit-venom shot is a Miami-Dade fireman.

It was our anniversary today. Spent the day at the beach. Stayed in our friends' trailer in Briny Breezes. It was lovely.

Groan. I'm sorry I brought it up. No wait, Dreadhead brought it up. It's all his fault ) So now everybody is owed an explanation. OK. I work on a news desk. I edit pictures and video for a newspaper, TV station and website. I see the raw, unedited feeds from all the wires, all the supplemental wires and the output of our correspondents . I see the the same raw news that Fox News does. I see what comes in and what goes out. Believe me when I tell you those guys are not a credit to their profession. To get the same level of spin and manipulation in politically-leaning media, you have to go to the free weeklies, like New Times. Huffington Post doesn't come close. MSNBC doesn't come close. What makes Fox pernicious and New Times, ah "interesting" is that New Times doesn't misrepresent what it is. Nobody is going to come up to me and say they got the "real news" from New Times. Fox News, on the other hand has the brass balls to use slogans like "Fair and Balanced" and "We report. You decide." Their talking heads spend half their time tearing down the rest of the media for doing the very thing that is Fox News has built an empire on - and usually in incendiary terms. Good god. How can they live with themselves? Part of the problem is endemic to broadcasting itself, not that this lets Fox News off the hook. News, analysis and opinion tend to blur together on TV. In some ways, that's a good thing. Newspapers have tended to be too dry. Rarely do we have an opportunity, without straying too far into the land of spin, put news in context for your life. To do the arithmetic to tell you, for example, how much oil is off Florida's coast, expressed in days of consumption. (A little less than six months of US consumption in case you were wondering. We did do that one little bit of math. It took a couple of people half a day to confirm the figures to "publishable" standard. ) TV does a lot better job of talking in terms that are meaningful in "your" life. On the other hand, consumers tend not to know where fact stops and opinion begins. I got a scary memo the other day. The point was to praise Fox News for "owning" their niche. It contained a list of the top ten rated "news shows" on TV. Fox News owned most of the spots, MSNBC had one or two and CNN had one or two. That's not scary. What's scary is that not one of the top ten "news shows" was a news show. Each and every one was an opinion/talk show like O'Reilly, Olbermann, Beck or Maddow. No straight news in sight. The rumble you hear is Ed Murrow turning over in his grave. If the ratings people don't differentiate between opinion and news, how the heck is the "average person" going to do it? I don't know about you, but that scares the crap out of me. Today's market is making it worse. Aggregators deliver much of "the news" that ultimately decides how our society is run. The Huffington Post is a good example, among tens of thousands of others. They don't report a damn thing. It's info-pinion. At least nobody runs up to me and says he gets "real news" from the HuffPost. But if you're looking for information that will lead you to, say, vote for someone, you've gotta know it's the farthest thing there could be from one-stop shopping. Bottom line: If you want a conservative-leaning media outlet that you can trust for something resembling the facts, The Wall Street Journal is a good choice. It's available everywhere and despite some nervousness in the industry about its ownership, it still does quality work. The Economist is a good choice too, especially for US news. It's expensive, but worth it. ... if you want to be bored/entertained by my best rambling Fox News anecdote, read on. If you hurt yourself falling over asleep at your keyboard, it's not my fault. You've been warned. One night I was editing the Iraq page. A picture intrigued me. It showed a crowd of people in Fallujah, of all places, chanting "Death to Terrorists!". Hmmm. Now here's another picture of what looks like same crowd at a different time of day. Now they're chanting "Death to America". Dammit. What could have been a ten-minute job is going to take and hour and at least a couple of consultations with colleagues. And somebody is going to have to suck it up somewhere because I'm about to eat way too much deadline on this. So I'm going through all the pictures and stories out of that part of Iraq, one by one, trying to figure out what I can do, and I glance up at the bank of TVs. Who should glare back down at me but O'Reilly hiz own self. He announces that he has something that the rest of of the biased, lying, sack of shit media won't dare show you...... my Fallujah crowd, in "Death to Terrorist" mode. Now his producers are looking at the same thing I am. (Time zone difference. This material has been in east coast US newsrooms since mid-day.) Not only does this windbag legitimize some dubious data, he ascribes it broad social and political significance. And insults anybody with a professional conscience while doing it. Now mind you, O'Reilly is about opinion, not facts. But that doesn't let him off the hook. With power comes responsibility. Opinions are optional. The truth shouldn't be. What did I end up doing with the Fallujah crowd? To be honest, I don't remember. But I know for sure what I DIDN'T do.