dsavitsk

I would take a scone with clotted cream over just about any other food on earth.

I watched the game, or most of the last period of it, which was the only hockey I watched all year. My totally uneducated opinion is that a team that can't figure out how to score with a 5 on 3 advantage probably does not deserve to win the Stanley Cup.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Never my favorite band, but these are in my collection. Both pretty near mint as I don't think I played either more than once or twice. If anyone here is a collector, I'd be happy to sell them with all money going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Chevy Sonic - so terrible that I got motion sick while driving it. I would also give the Fiat 500 a dishonorable mention.

Getting a super cheap rental car for 3 days costs less than taxi or Uber rides between the airport and my parents' house, so I have driven a lot of the worst cars on the road lately. I would definitely consider the Nissan to be not the worst I have driven. Would not be my first choice if I were buying something, but it's fine. Also - I kind of like the cube. I wouldn't own one, but I appreciate the Nissan has a history of making cars that don't look like every other car on the road. I saw one of these driving around Montreal a few years ago.

http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I'm pretty sure Buckley is not the originator of the sentiment: http://izquotes.com/quote/232269

Happy Birthday!

I have a working II+. I pull it out every few years to play Microsoft Olympic Decathlon.

Colin's IV (which is a common base topology) is a good alternative for a current out DAC. It is similar to Jocko's circuit, or Nelson Pass', and it can be made differential without too much trouble. For a voltage out DAC, a simple emitter or source follower works great as a buffer. Even a diamond buffer is a good alternative, and it can be made DC couple-able with the help of a servo (unlike some off the shelf diamond buffers.) Or any of Pass' recent buffers are good options. There is this myth of tubes as being pleasant sounding, and tooby. The reality is that tubes are very linear amplifiers with excellent bandwidth, and the bulk of the added distortion and limited bandwidth attributed to them has to do with the topologies and the surrounding components used. Similarly, the myth of DAC digital glare probably has more to do with the opamps used in the IV than the DAC chips themselves.

I wouldn't. A good switcher is no noisier than a rectifier, and it is generally easier to filter. There are other alternatives to opamps than tubes. The point is that there isn't a proper way to do it as it is the wrong tool for the job. An 8741, for instance, has more drive ability than just about any small signal tube and way less noise and a lower impedance than a power tube. Even the super high gm tubes pale in comparison to a $0.03 transistor, and they are unstable and difficult to use. Edit: The exception to this might be if you need gain. But voltage out DACs typically don't.

The DAC chip they use is $5 at Digikey. What am I missing? This just looks awful:

---------^ That. Tubes are excellent as voltage amplifiers, but they are high impedance devices. For a medium amount of gain, they are about the most linear option available. But a DAC doesn't need the gain, and the impedance is a hindrance.

Tom's house? I stayed at the Intercontinental - room service had good soup.

Pre emphasis correction in dac hardware is trivial. The CS8412 receiver, for instance, has a pin that goes low when it detects pre emphasis, and the PCM1794 DAC requires setting one pin high for pre emphasis conversion. So it is usually just connecting one pin to another, or as above doing so via an inverter or something. That said, I have never seen a pre emphasis track in my life, so I have never even bothered to do that much. But most commercial gear probably still will.

Not sure if this applies to your situation, but when we were considering HE boilers versus older ones, we found that the expected life (and the warranty) of the HE unit was about half as long (10 vs 20 years), and was just long enough such that just as it paid for itself, it was likely going to need replacement. Meaning that over time it would cost 2x as much and, in an effort to move from 90% to 95% efficiency, it would result in an extra boiler being dumped in a landfill.

Silly me, this is what I thought dockercon was ...

I think the issue is two fold - for most phones, the resonance is considerably less pronounced and thus has less of an influence. And for Sennheisers, a little bit of impedance actually helps them sound more balanced. Indeed, my personal favorite way to drive Senns is with pentodes using the impedance as the translated load, thus giving the circuit a tad more gain in the bass and midbass. YMMV.

It sure is. That's what you get for looking at graphs at 3am. The broader point stands. however. I'll defer to your knowledge of the inner workings of orthodynamic drivers. My point was really about the Focals and at least one reason why, unlike some other headphones, they do not perform well when mated with an amplifier with a high output impedance. My experience says that up to about 5 Ohms is OK, but any higher is not ideal.