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audiosceptic

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Everything posted by audiosceptic

  1. Thanks spritzer for the reply. I've read bad things about the Khozmo as well so I think I'll go with your TKD recommendation. One question though and pardon my ignorance but would going with the 50K pot avoid the need to put resistors in the circuit for proper volume control? The Khozmo was a 100K pot. They also offer a TKD10K pot.
  2. I bought this Audio Note Kits HE-6 headphone amp and had it built by a well known Audio Note kit builder, digitalpete. The amp sounds great with planar headphones but I have a problem I need help with. The volume control has a terrible scratch noise when adjusting the volume while music is playing. It will also produce the scratchy noise when the volume control is even touched while music is playing. When nothing is playing the sound is there but barely audible. I emailed digitalpete and he wants me to ship the amp back to put in a new volume pot. In looking at the khozmo volume pot it looks like there are only 11 connections to solder and all are easily accessible so I'm wondering if this is an easy repair? I asked digitalpete what model volume pot this amp had and he wrote back "The Khozmo unit I used is the standard model. It was bought as a 100K stereo. For your application and on khozmo's recommendation I changed the input resistors to 12K ohm which gave the control the proper range of motion. At 100K resistance it was 3:00 before you had any volume level." I'm thinking about either having digitalpete send me the volume pot and replacing it myself (with the help of an engineering friend), or putting in a different, perhaps better volume pot up to the Alps RK50 which is in my BHSE. The questions I have for this group are: 1. Is it necessary to have the resistors in place or would a different model attenuator negate the need? Is it common to use input resistors to change resistance for a volume pot? 2. Any recommendations on a great volume pot that would work in my application, be easy to install and provide better performance? A non-stepped volume control is preferred. Thanks for any and all input. I attached pictures of the volume pot and the circuit.
  3. We tried getting rid of cable a year or so ago. I bought a Mac Mini with Eyetv to DVR OTA channels. I subscribed to Netlfix streaming and Hulu+. We looked into MLB.tv because we're Brewer fans. I abandoned this and went back to cable for several reasons. 1. Commercials. Hulu+ includes commercials and no way to skip forward. I hate commercials. 2. Broadcast quality was just OK on both Amazon streaming and Hulu+. Why spend the money on a nice HD TV and look at lesser quality broadcasts? 3. Eyetv was buggy. Plus I could never get the remote to work like a normal TV remote. I always had to switch to keyboard and mouse to fix/play shows. 4. Not family friendly. My wife and kids hated it. If I were alone I think I could make the change. 5. MLB.tv did not broadcast home games. 6. I missed Dexter, Shameless, GOT and other premium channels. Yes I could BT stuff but that was not an option for my family. So I'm still paying high cable fees but always looking at ways to reduce costs. About every 2 years I call TW cable and threaten to cancel and they always reduce my bill if I promise to stay.
  4. I run Windows 7 Ultimate under VMWare Fusion with no problems on a Macbook Pro Retina. I haven't used Parallels in a long time.
  5. I had assembly issues with my BA. Big reason why I sold it.
  6. My A-27 is done with final testing this weekend. I should have it next week so Hamad will have time to work on other stuff.
  7. I found a Pioneer A-27 integrated amp cheap and sent it to Hamad to be updated. I really love the sound of the M-22 amp Hamad restored for me and am looking forward to the A-27 in my speaker rig. Here is a picture of the amp as received by Hamad: Here is a link to a Youtube video he made of my almost complete restoration:
  8. I bought a Pioneer A-27 Integrated Amp a few months ago and sent it to Hamad at Amplifier Surgeries to have it rebuilt. I and others here have had Hamad do wonderful work on Pioneer M-22 amps. Since I will be using this amp sometimes with headphones (but mainly driving my Sound Lab speakers) I asked Hamad to check the headphone circuit to make sure it is optimized as much as possible. He indicated he would and asked what headphones I was using so he could "check to see if the resistor network can be matched for my headphones". The hard part is I don't know which headphone to have this amp optimized for. The dynamic headphones I use are the LCD-2, HE6 and HD800. I like them all but they have quite different impedance and sensitivity ratings. I'm leaning to have it optimized for the HD800 but was wondering what others thoughts were on this. Here is a picture of my amp:
  9. Good question. I'm using a Forte F-44 I had laying around for now. I did use the BA as a preamp but the lack of features plus liking the M22 as a headphone amp so much made me decide to sell the BA. I was thinking a tube preamp like a Audio Research but the heat generated by the M22 might make me look for a cooler running non-tube preamp. It gets pretty hot in my small listening room.
  10. I decided to join the M22 club. I've always wanted a M22 and this thread did not help. I found one on Ebay for $600 and had it sent to the same place in Illinois that agile_one used. Hamad did an outstanding job restoring the amp. I've been using a restored Threshold S/200 as an amp for my HE6 and LCD-2 headphones and the M22 is an improvement over that. I like the sound so much I decided to sell my BA and get a real preamp to drive the M22.
  11. I also had the REF 7 on the loaner program. Wasn't too impressed at all. My ULN-2 and Modwright Transporter were superior.
  12. Well this didn't turn out well. We went for a week without cable and decided we'll keep it. The biggest problem is lack of convenience and poor picture quality. Having to use both a mouse and a remote was frustrating for my wife. The picture quality was great for OTA broadcasts but Hulu was horrible. I even tried the Hulu plus trial subscription and was disappointed. The kicker was realizing that local Brewer baseball games were blacked out unless we paid for the subscription with an out of state credit card and used an IP proxy service to make our IP address appear to come from out of state. So I guess we're keeping cable. I did get them to lower my bill by threatening to leave so that was a bonus.
  13. I've decided it's time to get rid of cable TV. I'm currently paying Time Warner $190.00 per month for HD cable, 2 DVR's, Phone service and 7 MB Roadrunner service. For now I'll keep Roadrunner and the phone service but plan on transitioning to the following: Mac Mini hooked up to our 2 TV watching areas in place of the DVR. I already own one and just bought another. I have an Elgato Hdhomerun box on the network and I'll watch and record OTA HD broadcasts through that. We have all the major TV networks available in our OTA broadcast area. I've been using Hulu for shows I can't get OTA and that seems to be acceptable. You can also go to the broadcasters direct web sites to watch free content. We're big Brewer baseball fans so I'll subscribe to MLB.TV to get those broadcasts. We'll try iTunes for movie renting like we did with Time Warner OnDemand. We also have the cheap Netflix service. Has anyone else made this change? This biggest challenge I see is getting my wife used to using a computer to watch TV. There is a remote available for the Elgato system that will allow channel changes but Hulu broadcasts will have to be chosen via mouse and keyboard.
  14. Well after a couple of weeks testing I settled on my Mac Mini running Snow Leopard as my file and Squeezebox server. Since all of my clients are Macs I discovered that setting up native AFP file shares delivered the fastest throughput for file sharing over both NFS and SMB. I also realized that while esata has the fastest throughput for local file transfers, it didn't add anything when transferring over a gigabit network. I might as well as attached the external raid via firewire as opposed to hacking the Mac Mini to accommodate estata. I also discovered that the router I was using affected my wired network throughput. I had a Netgear FVS318G firewall router connected to my broadband modem and would see congestion when doing simple things like time machine backups while listening through the Squeezebox. The router would also lock up every time I tried to use a Bittorrent client. I upgraded to the Netgear FVS336G firewall router and speed and reliability dramatically improved. So in the end I sold my HP workstation and kept the Mac Mini. Squeezebox runs well and is reliable. I have lessened my electrical usage and increased my throughput all using equipment I already had on hand (except for the router). This should hold up for a while until I get the urge to tweak it again.
  15. I was using a 20 watt Graaf GM-20 OTL amp with my ESL-63's and occasionally would hear distortion when I turned things up a bit. I substituted a Threshold S/200 amp I have and while the upper end distortion was gone, much of the life was missing out of the midrange that made the Graaf such a great amp for the Quads. I sold the Graaf and went looking for a newer amp and came upon the new Harman Kardon HK-990 integrated amp. This thing appeared to be well made, was heavy as hell and actually sounded good. It had some of the midrange richness I liked about the Graaf and presented a very nice soundstage. It included a nice built in DAC that sounded fine and had DSP capabilities that were interesting to play with. I was seriously thinking about buying this when the internal DAC died. The dealer took it back and stated it was broke and while he could get me another I was concerned about the reliability of the unit and went looking elsewhere. I auditioned a couple other amps and settled on my first piece of Conrad Johnson gear, a Premier 11a power amp. At 70 watts a channel it had the balls to drive the Quads nicely and I didn't have to worry too much about frying my panels. It had a nice touch of tube warmth and brought out the best of the Quads midrange. Bottom end wasn't sloppy so I'm not tempted to try and integrate a subwoofer (a useless endeavor I've read). Subsequently I found a CJ PV-15 preamp cheap and replaced my Forte F44 preamp. The PV-15 didn't add too much to the sound but matched the amp so the wife was happy (sort of ...). So I think I'm set on my Quad system. The source is a Logitech Touch connected to a Emotiva XDA-1 DAC. The only thing that might change is a new DAC if the Audio-gd REF 7 DAC I'm auditioning soon offers noticeable improvement over the XDA-1. It really is a great sounding speaker system.
  16. Thanks but I'm going to test it as a server once the eSata card arrives. I put Leopard 10.5.2 on the HP workstation today using the Hackintosh Kalyway install DVD. Surprisingly it works although the NIC card fails to enable after reboot. I'm going to test for a while and see what happens.
  17. In my testing SMB was the slowest of SMB, AFP and NFS when using only Mac clients to a server. This is for mounted volumes with drag and drop capability. I have also bumped into weird file name errors under SMB that I have not encountered through AFP or NFS. FTP is by far the fastest transfer protocol but not really feasible for drag and drop file manipulation.
  18. Thought about that. I have the HP listed on Craigslist and haven't received any offers. I hope to get at least $100. I'm not sure what a 2007 Mac Mini would go for but I don't think more than $100. What would $200.00 buy me towards server hardware not including hard disk if I use the 4TB external raid? Ideally I want an esata interface for max disk speed.
  19. That would be a nice solution but I'm trying to utilize what I already have.
  20. So I decided to upgrade my home file server from a Windows 2003 Server platform to something else. All the server does is serve files to Mac clients and run the Squeezebox Server. DNS and DHCP is performed by my router. No Email or Web serving. The reason I'm upgrading is because the Squeezebox server is running kinda flaky lately and file server speeds are kinda slow for a small Gigabit network. The hardware is semi heavy duty. It's a HP xw8200 workstation with dual 3.2 GHz Xeon CPU's, 6 GB Ram and 1.5 TB of internal disk. I also have a LacIe 4TB estata/FW/USB that's configured as a 3 TB RAID 5 external drive via esata. I recently installed a Linux SUSE 11.3 64-bit OS (Ubuntu 10.10 crashed on install) and am testing it as a file server. I formatted the 1.5 TB drives with XFS partitions and shared them via AFP and NFS. I can write files at around 1GB in 60 seconds for either NFS or AFP mounts which is a little faster than the same hardware under Windows 2003 Server with SMB mounts. I haven't hooked up my LaCie external drive yet to the Linux box. I haven't tested Squeezebox server under Linux yet. My other hardware platform is an older Mac mini with 1.66 GHz dual core Intel CPU and 2 GB RAM. It can connect to an eSata drive with a hardware hack. I have a OS X Leopard Server license but would most likely use a standard Leopard client OS because I don't need all the garbage the server OS provides. Performance wise I think both platforms will offer comparable speed for AFP transfers. I'm currently running Squeezebox server on a separate Mac Mini and it seems to work fine on OS X. Another concern I have is power consumption. Although I haven't tested it I'm assuming the Mac mini would use less electricity than the HP workstation. Has anyone else done similar evaluations?
  21. I've had the XDA-1 for a few weeks in my speaker system. I have it hooked up via coax to a Logitech Touch. I really can't tell the difference between the DAC and the analog output of the Touch. The sound out of both is very enjoyable. I'm on the loaner program for the Audio-gd REF 7 DAC so I'll be able to do more comparisons later.
  22. I sucked in this league although I was the 2nd highest scoring team overall.
  23. When I had my Quad ESL 63's repaired at Electrostatic Solutions in Kansas City, Kent had a pair of Stax F-81's among all the Quads he owned or was repairing. When I asked him about them he stated they were the only speaker he thought were as good or better than the Quads. I didn't get a chance to listen to them but I am always looking out for a pair.
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