kevin gilmore

I managed to get one of those hd-dvd players at wallmart for $99. Did not even have to wait in line. Just for chuckles i bought it. Filled with software bugs like i've never seen before. Won't even play one of the startrek remasters (which are glorious by the way) all the way thru, you have to go back to the menu and play it title by title. Think the blu-ray players are any better, think again. Go to avsforum and look at all the titles that various players won't play, or do stupid things with. Its not the price for me, i want something that works right out of the box and not have to install firmware every week for the next year. Plus some of the firmware fixes allow some disks to play, and then break others. So if you want to watch disk A you need this rev of firmware, and this disk you need a different rev... But evidently you can't go backwards in revisions on most of the players. The only player that works perfectly is the PS3. Very sad. By the middle of this year you will see lots of blu-ray players for $299 or less. In fact you can buy a blu-ray computer drive for that now...

I started counting headphones in that picture, came up with at least 21, probably more like 30. Then i started counting everything in my house, dynamic and electrostatic, and can come up with almost that many. What i'm obviously sorely lacking is enough closet space to do that. I would have to throw out half my wardrobe (ahem) to pull that off. Damm

Thanks billy, It really means a lot to me. Maybe I'll let you play with my new hammer. (i just got a couple of miniature pumpkins) http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/hammer3.jpg

Does 19 pair of electrostatic heaphones and a pair of esl 63's qualify as an electrostatic fanboy??

My opinion is that all the meridian cd players i have seen are mediocre sounding units with a fancy front panel and a price 3 or 4 times what they are worth. What did you expect from tuberoller's massive pitch for them at the time. Still has not worn off. And lets not forget the $50 computer cdrom drive as the transport. There is to this day no fully complementary silicon process. You cannot make perfect npn transistors AND pnp transistors on the same piece of silicon at the same time. One has to be lateral, and the other vertical. So most opamps are virtually 90% npn transistors. No matter how hard you try you are not going to get identical slew rates for rising and falling edges. If you are in the fully differential, fully balanced, fully complementary camp as I clearly am, then opamps are not going to cut it for the seriously high end stuff.

From the duracell and prismatic web sites... duracell alkaline 9 volt battery internal impedance 1.7 ohm duracell aa alkaline .12 ohm duracel aaa alkaline .25 ohm have not found the numbers for the carbon zinc versions, but it has to be much worse. lithium ion prismatic .06 ohm Now to find the ESR of that 15000 uf cap...

Certainly not compared to lithium batteries.

hornet does not have any output capacitors. Neither does the tomahawk or sr71. raptor and b52 have output caps. 50 to 100uf. electrolytics. all of mikhail's tube amps have output caps. He typically goes much bigger. 470uf.electrolytics. the zana deux has a 50uf output cap (i think) Bigass film cap.

Both true and meaningless in this context at the same time. If the capacitor was an audio output cap, or coupling cap, then the change in the dielectric might be audible. Across a battery with a relatively low output impedance none of this applies.

Of course the numbers are doctored. I've yet to test a rudistor amp that comes within 30% of rated specifications. Same thing with the complete bullshit numbers on the apache. >120db signal to noise ratio. Absolutely impossible with an amplifier with a gain of 65db. Fact is even under the best conditions, johnson noise will bring the signal to noise ratio down to about 108db. Unless of course you plan on running the thing in a bath of liquid nitrogen. 2hz. Again absolute bullshit. Those chassis are what about 1.5 inches thick. Output caps big enough to give 2 hz frequency response would be bigger around than the chassis depth. Or really shitty electrolytic caps. How about that power supply. Anyone see any chokes on the top of that supply. They sure aren't going to fit inside the case. Which means that if the supply is actually regulated, then it is solid state that is doing the regulation. Completely ass backwards. You might want solid state rectification, but you want a pass tube for the power supply if what you are after is the tube power supply sound. Rudi's opamp unbalanced/balanced to balanced input stage has a gain of 13db. At least the version in his latest dynamic amp does. All the voltage gain in that amp is all in the cheap opamps. It may be built better (because its actually built in the UK) than the old junk, but it is still a piece of shit. A very expensive piece of shit. Somebody will buy one sooner or later, then we will get pictures of the insides. If rudi is not showing pictures of the insides like he has done with some of his other units, you know there is a reason.

I'll add that it can't meet the gain and distortion numbers if it is only the 2 tubes in the audio circuit. At most you are going to get a voltage gain of 100, and you really need a minimum of 500, and really 60db which is 1000.

here is my opinion on that OTHER site. Wonder how long it will last. Actually my take on this amplifier is a bit different given hints from rudi's website. If you believe the distortion numbers rudi quotes then clearly there is significant feedback in the amplifier. Therefore each of the 4 output sections is likely to be a composite amplifier with 1 section of a 12ax7 triode connected to a el34 wired as a triode with feedback around this section. Then the input is rudi's unbalanced to balanced autoswitching balanced to balanced input stage which is all opamps. If you look at the amp chassis however, there is no indications of any external heatsinks. If you run the el34's at their sweet spot of about 10 watts each, then somewhere there is going to be plate resistors or constant current sources that dissipate 40 additional watts. If that is inside the chassis as it certainly has to be the thing is going to get very hot. Probably the best thing rudi has done to date. Certainly the most expensive. There were a few burmeister electrostatic amps built, they were $25k each. Evidently they were worth it. __________________ Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati Now the stuff that would be deleted over there... No more box of boxes, i'm disapointed. limited to 400vrms HOW??? And why would you anyway. And if it can do 700vrms is that stator to stator, or stator to ground. Notice the low frequency cutoff is 2 hz. Yeah bullshit, and it also means its a capacitively coupled output. Back to that correct spectral harmonic compensation thing (politically correct version 3)

a bit more work http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/hammer3.jpg

my serial number is better than yours... Ask justin

Yep and then the arm twisting behind the scenes to get wakeride74 to change his opinion. Yes the spin is working overtime.

Wonder when ray is going to go back to his nasty old trick of shipping his product to some of justin's pre-orders. Just like he did back in the amp wars days when he sent his amplifiers on eval to anyone interested in a singlepower.

Buy the 900 volt parts. Really. You should not run them at more than 50ma each. You can try the 450v parts, I have not tried this. Getting 3 of them in series to correctly voltage share might be tricky. If you raise the voltage rails past +/-400 you have to change out the 2sa1156 with a 2sa1486. Then you can probably go to +/-550. Everything else references the two rails, so there should be no other changes.

Well its a new year, and it is certainly starting with a bang. I do like flashbak's quote that the dac in the pico was superior to the one in the predator, and then ray's fanboys jump all over him. Great stuff. For portable amplifiers that use 9 volt batteries (sr71,hornet and a whole bunch of others) and are not class A (none are) the impedance of the battery is an issue because 9 volt batteries are a high impedance. So you slap a cap (4 for the sr71) across the battery to lower the impedance so that the audio does not modulate the power supply. But lithium batteries are anything but a high impedance. In fact the lithium battery inside ray's predator has a lower output impedance than that big honking electrolytic cap that is in parallel with it. A huge waste of realestate. So he perpetuates the myth that the cap makes all the difference, and the cap takes 600 hours to charge. And then he puts in an ultra crapo and in my opinion dangerous lithium battery charging circuit. I'd post the necessary equations to show that a 15000 uf cap takes less than 2 seconds to charge from a 9 volt battery, and much less than that for a lithium battery, but i'm just a touch hung over, and about to start the new years festivities. Ray really has lost it on this one.

You would put 2 of them in parallel, not in series. In parallel with suitable heatsinking you can get to about 100ma. You could put 2 in series to get twice the voltage swing (say 1800 volts) but then there are going to be voltage breakdown issues and they have to be heatsinked very carefully and probably with berylliumoxide insulating washers. (which are toxic if not handled right)

I would think that being compared to the greats such as Nelson Pass, James Bongiorno, Dan D'Agostino and Charles Hansen would definitely be a good thing.

The back to back zeners need to be 100v not 81v.

That is great for knives, might work for a chisel. Not nearly thick enough for knobs. Will contact him and see if he can supply what i need as raw material. Price is certainly reaasonable.

Maybe you have never played with a real jewelers hammer. The design was specifically for the function of perfect use. Perfect balance... There is 30 hours of machining time in that hammer at the moment. Guess i wll have to try harder. What do i have to do to get that 9 turned into a 10?? Maybe your opinion will change once it is finished. I have OH so many uses for that chunk of damascus. More uses than i have steel. For the knob, it would have to be cut out of the side, because you clearly want the lines going across the face of the knob as well as the sides of the knob. That eats up a lot more of the material. And if i want the chisel to have lines all over the main face, i have to cut it from a chunk at something like a 20 degree angle. So the material is going to be used up quite quickly. I can certainly make a damascus toothpick, but i think it would be a real bad idea to ever actually use it. If anyone actually knows where to buy raw chunks of damascus, i would be very interested, and i really don't care how much it costs. Once is fine as a joke, but i really don't want to burn most of the hair off my arms again.

The KGSS design is 8 years old now. There are lots of things that can and will be done to this design. Better current sources, even better front end transistor/fet, stronger and faster output devices. Maybe i'll even publish the fully complementary differential design i have had for a few years now. Lots of parts. Bigger and better power supply always a good thing. Not going to get into the Me vs Mikhail thing. But it sure would be nice to see someone else doing actually new designs.

This is the first, and probably the last time i'm going to try something like this. I have absolutely no idea what the final steel is going to look like. I started with 25 layers of various scrap steel. All cut to 3 inches wide and 10 inches long. Stacked as flat as i could get them, about 2.5 inches thick, then i arc welded the sides in 4 places each to get one big hunk of stuff. Then melted the piss out of it, and used a 10 ton press to bang the crap out of it, then heat it up again, and use the press again with a cutting head to cut through most of it, then bend it and heat it again then beat the crap out of it again. I did this 4 times. No way was i going to pound on this stuff with a hammer for 8 hours. The last time i did something that stupid i had tennis elbow for almost 2 years. I'm probably through heating and banging it. I want the finished piece to be 1 inch wide at the head, and the shaft about .5 inches in diameter, so i'll have plenty left. No idea of hardness. I envy the guys in japan that make those presentation swords. Then again for the prices they charge...