Craig Sawyers

When I was in my early 30's I came within a hairs breadth of having an affair with a work colleague. And I mean absolutely a hair's breadth. Both of us married. Stepped back from the brink, and if we/I hadn't, life would have worked out really differently. We're still in occasional contact, and meet up when we are in each other's cities for a pub lunch, so we ended up as friends. But, Dusty - you have nothing to beat yourself up about here. With all the signals you were undoubtedly subconsciously radiating, she had every opportunity to mention her marital status. That she said she'd check her diary indicates she was certainly interested in the prospect of joining you for Thanksgiving. And then decided against it, and only then mentioned why.

And another belated one - hope it was great!

Aagh - missed this. Hope you had a great day! Belatedly.

^Good heavens!

Oh fuck. Not another senseless massacre. On the bright side, that heavens your kids are safe, Greg.

Just catching up on the sad news. Brent - so sorry for the loss of your friend. Brain tumors are not a good one - I've lost three friends to that over the years. And Todd, very sorry to hear your loss.

Yeah - the 104 series were excellent. I used to visit a rather anal hi-fi shop in the late '70's which had the motto above the door "Experto crede" which I had to look up - it was "Believe the expert" in latin. Tells you all you need to know about that shop. But one day I was in and River Song by Dave Grusin was playing through 104's. And I have to say my recollection was that it was excellent. It shows the effect that had, in that forty years later I can still remember what was playing. But KEF were at the leading edge. They pioneered impulse testing of speakers, and invested what must have been an eye-popping amount of money in the early 70's - an HP computer. This was a 19" rack full of stuff that they used to do FFT analysis of impulse tests, and do crossover optimisation based on the driver FFT responses. I was lucky enough that my wife Carole (an accountant) was given the audit of KEF - and given the opportunity of buying KEF loudspeakers at a massive discount. Because we were young and did not have much money we bought Caprice II. And enjoyed them for five or six years. Wish we'd been flush enough to buy the R105's!

Ouch. Hope it all heals quickly and you get back on the bike as soon as.

Eau de colon?

KEF - Kent Engineering Foundry. Used to make crop sprayers and agricultural machinery. It was bought by Raymond Cook in 1961, ex BBC and Wharfedale, and hence renamed KEF Electronics with a completely different focus - away went the agricultural stuff, and in came the loudspeaker designs. KEF went bust in 1992 and was bought by the Chinese. So it only existed for 31 years as an independent business. Design is done on HK and manufacture in China.

At various points in my life I've been all over that diagram

Could be Lemo's competitor, Fischer. The are tantalizingly close in appearance and incompatible.

Yum yum (not)

Happy birthday!

I was on the Isle of Wight last week. Just off the South coast of England. I took this photo (among others). This was the site of the 1970 rock festival - the largest ever with 700,000 audience. Hendrix headlined, which attracted a who's who of rock legends (Baez, Dylan, Cohen, The Who, Miles Davis, ELP, Free, etc etc) The second photo is what it looked like from the same place in 1970