Craig Sawyers

This really warms the cockles - cheers! We're off for a week of walking (and a bit of running) in the English Lake District tomorrow morning, so unless I can find a WiFi hub I'll be off line for a week.

You have to crystallise the meth before it becomes dope

^Constipation is never an attractive look

^That is so Japanese. I've visited on business a couple of times, and it is a fine country - but some things really do give you a WTF moment for sure.

Holy crap! Like they say, it trashes the saw. And if it was a regular table saw that sort of force would buckle the axle and frame, so an entire new saw. But better than a lost limb.

As cluttered at my office. Different kind of clutter though

^That is hilarious!

Great pics. Hi did pretty damned well, produced some fine music and lived long, considering he was fueled for large parts of his career on cocktails of dope and booze. A great survivor.

Happy birthday - and have a great one, OK

That is awesome

I turned off the India special. Having visited India, and met its wonderful people, I found the TG Christmas treatment insulting, patronising and juvenile. The Indians are a people of great dignity and friendliness, operating in conditions of grinding poverty - 300 million of them live below the poverty line - defined as an equivalent of $75 per year. They deserve better than Top Gear dished out.

Long term, they eat output devices. My KSA100 from the mid 80's blew a number of them, once in a rather incendiary way. I'm not sure I can find the quote, but Krell said they went away from pure Class A with a huge standing current of a fair chunk of an amp because of reliability reasons.

Nope - I was misremebering. He didn't use controlled explosives - he knocked the lower structure away, and put wooden props in place. He then set fire to them.

This was our own homegrown guy, Fred Dibnah. Spent his life demolishing factory chimneys, and then got into controlled explosive demolition. But it was his calm life philosophy that made him something of a celebrity here in the UK. Quite a few you tube vids of the guy. Many years dead - a combination of smoking, and demolishing chimneys coated with toxic stuff did for him in the end. The "engine" is his steam traction engine that he spent many years restoring - it has recently sold for £250k - a mark of Dibnah's cult status.

That is truly astonishing. My grandparents were in their teens at the time these images were taken.

Have a great one Dan!

That is a very good description. And of course the thing that is often missed is that what comes off the disc read system is very much an analog signal. It looks something like a noisy and several nanosecond jittery sine wave. The jitter comes from the focus and tracking servos work to keep the laser head in the right place taking account of disc eccentricity and out of flatness - and that is never perfect, hence the jitter. It is only after quite a lot of embedded processing in the standard chipsets that come with the mechanism that a digital signal we'd all recognise emerges. Reading several times and summing the results only works if this is done in the analog signal domain - so at raw RF level. If you sum N times, the signal to noise and jitter are reduced by root(N) - so summing four times gives a factor of two. I guess it would be possible to flash digitise at maybe 8 bits at a GHz or so, and then multiple read and sum on the fly, but it seems very hard work, and I'm pretty sure that Parasound aren't doing that. It is only after the analog RF data is processed and reclocked that jitter comes out of the equation. I'm not sure what Parasound's jitter spec actually is - psuedo peak to peak, or rms. I know that the jitter in my reclocked digital output (this is an ancient CDM1Mk2 mechanism and 1990 vintage chipset) is 100ps p-p, so around 17ps rms. That is measured on a Tektronix 7000-series sampling setup (7S11/S4 head and 7T11 timebase, 14GHz BW, 10ps p-p trigger jitter). Incidentally, the CD mechanism that they are using seems to be a car (automotive) unit.

I use tin-lead solder with 2% silver. The lead-free solders all have too high a melting point for my liking, and make a dry-looking solder joint. Plus they are susceptible to tin whisker formation - particularly in high voltage gradients. I notice that Cardas reckon that they have a lead-free solder that is eutectic, which implies that it should solidify without the dull grainy finish of regular lead-free solders - but I haven't tried the stuff.

Ouch! And here is a great set of flights sans crash

I'd agree entirely with that sound on initial switch on. 75-ohm mods give a very worthwhile improvement - but the one that really nailed it was removing the Murata pulse transformer and replacing it with the Lundahl LL1572. A good friend, long-time audiophile and one-time dealer, was across at the weekend. He compared the sound to a Koetsu Red, which is just fine by me! Some Scientific Conversion transformers arrived yesterday. So I'll have a play with those.

Or even this:

Now that is a scary thought - hoards with Birgir at the front wielding a battleaxe

Didn't realise that AC/DC's Brian Johnson is a Geordie. For those for whom this is jibberish, Geordie is a dialect from the North East of England, from an area maybe 30 miles square at the outside. It is where I come from, and after a few beers my accent is pretty much indistinguishable from Johnson's. Yes - he comes from Dunston, and I'm originally from Ryton. They are separated by maybe five miles. And just because I'm like James May, and an anal retentive at heart, Geordie is actually bastardised Scandinavian, from the dark ages invaders who came across the North Sea, and eventually settled.