Craig Sawyers

Absolute chaos in the English lake district yesterday. We were there three weeks ago, and my son two weeks ago. Yesterday a lone gunman went on a shooting spree and killed 12, injured 25 of whom 4 more are in critical condition. Divorced 52 year old taxi driver with children, living with his elderly mother. Everyone who knew him saw him as a regular guy who enjoyed a beer or two with friends in the pub - in a village with a thousand or so population. Starts by shooting two taxi drivers, his solicitor and his brother - and it went on from there - drive-by shootings in tiny villages. Eventually, like all shooting spree killers, he eventually turned a gun on himself in woodland near another small village called Boot in upper Eskdale. Last week two 16 year olds were killed in a coach crash - and one of their funerals was in progress in one village when the police show up in force persuing the shooter, who had just killed a couple in that very village. This is all exceptionally wierd - we have the toughest gun laws in the world after Japan, and the Lake District has the lowest crime rate in the UK. Totally and utterly safe, the sort of place that some years ago people would leave their houses unlocked so that friends could just come straight in. Looks like the guy had a license for both his guns (a hand gun, and a .22 rifle with telescopic sight), no record of anything wierd about him - just pow, some switch went off in his head.

I'll hang on a while for my casework in the possibly forlorn hope that the exchange rate will improve a bit. $1.47 at the moment - up a cent on the bottom. Even though we aren't in the troubled Euro, we're still tainted by association. Wish I'd taken the plunge on a pair of omegas a couple of years ago when the dollar was at $2 to the UK pound.

Tweeter repair on MG1 is not easy - the wire is aluminium (or aluminum depending on the side of the pond), which is easy to zig-zag up the panel, having removed the old tweeter wire, and then to stick down with thin varnish. The problem is making a good solder joint to aluminium wire. There is solder that is supposed to be suitable for aluminium wire, but it is not wonderfully successful. Been there, done that, still got most of a reel of wire and solder.

Try out the green and red specs

Uh?

For what its worth, Daughter Liz is a budding actress - publicity shot below. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3165[/ATTACH]

Apologies Reks - I must be feeling a bit maudlin. Didn't mean to bring back memories. I often think how good it would have been to know your parents when both they and you were the same sort of age. Good mature conversation over a beer or two. As it is, when they were young, you were a kid or teen and you parents are a PITA. And when you grow up they get old and cranky, and they can still be a PITA. No good solution.

Maggies are a really good choice. Back around 20 years ago I did a home audition of ESL63's and Maggie MG1C's. I chose the Maggies - they just suited the room acoustics better - the '63's sounded really dull in that room. Then went across to Logan Aerius, then Podium1 (nearly 7 feet tall, distributed mode speakers) and finally now the ESL57's. Kind of full circle....

Yeah - I used to argue with my mum too. Can't tell you how much I miss her now she's gone.

Not entirely sure what you mean by amp match. Originally they would have been used with the Quad II power amp with an output of around 15W. At the end of their production life, they would have been partnered with 405-II with between 50 and 100W. The only difficulty is the wild and difficult load that the '57 presents, something that tubed amps seem to deal with better than transistor ones (which have been know to burst into auto-destruct oscillation). FWIW I am using an Audio Research D125 hybrid - FETs plus 4x6550 per channel putting out 100W. I bought it second hand about four years ago. Seems to work pretty well, but I'm sure that many amps would do the same job - I suspect that a FET output amp would also be good.

Heard Suchet on the radio recently. He actually has a deep bass voice, and explained (and then demonstrated) how he moves from chest voice to head voice to interpret Poirot's character. He did this gradually as he explained it, with his voice getting progressively higher, and then taking on the French/Belgian accent. A real masterclass in acting technique.

Looks like I have an N-1 issue....

Watched season 1, and massively enjoyed. Watched part of season 2 and felt it had lost its way. Son Rob told his Pa that season 3 is kick ass with a great and unexpected surprise end - so really feel the need to catch up now, before season 4 airs.

Sorry that the purchase seems to have failed. What I've found is that they don't need to be modified - they just need to be restored to their original condition. That is actually more work and cost than that simple statement implies - but all electrostatics are like this. I had a pair of Martin Logan Aerius in which the E/S panel ceased progressively to function at T=5 years. The ESL63 from Quad has a lifetime of 20 years max (and sometimes much less, depending on how loudly played) before needing a repanel job. I expect current Quad offerings to be no different. My ESL57's were made in 1964 and were *well* in need of some work. Audiostatic, Acoustat, Dayton-Wright and Stax speakers suffered from similar lifetime problems, and there are small specialist companies worldwide involved in their remanufacture and rebuilding - often for love and pretty marginal or zero profit. So don't be too disheartened that yours might need so TLC

Ah - thanks for that Dusty - that explains why the book just sort of goes phut right at the end. I didn't know the story behind the phut-ness. Now that means that I'll have to buy all his other stuff - which is just fine

OK - I can see that working well. I watched it last year with Norton and it was pretty good. As good as the Eurovision Song Contest can be that is. It is all a stitch up of course - nothing whatever to do with how good the songs are (or mainly aren't). I was listening to an interview with a guy who had made a bunch of money betting on the result. He looked at the statistics of voting - and the way that one country always voted for another because of geopolitical alliances (eg latvia always gave 10 votes to lithuania etc). He's so far got it on the nail three times and second place twice. So nothing to do with the songs at all.

Jeeze - you guys have got some heavyweight pests! And here was me thinking that Florida was the worst place - I hadn't associated California with snakes that big. We have only three titchy snakes in the UK, and only one slightly poisonous one (the Adder) which grows to a maximum of two feet or so. They are all pretty difficult to find, with a habitat of wild and remote places - I've only ever seen one Adder in the wild.

I've put a paper that I wrote about this beast here http://www.tech-enterprise.com/tekstuff/LorenzSZ42/Paperupdated.pdf . Also Tony Sale's website has lots of other information about BP's code breaking efforts here WW II Codes and Ciphers . Tony is the guy who spent 14 years rebuilding Colossus starting with 7 black and white photos. Tony is really getting on now - must be in his 80's - but a fascinating bloke. The thing that really made my neck hairs rise up was when I realised the significance of this particular SZ42. Before operation Overlord, false intelligence was placed with the Germans to the effect that the main attack would be to Calais. An intercepted SZ42 message from Kesselring showed that they had fallen for it and withdrawn quite a number of troops to defend Calais. That crucial message went through the SZ42 that I restored. And yes - I've read Cryptonomicon twice. I think the thing that frustrates me about the book is that there is a ton of details about how Captain Crunch should be eaten, and similar heavyweight detail about codes etc etc - which is all absoutely great reading. But the end, when the gold is extracted from the mountain, is all shoved into the last couple of pages. It is almost like Stephenson got bored with the book and finished it off in a rush. To those who get a chance to visit Bletchley, definitely do so. It is incredibly "amateur" in a way - the Bletchley Park Trust has nothing like enough money to properly restore whole chunks of the site, and parts of the original site are now housing estates. In fact it is only during the last ten years that the site was saved from developers, who wanted to buldoze the lot and build houses over the whole site.

It'll be interesting to see who is hosting on the BBC. It used to be a bit of a national treasure called Terry Wogan, who was a lifelong radio DJ and presenter. He took Eurovision with a large dose of salt, and a large bottle of Scotch, getting progressively pissed during the evening. He retired a couple of years ago, and kind of took the fun out of it for me.

Spent the day at Bletchley Park trying to get just about the planet's only Lorenz SZ42 cipher maching working. This is the machine that triggered the invention of the electronic computer (Colossus) to break the codes, and this particular one was Feldmarchal Kesselring's during the Normandy landings. The only other complete example is in the National Crypographic Museum in Maryland. Only around 200 were ever made, and were used exclusively for communication between the field commanders, and between them and Hitler's bunker. Restored it about 8 years ago, but in the meantime the 70 year old mains wiring had got leaky, so was tripping the earth leakage breaker. Sorted that out with temporary rewiring, and then the mains transformer developed a short in one of the windings, and the transformer got very hot very quick. I'd already had it remanufactured since the original had an open winding - so I guess I'm in for a conversation with the transformer suppliers to get another made (after they have diagnosed the reason for the problem). Easy to get one remade, since Lorenz used what became a standard ISO lamination size!

Sounds like a case for sabotage.

I took my 21 year old daughter to see Jarre - I snagged tickets right in the middle of the front row of the 13,000 seat National Indoor Arena in Birmingham UK. Great to be so close to the action, but crap for the light show. Daughter said, after Jarre's typical spectacular entrance "Oooh - he's cute" to which I said "Oooh - he's six years older than me!". He clearly dyes his hair at least, and there is certainly some botox and maybe more going on to hold his face in place and make him look 35 and not 60. But an amazing show, all played on a total of 35 keyboards of various and irreplacable vintage. I'm not sure how Oldfield works in concert, since all of his recordings are just him multitracked. VanGelis would be a good one to see though.

More on the resistor. I've now got what seems to be the latest schematic for the ESL63. There is a printed circle around R14, for which the schematic value is 100k, but the note says that its value should be selected on test for 5.25kV. So the summary seems to be: In early versions there are two VDR's (to compensate for line voltage variation) and two 180k resistors. That was then changed to one VDR, two 220k resistors in series, a 180k and a 56k resistor. It was finally changed to one VDR, two 220k resistors in series, a 180k and a nominal 100k with a note to select this on test to give 5.25kV. So it would appear that they knew that there was a problem with the version with a 56k resistor, and modified it to ensure that the EHT was set to the original design spec of 5.25kV.

In my quest to see as many ancient rock stars as I can before they all die off, the wife and I went to see Rod Stewart last night in Birmingham UK. Absolutely excellent show, especially considering he's 65, and has a 4 year old son. All possible ages were there, from teens to the elderly in wheelchairs. A lady who looked to be in her early '80s and flanked by two middle aged daughers was boogying with the best. Baking hot - it got up to 30C in the UK yesterday. So in the last 18 months, me (plus either wife, daugher or son) have seen Leonard Cohen (73, and fantastic), Bob Dylan (69, and difficult to know what he singing), Jean Michel Jarre (60, superb), Deep Purple (amazing - 34 years since I last saw them!), Eric Clapton (65 and showing it) and Steve Winwood (62 and in good shape), and now Rod Stewart. Regret never seeing Queen, Stones or Jimi Hendrix, but Neil Young has to be a must when he next tours.

The Silurians are quite convincing. Consequence of having a big bucks budget. When they last appeared in the '70s and the budget was about a dollar fifty, they just looked like guys in a cheap suit - a bit like Adam West when he was in the Batman series.