Craig Sawyers

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.

Well done! You might have a bit of work to do to get them back on song, but it is seriously worth it. A properly sorted pair are most definitely not treble shy. Check my posts for the odyssey of fixing mine, which now sound absolutely awesome. I suspect from your description that one or both of your treble panels is burnt out - most are. This not only clobbers the high frequency response, it also slugs the EHT voltage to the bass panels too - so the bass is quiet as well. There are plenty of places that will supply replacement treble panels if that is indeed the problem. You can easily check this - take the rear grille off (screws around the edge and under the plinth). Now lift up the felt that is behind the centre treble panel - you will easily see if it is burnt out (carbon charring, perforated dust cover etc). If you do replace the treble panels, be sure to retrofit the protection clamp board that prevents too much voltage getting to the treble panels and burning them out. The jumper is a voltage setting - select whatever the nominal local mains voltage is (110V, 240V etc). Let us know how you get on.

That is indeed interesting. Issue 1 and Issue 2 EHT boards seem to be identical, with the final Issue being changed. I guess that what Kent has done is replace the 56k resistor with the originally fitted value of 180k. 15% on EHT voltage should change the sensitivity by around 1.2dB. It is odd why Quad did this, because the loudness is a function of the electrode spacing only - over a level defined by that the film hits the stator and burns out (hence the many protection circuits in there). So changing the EHT only changes the sensitivity, not how loud they will play. But Kent is certainly right that a higher voltage may well limit lifetime. These sort of things tend to go as a high power law, like fourth or thereabouts - so increasing the voltage by 1.15 may well reduce the lifetime by close to a factor of two. Is there anyone close to 'jack who is skilled with a hot stick and can do the resistor retrofit? If I wasn't 6000 miles away, I'd voluteer

Way to go! Well done - and remember that if your legs don't hurt you could have run faster, so it looks like it was mission accomplished

It looks like they have the reflex alignment wrong - it should be possible to get the response quite flat (4th order Butterworth or Bessel or any one of a myriad of others). That said, the problem with bass reflex (or ported boxes) is that they store resonant energy in the air within the port - it is an extra mass/spring system - and to my taste they all sound boomy to a greater or lesser extent as compared with a dipole or sealed box. But if you are trying to get extended bass out of a small box and small speaker, and not run into driver excursion limits, they are about the only game in town.

The really neat thing is that this is a trivially simple circuit for measuring resistances in the T-ohm range using a watch to measure the time between flashes . Costs pennies, or built out of the spares box. Not as accurate as a proper meter, but around five or six orders of magnitude cheaper! The problem with PJW retiring was that he handed the reins to his idiot son Ross. Ross has a degree in economics and doesn't have a technical bone in his body. Under his stewardship he piloted Quad into financial ruin. In Kessler's book about Quad, he interviewed Ross Walker, and it is clear that he blamed the engineering team for telling him porkies about the maturity of the new remote handset controlled range - and on that basis, like a fool he launched the product. He missed the point entirely that it was his responsibility to know - and if he had done what all good small company CEO's do and walk around the shop floor on a daily basis he would have known what was going on. It was what Hewlett (of HP) used to call "management by walking around". PJW for sure would have known precisely what was happening on an hourly basis.

The end was absolutely not what I was expecting - buckle up for the rest of the series, and wait with anticipation for the last episode. I never watched Life on Mars, but I must get the DVD of that series and catch up. Just bought the first season of Commander in Chief (Amazon - cheap).

I wonder which ones are the woofers and which the tweeters