Craig Sawyers

Alternatively

Even worse than that. Estimated 75-200 million at a time that the world population was 450 million in the mid 1300's. It took 200 years for the population to recover. And severe outbreaks continued periodically to this day; the last major outbreak was in India in the late 1800's killed 3% of the population. But even with modern antibiotics the mortality rate is over 10%. And earlier than the outbreak in the 1300's was the plague of Justinian in the mid 500's - again killing half the world's population. All due to the Yersinia Pestis bacterium carried by rodent fleas. By "world" that means Europe, the middle East and Asia at that time. Bring out your dead!

I really like McIntosh gear. It has always been stylish, and they have never deviated from the characteristic appearance as the decades have rolled by. Their latest stuff has eye popping performance too.

The Satanic Exorcism and Fried Chicken image is a brilliant bit of photoshop editing. It started life as the much more boring:

When I was building my KG T2, I bought C3675's from Nikko. There were actually sparks from the board. Testing one of the unused devices on the curve tracer revealed they broke down at half what they should. Collateral damage was extensive. The horror story is all buried deep in the T2 thread.

Any long obsolete silicon will ultimately be fakes now. And still I occasionally get suckered.

I feel the need to gag.

Immoral and Lardy! Brilliant! For those that have not picked this up, "Immoral" is Dominic Cummings. Who drove 270 miles with his wife and child to their family estate when they were coming down with Covid-19 so that his sister could look after their son. He then drove them all 30 minutes each way to a beauty spot "to check my eyesight". During lockdown, when the instruction was to stay home and isolate for 14 days. Boris refused to sack him in spite of a back bench revolt, one minister resigning in protest and the media going for his gonads for ten solid days. But Cummings is the power behind Johnson, the master strategist behind the scenes. If he were sacked, or fell on his sword and resigned, Johnson would be exposed for the incompetent blusterer that he actually is. or "why would the puppet sack the puppet master". Well, that has nailed my colours firmly to the mast...

A real pity these bastards have pissed in the cookie jar for the rest of us.

Was lucky enough to see Ian Mcdiarmid (Emp Palpatine - as above) in his own version of Dr Faustus (Faust X2) in a tiny theatre called The Watermill near Newbury UK (one of our favourite local theatres). A couple of years ago. https://www.watermill.org.uk/faust_x2

Meanwhile: https://mcphee.com/products/tin-foil-hat-for-cats

Thomas Beecham, the orchestra conductor whose quotes could fill a book, was asked by a lady acquaintance what instrument her son ought to take up: "I have no hesitation madam in recommending the bagpipes. Because they sound exactly the same when you have finished learning them as when you start learning them"

It isn't clear if the various bits of the new case are electrically connected. Many case manufacturers powder coat or anodize all the parts, and leads to odd problems with ground continuity.

They look like Quad ESL57, but they are the wonderful and obsolete Dahlquist DM10. They need more room behind them though. In the way that only Germans can, they have remanufactured the ESL57 https://www.quad-musik.de/index.php/en/products/electrostatics/esl57-qa .

I'm very sad to say that Bob Weightman, the world's oldest man, died yesterday two months after his 112th birthday after a short battle with cancer. Peacefully in his sleep. RIP Bob. An astonishingly long life well lived.

Wrong thread for that - I'll repost.

I'm very sad to say that Bob Weightman, the world's oldest man, died yesterday two months after his 112th birthday after a short battle with cancer. Peacefully in his sleep. RIP Bob. An astonishingly long life well lived.

I don't think that smoothie looks innocent at all - it looks like it came straight from a nuclear clean up operation. I tried to find a suitable emoji and failed. Oh wait a minute Seriously Knucks - I'm really sorry you had such a bad a bad and scary day. It really must have come very close to food poisoning - or maybe it was just that.

As I said - the reviewers kind of stopped at the physical appearance, which they hated. I'd forgotten how superb they were inside, and that the A100 was dual mono! I do however remember the blue flexible links in the preamp. It wasn't long after those beautiful British manufactured products were built that Cambridge Audio made decision to have them built in Taiwan. The problem was that they were too expensive to build in the UK, and were close to making a loss on every single one sold. The Taiwan outfit (forget their name - it was 30-odd years ago!) used to build them , box them (including instruction manual etc) and ship to the UK for a goods inward cost less than the circuit board parts cost (ie not counting transformers and cases) at Cambridge Audio. Looked like a dog inside, with the cheapest brown circuit boards, but worked just fine. When we bought CA from the receiver, quite a bit of the stock was from Taiwan. As part of the appearance uplift we started manufacture back in the UK to get a grip on quality.

Love it or hate it you can sure see that pickup coming. Actually looks like something out of Close Encounters...

Ah - the good old battleship grey Cambridge Audio livery. It was panned by the reviewers, as were the buttons on the CD player (they described them as reminiscent of poking dead flesh). Very unfair, because the product performance and sonics were good. However the reviews killed that iteration of Cambridge Audio (~1990). We acquired the wreckage when I worked at Wharfedale, including a massive inventory of product, for almost pocket change (at least in a corporate sense). We sold the inventory at knock down prices, and then did nothing more than change the appearance to a dark gold colour, and the dimple in the knobs became a light gold colour pin instead. After that they sold very well. I turned the Cambridge Audio technical team to the re-launch of the Leak brand, that Wharfedale owned. Among those was a very young Steve Sells, fresh from University, who I let off the leash and told him to design the best power amp he could - a Krell-beater. I got a design consultancy to do the appearance design, and Steve designed FET output monoblocks of truly heroic performance. When we set up to show that at Heathrow, I wired up the speakers and only got a very quiet sound like a tinny transistor radio. I'd left the shorting links across the back of the speakers, and Steve's design was playing the speaker cables into a short circuit without breaking sweat. Fast forward several decades, and Steve is now director of engineering at Naim. They likewise let him off the leash, and the astonishing and ridiculously expensive Statement was the result (google it). Cambridge Audio, from its foundations in 1966, has been bust umpteen times over the decades. But astonishingly it is still very much alive and still British, and owned by Richer Sounds. It was orignally founded by my good friend and mentor Gordon Edge (RIP). To celebrate 50 years from the foundation of the company, Cambridge Audio introduced the high end Edge series of products in 2016. They even incorporated Gordon's always barely legible signature on the circuit board silk screen.

Oh yes. Betamax, I bought a Betamax back in the day because it was technically superior to VHS, and the tapes were physically smaller. But VHS won the day - so I had a lemon on my shelf. Betamax, VHS - long dead formats both of them now. Like cartridge tapes, cassette tapes, floppy discs, Zip drives and quadraphonic. But who would have thought that vinyl records would make a come back?

I discovered the problem with chopping chilies in my early 20's. Then going for a wizz. It is a lesson once learnt never forgotten . That picture in the Wikipedia link is a horror story. Look at the front of the stainless steel units that the chef is standing at. And the filthy wiping rag. Sure he has some stuff organised in the foreground, but the rest of the kitchen is salmonella waiting to happen. Ugh. Can you imagine how Gordon Ramsey would take that place apart? It looks like a classic Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares episode.

Ouch. At least it wasn't California Reapers . Small knives are a real danger - I tend to use large ones, kept really sharp. A mate of mine is a pro chef. At least he was - he stopped when they had kids. The hours are stupidly long and he wanted to see the kids grow up. Pre-virus we used to have a cook-in from time to time; beer and cooking for us and wives. And watching him prepare vegetables in particular is a thing to behold. After catering college, he said that the first restaurant he joined would not let him actually cook anything until he had proved his knife skills to their satisfaction - which took 6 months of veg prep and butchery. And when he cooks our kitchen looks like an operating theatre rather the the mess I generate when I cook. He tells me that in a restaurant kitchen you have to have an almost OCD level of tidiness, otherwise you just can't get dishes out on time. I buy our cookware and knives from this place https://www.procook.co.uk/