Craig Sawyers

Happy birthday Nate

You can buy them on eBay now http://stores.ebay.com/NuTube-US-Store?_trksid=p2047675.l2563 And there is an active group on diyAudio . Applications tests there suggest they are darned sensitive (frequency response and distortion) to bias conditions and surprisingly heater voltage.

That is truly awesome news!

Go for their throat, Jacob. Good luck. Might not be so relevant Stateside, but these are the UK rules that have to be followed by landlords wishing to evict tenants. https://www.gov.uk/evicting-tenants/overview

Yup - a lot of them need to be taken with a pinch of salt. They were based on using carbon power in the construction (a bit like Elna Silmics use chopped up silk fibres and Elna Cerafine use ceramic powder). Whatever the physics behind using carbon, hence BLACK gate, the measurements in some of the blurb indicates that the ESR is lower than conventional electrolytics, and the inductive reactance is lower too. But only by a factor of two or three, or thereabouts. A guy called Cyril Bateman, who used to be in charge of capacitor design at one of the UK manufacturers, wrote a series of landmark articles about the sound of capacitors. He did this by designing a sub-ppm distortion oscillator, a tunable filter to get rid of the fundamental, and spectrum analyzing the distortion residuals. Electrolytics were run without bias and at different bias voltages. Also bipolar electrolytics and using two conventional ones back to back. Plus reams of stuff on other non-electrolytic caps. An archive of Bateman's output is here http://www.waynekirkwood.com/images/pdf/Cyril_Bateman/ for anyone looking for some light bedtime reading.

Open baffles do things box speakers don't. Of course they need extensive EQ, but one of the things you notice if you are used to box speakers is they can sound bass-shy. If you are used to open baffles, or electrostatics, of planar magnetics (Like Magnaplanar) there are no surpises. The bass is there in the right proportion to the rest of the music with no overhang, and sounds tight and fast. And open baffles interact with the room in a completely different way, exciting far fewer resonances. Well you can buy a kit, or even buy one already built. Or you can do what I did - buy two sheets of Baltic Birch and build them from scratch. Then hot hide glue veneer them, and French polish them. Parts which are not veneered I made from a Rosewood called Cocobolo, and the feet were made from Goncalo Alves.

RIP Bill Paxton - forgot he was in so much until I looked at IMdB. Same age as me, and that in itself is scary.

Have a great one Naaman, from a fellow "gentleman of leisure"!

Before Rubycon pulled the manufacturing plug in Jelmax ten years ago (not enough volume I guess to keep Rubycon's interest), they used to be a bit expensive but affordable - similar price to Elna's Silmic and Cerafine. But since remaining BG stock has dwindled over the years, NOS or reclaimed ones go for really silly money. And of course the inevitable fakes. If anyone is vaguely interested in the cryptic apps notes in quaint Japanese-English, I downloaded all 116 of them (from Parts Connexion) back when Black Gates were available. Index attached. blackgate_index.pdf

Called either pork scratchings or pork crackling in the UK.

That looks like something based on the Linkwitz Orion. I have the same SEAS woofers in my Linkwitz LX521.

I bought a bunch of these from eBay, and use those to store jfets and low-noise bipolars, and sorted pairs/quads etc, with an ink-marker to write details.

^This. Really nice job. What are the speakers, Bjarne?

Woohoo! Just got tickets to see Ian McKellern playing King Lear in Chichester (UK) in October in the tiny 300-seat Minerva Theatre. Seen some landmark stuff in that little theatre. McKellern in 2011 took a break from filming The Hobbit in New Zealand to be in The Syndicate (a play about The Mob). Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth (went on to the West End, Broadway and then was made into a movie). Patrick Stewart in Bingo (a play about Shakespeare in his senile older years). That will actually be two Lears we have seen in a year. A couple of months ago we saw Glenda Jackson, aged 80, playing Lear in the West End, and it was absolutely awesome.

It is a really big thing, extreme ironing. Google it and look at the images. People try to do it in ever more beautifully crazy places.

That looks like it is in with a fighting chance

Sounds to me a bit like like extreme ironing

Yup. I'd pay money to purchase a normal bias Lambda extension cable.

Yup. The main consideration (well as far as I was concerned!) in buying where we have lived for the last 20 years was the listening room. It is actually the lounge, but was 6m x 4m with a concrete floor. So I have the luxury of siting dipole speakers 1.6 metres from the end wall. And I have a listening seat that I pull out and put in the sweet spot. Bliss.

Have a great day - happy birthday!

Several speakers ago I owned a pair of Maggie MG1C, which sounded splendid. However, they had a nasty habit of the tweeter wire on the main panel going open circuit (the tweeter on this model was not a ribbon). Awkwardly this was aluminium wire, and I guess failed by work hardening and cracking. Being a guy who does not admit defeat, I procured some aluminium wire of the right gauge, and made a jig to zig-zag it the same way as the original. I then pulled the old wire off, cleaned the film, and glue bonded the new wire on. The main difficulty was soldering aluminium wire, which needs a special flux and solder, the details of which I entirely forget! Eventually they failed entirely when the diaphragm film split. But they had a great innings!

Although he died on 8th Feb aged 83, RIP Peter Mansfield, Nobel prizewinner for invention of MRI

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to the woody man! Have a truly great one Steve.

Happy, and healthy birthday, Ed! Have a great one