TMoney

Nice, also called comcast and got them to cut my bill more than 35%! It is still an absurd amount, but at least it isn't the ridiculous sum it was before.

Well that sure was easy. Plugged the SB in when I got home and got a prompt within 5 minutes to get it set up on my account. Working like a charm!

PSA: Stay the fuck away from the iOS 9.0 public beta. In its current form it is quite a mess. Worst problem? At least a solid 25% of my apps flat out do not work on it, including Plex and the Oppo app I use to control my BDP-105. They also completely screwed up the podcasts app. -- I've been having much better success with the El Capitan beta on my work computer. The full-screen snap feature works really well. You can also set the top menu bar to auto hide!!!!!!

So relaxing. Just what I needed.

Thanks for making this thread, DC. 6141 purchased. Shitty comcast modem will be returned to them as soon as it shows up.

Lowered it a good 2 to 3 inches.

So I've been reading Jason's blog over at head-fi. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it. The guy is nothing if not determined. He also seems pretty honest.

I have now! Wow. Also impressive looking! -- After meets I tend to browse the forums and see whether my subjective impressions matched up with the crowd. Browsing Tyll's site, I came across this video of Frank Cooter talking about the amp at a Southern California meet. Very cool and worth a watch. Boy are we ever lucky to have guys like Frank Cooter in our hobby.

I had an awesome time at the Bay Area HF meet today listening to rigs and chatting with friends old and new. It was fun to meet a few more of you in person after conversing online. I played this one a little differently and brought a pair of HD 600s with me to test out all the rigs. Rather than listening to different headphones I basically stuck to only the HD 600s. They really do scale pretty remarkably to the rig. I posted my impressions over on the other site. Other than chatting with friends, highlights of the meet included the Eddie Current table and the most beautiful DIY amp I've ever seen made by our own Frank Cooter. I put a few pictures of it

The pictures don't even come close to doing it justice. Jude has himself one hell of a looker. The tubes on the amp are just massive. I've never seen tubes that big on a headphone amp before.

I tried! He made it for Jude.

I had a chance to listen to a couple of Yggy based rigs at the SF Bay Area head-fi meet today and I was pretty darn impressed. I ordered one. It should make a nice compliment to the Oppo. -- I had a chance to hear the new Eddie Current Studio amp running off a Yggy. Holy fuck, that thing sounds amazing. Hands down the most impressive (dynamic) amp of the meet. Good thing its so goddamn expensive or I'd be tempted. I almost walked out of there with a Zana Deux amp to run my HD 600s but then I remembered I had 009s at home Most impressive electrostat amp was Frank Cooter's latest masterpiece. It was easily the most beautiful DIY amp I've ever seen.

I'm not going to lie. It would kill me to see all those cars just sitting there. It is way too much of a tease. Those things are meant to be driven! I can't imagine how awesome it would be if they had a little auto-cross course set up, or, at the very least, a drag strip. Who the hell wouldn't want to see those vintage BMWs do drags against the vintage Porsches?

Something we both have to do: get those stock dealer licence plate holders off our cars.

Congrats to anyone who owned Google stock today. I looked at my computer and thought it was a mistake. It isnt.

Now that I've been on the track I'm dying to go autocross. For anyone in the Bay Area it looks like the Evo School will have driver training programs October 10 and 11 at the Marina Airport down near Monterey. I'll have to check my calendar, but I think there is a good chance I'll be going. Link: http://www.evoschool.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=598 EDIT: Two driver cars are welcome, so if anyone is interested in driving my WRX that could work.

I bought one of these on your recommendation. I'll test it out on my PC this weekend.

If you are ever out in the Bay Area and want to the the Audi R8 experience day I'd be down!

Man, Neil really needs to shit-can his business manager.

Schiit?

Presumably you could stream DSD over HDMI (which Yggy does not have) also.

Oh for fucks sake. Saw this in the Oppo BDP-105 user manual. Guess I won't be ordering a Yggy after all.

Also, Brent, this last one is for you. They had a bunch of these things set up for people to train on.

So the performance driving program was an absolute blast! It is amazing how much you learn when you can really drive your car HARD. So now for the recap: We had 10 or 11 participants and 4 instructors. The day started promptly at Sonoma Raceway at 10AM. Having never driven on a track before, I was easily the least experienced member of the class. It turned out that I had the second shittiest car of the group (at least to start). People brought some seriously impressive toys. We had: A Ferrari (don't know which one but it was one of the GT ones because it threw its weight around a ton in the corners. That being said it was fast as shit). An R8 v8 (the silent assassin, seriously this thing is quiet. It was perhaps the most impressive car in the group with how flat it stayed in the corners. A true supercar). A couple of Carreras (one S, one not). A Shelby GT500 (the bruiser of the group and perhaps the least elegant). the Jag F-Type (my god what a beautiful exhaust note! must be loud in the cabin tough. also it looked very tail-happy but the guy who was driving it kept it under control). A TT RS (solid all around). An Evo (my Japanese brethren and the closest car to mine performance-wise). A beater E36 BMW (someone's dedicated track car). My WRX. (Naturally, the beater BMW crapped out before the end of the day making my WRX the slowest/crappiest car of the group. I can't say I expected that to happen!) The Mustang GT and Camaro in the pictures were the instructors'/tracks' cars. After a bit of classroom instruction, we started the day using a big parking lot and some cones to do two sets of drills. Half the group started on a slalom course while my half of the group started on a hairpin turn. The goal for the hairpin drill was to approach at maximum acceleration, hit the brakes Hard, turn in at a cone they had set up, make a proper line to the apex (also marked by a cone) then slam full throttle as soon as you hit the apex. It sounds easy, but I sucked at this drill to start. Prior to yesterday I had always thought that the apex was simply the halfway point on the turn. Yeah... that is defiantly wrong. The actual apex of a turn is past the halfway point, sometimes well past it. It took a while to break my bad habit of trying to hit the half way point. I kept turning in too hard right at the start which caused me to be 4-5 feet wide of the apex and come out of the turn at way to wide of an angle. When I'd go to power out I'd have to hit the brakes as my exit angle was taking me right in to the cone "wall." The cool thing about racing is that when you get something right you feel it. I knew right away on subsequent runs when I nailed the turn and hit the apex as I was able to have perfect run-outs at full throttle. We had about 10-12 runs each at the hairpin before we moved on to the slalom course. The slalom course had 5 S-turns in succession. The key to this one was taking it easy though turns 1 and 2 so that you had the grip you needed at turns 4 and 5 to put the power down on the exit. It was hard not to overcook turns 1 and 2. You would know right away if you screwed up as you'd start losing traction and start slipping and have to slow down to regain it. The few times I nailed the slalom felt great. When I get a good line down it minimized the amount of load transfer going through the S's. I was able to exit with much higher speed and felt more in control the entire way. I guess the point of the slalom course is to teach you that you always need to be setting up your next turn as soon as you exit. Lesson learned! We then broke for lunch and I had fun chatting up the other group members. Naturally, it was all guys. At 30 I was the youngest guy in the group, but there were a few other guys who must have been in their mid to late 30s. A guy who worked at facebook was driving my dream car, this blue Carrera S. Very nice whip, sir! I also went and sat in one of the Audi R8s. Go get one of these right now, VPI! The Audi school had basically all the R and S models sitting around. After lunch they had rearranged the cones in the parking lot to set up a little auto-cross course for us to practice cornering and transitions from corner to corner. Being a beginner, it was a bit overwhelming stringing it all together. I found it hard not to let botching one corner effect your performance in subsequent corners. Still, this drill was a ton of fun. We each had 4 runs of about 4 laps each. Like I said before, you new instantly when you had nailed a turn. The feeling of doing something right is pretty damn exhilarating. Stringing turn after turn together to put together a good lap is very challenging. For as much fun as I had already had, the main event was still to come. We were finally ready for the big-boy Sonoma Raceway track. Holy fuck, driving it was amazing! We split in to trains of 3 cars, each with an instructor and two students, and set out for two 25-minute lead-follow sessions. In lead-follow, the instructor car goes in front and the two cars in the train follow and try to maintain a distance of two or three car lengths. For going out on the big track we all had to have helmets and head-socks on, giving the entire thing an awesome feel. My train was me, an instructor in a mustang and the Evo. We started out going reasonably quick and picked up speed on each lap. I have no clue how fast we were going as I never really had time to focus on anything other than driving, but it was pretty goddamn fast. It is amazing how much you feel everything when you are going at speed. The load transfers, the tire slip, the velocity of it all. You have to feel it all too, as any mistake at speed on the big course can easily end up very badly. Sonoma Raceway is a crazy track. There are elevation changes and blind corners EVERYWHERE! Turns 1 and 2 are on an uphill and we would hit them so damn fast I was worried the WRX wouldn't be able to handle it. The tires howled, but she made it time after time. Exiting turn 4 was also insanely fast, as 5 is very gentle and you can take it at speed. The instructor flew out of 4 every time and it was definitely challenging (in a good way) for me and the Evo to keep up. Turn 6 is blind and on a downhill and I could never quite figure that damn thing out. The apex is way at the end, almost completely out of the turn. I could hit it, but it always felt like I was coming out of 6 slower than the Evo and the instructor and they would have to slow a bit going in to 7 to let me catch back up. The slalom turns at 8 and 8a were also easy to mess up, but very rewarding when you hit them right. When you didn't get the right line you could feel the weight of your car causing it to slide. When you did get one though, smooth like butter. We finally finished up at 5:30p.m. and I drove the WRX home pretty gently as she (and I) had had a demanding day. -- Suffice it to say it was a fucking amazing day! I haven't had a spike of adrenaline like that in a long time. I've never driven faster and harder than I did on the big track. I was glad the instructors were leading us, they pushed me to keep up and do things I didn't know my car was capable of. It felt like I definitely had the WRX at 90/95% of its capability and that I learned a lot in just a single day. TLDR version? If you get a chance to do something like this, DO IT!

Holy fuckballs, that was awesome. I'll put up a few pics and a post-mortem tomorrow, but suffice it to say that I had an absolute blast. I haven't had my adrenaline going like that in a long time.