aerius

Yup, it's all in his head.

The solution, clearly, is to buy a set of closed headphones to block out the beep. Or you could just run an extension cord and listen to your rig outside.

This depends on several things The output of your cartridge The gain on your phonostage The gain of your amp If you have enough gain in the rest of your system, then a TVC will work just fine, if not, then you'll need an active preamp to make up the gain or an amp with more gain.

Definitely not safe for work, but that's what I wanna be doing. What is the most bling piece of audio gear you'd want to own?

It's a Sony. I've yet to hear a Sony that I like and I don't expect that trend to be broken anytime soon.

Who is your favourite pornstar?

What? Don't look at me...

Valley girl She's a valley girl

This topic lied to me, there are no pictures of this Katie Melua person.

A bunch of concert tickets. Chick Corea at Massey Hall John McLaughlin & The 4th Dimention, also at Massey Hall Cowboy Junkies: Trinity Sessions Revisited, Massey Hall again Buddy Guy, yup, Massey Hall God I love living in Toronto.

It took the stupid worthless wankers long enough. Two years and more "why the fuck aren't they MoT's yet?" posts than I can count, and now they finally get slapped with the tags.

I, for one, approve of the K701 being kicked out the door.

Head-case was down?

Done, but that doesn't help since my scanner went tits up...

2 contracts for gasoline futures on the NYMEX.

Well, I guess this explains the secret to getting mad bass with an Ety...

Of course now that you've said that without knocking on wood, you've jinxed yourself to repeat the mistake, and likely with far more dire consequences.

It's not that weird, you just got corrupted by the bass.

I get buzzed by these planes from time to time...

I know it definitely can be done. The October 2007 issue of Hi-Fi News & Reviews has a nice article on measuring headphones, as well as how some of the measurements may correlate to how the headphones sound. Run a tech article in basic easy to understand language in every issue, and have sidebars or even a whole page if needed in the reviews themselves to explain the unique features of the gear under review. For instance a tube amp review might have a sidebar on what fixed bias is, what its advantages are and why it's used, much the same way a car mag will have a blurb on say, Honda's VTEC technology. After a year or 2 of reading, the readers should have a basic layman's understanding of the principles behind the designs, and you can start pointing them towards journal articles, research papers and so forth which discuss the issues in more depth.

That I think is definitely a big issue, all too often we have reviews where the gear sounds great but measures like shit, or it measures decently and sounds like crap. There's a few rare components that both measure well and sound great. And that's about where it ends. Nobody outside of the DIY forums really looks at the whys behind it all to try and put together some of the pieces to the puzzles, the audio mags along with most of the online 'zines pretty much shrug it off and go "guess that's just the way it is". That is, if they don't go hardline with yet another subjectivist vs. objectivist strawman shitfest. I find that sad since the general public never gets to learn anything. The mags gush on about the gear and they don't bother educating the readers on anything, UHF is the one exception since they do have a tech theory article in each issue. Using the car mag analogy, when GM, Honda, or Lotus comes out with some new engine tech, suspension design, or other new tech gadget, the car mags will usually have a column to explain what it is, what it does, and why it's good. Stuff like VANOS, Bluetec diesel, suspension linkage design, Miller cycle engines, CVT's and so forth all gets explained. Read a dozen or so issues of most car mags and you'll know most of this stuff. Contrast that with audio mags, I could read the last 5 years of Stereophile & TAS and still not know the difference between a MOSFET, JFET, and a Bipolar transistor. I won't know what a Williamson or Dynaco circuit is, or what a Long Tailed Pair, Cathodyne, or Schmidt phase-splitter is and the advantages & disadvantages of each. I won't know why the slope of a crossover in a speaker is important, I'll know that 1st order crossovers are phase coherent and that's as far as it goes. I won't know the difference between R2R DAC chips and delta-sigma DACs, which is about as important of a difference as the one between gasoline & diesel engines as far as designing DAC circuitry is concerned. Nowhere do they explain anything about power supplies except to say "big transformers, big caps, Blackgates!", the reader is left to guess at what the fuck it all means. It's almost as if the audio mags are deliberately trying to keep their readers stupid. Cause god forbid if your readers grew brains, they might figure out that something like say, the cRaptor is a flaming turd and a safety hazard to boot. And that would tend to give them second thoughts despite your gushing reviewer praise. I feel that the audio mags have a duty to educate the readers so that they can make informed decisions. There should be tech articles, explaining for instance the pros & cons of soft dome vs. metal dome tweeters or the tech behind SE vs. P-P tube amps and speaker cabinet designs. UHF does have basic tech articles, they did one a little while back on power supplies and they're now running a series on room acoustics. AudioXpress which is mostly a DIY mag will of course get into all the nice calculations and talk about the theory & design issues, hell, they even broke out some calculus in one of their issues. You don't need to go that in-depth, but I'd like to see the mainstream audio mags cover some of that stuff on a fundamental level.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=1310763#post1310763 Of particular interest: Thoughts?

Mike Gravel (D) 92.62% match I'm wondering how I scored that high despite being in favour of drilling ANWR into swiss cheese...

Well, they basically took a Heil air motion transformer and stuffed it into a headphone. The Heil AMT, when used in speakers as a tweeter, is quite possibly the best tweeter I've ever heard.

Cheaper & easier to build. All you need is a simple CRC filter with big caps and you'll have practically no ripple in the DC. Tube PSU's have limitations on the size of capacitors which can be used so you generally need to use chokes to get enough smoothing, but then you run into the problem of the damn things hitting resonance and ringing. Chokes also cost a hell of a lot more than resistors. On the plus side, tube rectifiers give a nice delayed soft turn on, and don't generate as much switching noise as silicon diodes.