Leaderboard

Here is a picture of the inside. There is a limit on the file size I can upload so I had to dramatically shrink it and compress it to be able to post it.

Ho. Lee. Shit. I'm hella jealous of your pending gyro. Not that my dinner was lacking.

We are given to understand the trepidation is usually on the other side of the interaction?

Rotisserie leg of lamb. Going to chop up and eat in pitas with tzatziki and Greek salad.

After 5 years from the time I acquired the PCBs and parts, I finally took advantage of the free time created by the pandemic and completed my KGSSHV. This is the offboard version with +/-500V supply. I know many have since moved on to the Carbon but I am very happy with the results and plan on building myself a Carbon in the near future. Hopefully it won't take me that long this time. Thanks to Kevin for the great design, Spritzer for his support and providing some of the parts and this thread from which I learned a lot. The case is from Aliexpress but I got a new front panel made at the local machine shop.

This is the one and only time I've felt trepidation showing my own meat.

One constant among all discussions I read on audiophile fora is the back-and-forth between older enthusiasts who have spent $800 on Pet Sounds and younger enthusiasts who have spent $0 pirating video game soundtracks. I think the best way to bridge that gap is to put everyone on a level playing field. If you would, please share some examples of albums you love that were first released before you were born. For my part, here are five to get us started. 1) Ahmad Jamal: Chamber Music of the New Jazz This is a phenomenal recording, showing really thoughtful playing by Jamal. I'm particularly fond of the rhythmic tapping and string plucking he employs throughout, making use of parts of the piano you're not supposed to play. This is from an era of jazz I don't prefer, but it sounds to me far ahead of its time. Roon says I've listened to it 78 times, and I don't doubt it. While writing my masters thesis I would listen to this album every day. That was pre-Roon, so those plays aren't even counted. I never tire of it. 2) Talking Heads: Remain in Light This is for my boy TMoney. Being a millennial, I was first exposed to David Byrne via his solo career. "Sure sounds like the guy on Psycho Killer", I think I said. Working my way back through the catalog I was absolutely floored by this album. Some of my favorites off Stop Making Sense were on here, and to me it represents a turning point for the musical landscape that would lead to a lot of things I enjoy. 3) Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: Will the Circle be Unbroken? I inherited my Dad's turntable and his record collection when I turned ten. He didn't die or anything, he just didn't listen to records. I sure as shit did, but didn't want to listen to all the stuff I'd heard on repeat the last ten years of my life, so I went to record shops and thrift stores and picked up things with interesting covers that I could afford on a very finite allowance. This album was the heaviest thing I could get for $0.25, which represented a real value. It was also the first bluegrass/old time album I ever heard, and it was an absolute revelation to me. 4) Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel III (Melt) I'm cheating a little here, as my favorite Peter Gabriel album is "So", but that came out in 1986 and as such is disqualified. Obviously there are some phenomenal songs on here, notably "Games Without Frontiers" and "Biko", but this was also the first album to use gated reverb on drums, ushering in a sound no one would get sick of for ten years. I constantly tell my wife and daughter "this is a Peter Gabriel household", and we wear it on our sleeve like it will get us martyred by the IRA. I don't know if the Collins/Gabriel divide of opinion exists in real life, but if it does we are ready. 5) Frank Zappa: Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch This was another gem from my father's record collection, but one I actively avoided for years. It was the weirdest thing I ever heard, and I thought it might be irreparably damaged. The only song I could even remotely latch on to was "Valley Girl", but I played it dozens of times until I got the courage to ask my Dad what that even meant. The explanation went similarly over my head.

I use the later (current version) black bodied Zu Denon DL103, and can confirm its excellence. I use the later (current version) black bodied Zu Denon DL103, and can confirm its excellence. Repeated sentence, sentence repeated.....

1. Ornette Coleman/Paul Bley - Live from the Hillcrest Club 2. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds 3. The Monks - Black Monk Time 4. The Grateful Dead - Live Dead 5. Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um

Karen and I watched Overboard (original one), she had never seen it. Then we watched The Way I see It. I was practically sobbing for the Sandy Hook piece of the story. I fucking miss that kind of leadership!

I leave Tuesday morning to go see my partner. A 7.5 hour car trip. I always give the "good watches" to my mother, to keep, if I'm going to be gone for a while, but it caught me that my travel roll was sort of interesting, in a buckle/clasp branding perspective.

Making some progress. A belt should arrive today. Hoping it will fit, but not completely sure until it shows up. The speed controller was DC. It ran off of a motorcycle battery. Noise free, but not the most convenient, so a simple DC to AC wall wart later and problem solved. My TICE Audio Solo power conditioner should keep things clean enough (no relation). The input and output of the Pass Pearl have been figured out. This is a top notch phono stage. And the ZuAudio rebodied Denon DL-103 is out for repair. The cantilever was broken off just past the pivot. I honestly don't remember how that happened. But it's getting an upgraded, tapered cantilever and a new square shank, high polish, diamond true ellipsoid needle to replace the missing, stock round needle. Should be a nice sonic improvement. Now I just need to concentrate on a new, larger stand. it needs to be 20" x 36" to house the turntable and the motor pod. I'd like the top to be thick butcherblock and the base of the stand to be a separate unit. I'll then use the Big Feet isolator feet in between. I'd like a low shelf for record storage and an 8' shelf on top of that to house the phono stage, speed controller and record cleaning gear.

Just finished a fantastic jazz recording by 7 musicians who decided to form a supergroup comprised of pianist and musical director Renee Rosnes, clarinetist Anat Cohen, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, bassist Noriko Ueda, drummer Allison Miller, and featured vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant Artemis - ARTEMIS As usual available on most streaming services

I finished Horizon Zero Dawn over the weekend on PC. Very cool game! The story was surprisingly good and a really cool take on what would otherwise be a familiar post-apocalypse trope. I mentioned to a buddy that maybe the reason there are so few great Sci-fi tv series these days is the games industry has picked off so much of the good writing talent? Also, it is a credit to how good the story is and how fun hunting robot dinosaurs is that the bad parts of the game (side quests, in-game economy, boring open world activities) really don't distract from the high points. The game is also really stunning in true 4k on PC.

7 years ago, yesterday. I've watched a bunch of Puddles' videos on his YouTube channel over the years (including "punk rock" and "new wave" versions of Royals). Many a good, some are not. None are as transcendent as this one.

For those of you interested in improving your guitar playing, this article could be of interest. Tomo Fujita, the Berklee teacher we've talked about before, is featured at #5. Also a girl of Dusty's liking.

Elvis' new album with Steve Nieve, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and other musicians supporting. Good stuff.

That's a good one. I thought about A Bridge Too Far but it's too big of a cast. Now thinking of this:

Adiós querido Español...

Sorry to argue, but that's what's known as a coping mechanism. The remedy is moving somewhere warm. It took me 40 years to learn that.

Oh my. I haven't thought of this at all and now I feel out of sorts. I gotta get my 2020 batch going!

RAALstar v0.1 with one of Ray's old test discs raalstar.mov

Yesterday died someone who probably you never heard of, the spanish jazz saxophonist Pedro Iturralde at 91. He wasn't a top ten player, but he did a lot for jazz in Spain in the dark ages. He recorded a few enjoyable albums, one of them was Flamenco Jazz (it had part1 and part2). You can pay a listen in any of the popular streaming platforms of your choice. Or just this tune RIP, Pedro

I had a very scary halloween last night ...and not in a good way. Background: I am mostly blind in one eye. I see very little out of my left one. I was born this way. Had the doctors caught it in time, they could have corrected it. I'd have had to wear an eye patch for several years (arr!) but I'd have gained sight in my bad eye. None of that happened. Last night I lit a candle I got a while ago. It's got 3 wicks and sits in a (rather flimsy) glass jar. The three wicks are a PITA, necessitating turning the candle to get them all lit. I was working on the third when one of the wicks shot off a bit of ash or hot wax and hit me in the face ...right below my good eye. I said "oh shit!" and put down the candle. After insuring I was alright. I looked at the candle. I didn't get hit by wax or ash. The jar shattered and I got hit in the face with a glass shard, a few mm below my one good eye. Ulp.