CarlSeibert

Damn. How did I miss this thread? Happy Belated Birthday Steve!

Happy Birthday-ish!!!

....I think John means being VERY, EXTREMELY, EFFING CAREFUL anywhere near the cantilever. I feel like a complete jerk saying that, but I know two - no three - highly experienced audiophiles (not John) who have lunched carts that way. And I've come close. I, too, vote for the Swiffer thingie. I have the worst household dust on the planet to contend with and Swiffers rule.

Has anybody had any experience with the Nova Phenomena phono stage? My friend Howard has a floor sample he wants to get rid of. It's not the deal of the century, but it would be a good enough deal that I could sell the thing later and not take too much of a bath. It looks like an attractive candidate for the den system. (widely adjustable gain, plus wide selections of loading values).

Condolences for Knucks. It looks like Heidi had a great, long run.

But pricey it seems to me.

Yup. I have the automatic one with the module. Now I lust for the original. Although the auto can be got for cheaps. It's 38mm if you find the big version too big. But 42 is by no means huge by today's standards.

It's working....adding back into appropriate groups. Thanks Todd!

Happy Birthday!!!

Vicki- Heads up. MOG emailed that the new Nick Cave album released today. When I mentioned this to young designer who was wearing her earbuds, the response was "who is that?". Go figure. I'll give it a listen if I can shovel out of the avalanche that I'm under.....

Very cool. Thanks.

I found that hanging a two foot by four foot panel of 705 about eight inches down from the ceiling at the first reflection point made a bigger difference than anything else I did in the Home Theater of the Absurd, which is a tiny little room, just filled with stuff. If you're short on places for panels and there's still a bit too much general purpose liveliness the ceiling is a handy spot. By being able to space the a panel from the surface I got good effect lower in frequency than I otherwise would have from a single thickness of 705. I think that's why that panel made such a big difference.

Here's my RCM. I built this thing about twenty years ago in my old apartment, with hand tools and whatever was at hand. If I was to build it today, it would be a whole lot snazzier, with hardwoods and acrylic and maybe even workmanship. But it probably wouldn't clean records any better. This is design-decisions-are-all-based-on-using-the-stuff-you-have-at-hand-and-the-tools-you-happen-to-have sort of project. I started out with a set of Nitty Gritty lips and went from there. So I ended up with a pretty shameless Nitty Gritty clone. All I was going for was a plenum to hook a vacuum to, something to hold the lips and a sub platter with which to rotate the record. I made the plenum be the whole structure (A Rat Shack project box. A small Pelican case would work. About anything would work.) but you wouldn't have to do that, say, if you started with a broken turntable from a thrift store. In which case, a piece of PVC pipe would do it. My lips are mounted on a piece of CPVC plumbing pipe, sawed in half. I forget how I made the slot. A broken hacksaw blade, a Dremel tool. who knows. The end pieces are craft store plastic, ABS, I assume. The "bearing" is a piece of wooden dowel in a half-blind (so that it's not a huge leak) hole in a piece of wood under the top of the box. The record spindle is the same piece of dowel, turned down by chucking it in a drill and running it against sandpaper. That's actually a piece of cleverness. By making the bearing spindle and record spindle out of the same piece, you don't have to worry about concentricity. All you have to do is get the lips more or less lined up with the bearing hole. I doubt I had any measurement or layout instruments beyond a ruler or maybe a combination square in those days.The spindle doesn't reach the bottom of the hole. There's no ball. The actual bearing, such as it is, is a stock of thin nylon washers (from the hardware store) between the case and the platter. That's also how I adjusted the height of the platter to match the lips. The platter is ABS from the craft store (but it could be anything) and the mat is whatever piece of rubber that wasn't quick enough to get out of the way of an Exacto. Nothing needs to be accurate, actually round, or rigid. The hole in the back is sized to be about mid way up the taper of an inch and a quarter vacuum cleaner hose connector. The other holes can be covered with tape to regulate the strength of the vacuum. Right now I'm using a vacuum head from Home Depot that goes on a five gallon bucket as my vacuum source. i have used a regular shop vac and one of those little one gallon jobs in the past. Basically, anything will work. The "record clamp" is a piece of chipboard with a piece of mouse pad glued on the bottom. Now that I know a little about woodworking, it is really offensive to my sensibilities, but it does turn the record just fine. I made a bunch of brushes (at bottom) that are pretty much clones of the Nitty Gritty brush (the next one up). There's nothing to say that the round part needs to be the diameter of the Nitty Gritty ones. It looks like the investment I made in a piece of 5/8s dowel was the deciding factor there. Just a cylinder of some sort (like the thing on top) would do fine. The real work is done by the velvet on the brush. A tiny amount of velvet will make a lifetime supply of brushes, so just go to the cloth store and buy some of every kind they've got and experiment on some dollar bin records. Some kinds clean way better than others. Some leave tiny bits of fibers behind. You'll need a grooming brush. The little round one works. So does a toothbrush. You could make your own lips by the same process of experimentation. I didn't bother. I've done double stick tape and hot glue to fasten the velvet to the brush. It doesn't matter. Just keep the fastening away from the part that comes in contact with the record. I made one brush that clamped the velvet in place mechanically. If you make your brush body out of wood, over time, the fluid will raise the grain of the wood and you'll have to sand it down again to make sure your brush stays smooth. If I were to make some brushes now, I'd use plastic for the cylinder. (Acrylic rod with a hardwood handle would be fun. A 10 cent piece of PVC pipe would be more sensible.) Since I ended up with a Nitty Gritty cone, I ended up with Nitty Gritty issues as well. One of which is that while you wash the first side of the record, the other side is running against your lips and covering them with filth. You'll spend half your time grooming the lips. So I eventually went to Bed Bath and Beyond and got a vinyl pad that's meant to go in the bottom of a sink (to keep glasses from breaking, I think) I place the record on said vinyl pad to wash the first side and that way the lips first come in contact with the record while vacuuming the first side and they don't get anywhere near as dirty. You certainly don't have to make the lips on the bottom, particularly if you start out with an old turntable. You could make the platter support the whole record and make the lips on a wand, like the VPI. All you would need to do is to fabricate a wand mechanism out of telescoping tubes or hose or something and figure out how to keep the wand radial to the record and in contact with it when it should be and to move it out of the way when it shouldn't. If I ever run into the makings, I'd be tempted to do another machine with that kind of design. I'd also really like to make a motor-driven platter, although honestly, it really isn't much effort to turn the record by hand. This isn't a precise affair. And it isn't like plumbing, where there's 65 psi of water pressure to blow everything to bits if you don't make your joints perfectly. If it leaks a little, who cares. Any likely vacuum source will have way more capacity than you'll actually need. Whatever you find to in the way of parts and materials can probably be convinced to work. If you feel the mood, just go for it. If pretty isn't an object, an afternoon, maybe two, and you're there. And you've saved 600 bucks. Oh. I have a foot pedal switch to turn the vacuum on and off. That makes life easier. And working out some sort of muffling/sound deadening for the vacuum helps. You could put it in the closet or the next room, even.

Actually, it gives the VAMP WiFi connectivity without worrying about about drivers for a USB WiFi dongle, which might be a bit of a stretch for the VAMP. (Although it's an intriguing possibility) WiFi connectivity being a Squeezebox function the VAMP doesn't natively replicate. The fellow who develops the VAMP is into HomePlug, the Ethernet over power mains thing. The idea of deliberately putting that much RF on my power circuits kind of creeps me out, so I wanted to toss out a more conventional idea. The real thread is over on vortexbox.org. We're just kind of following along.

I almost never tweet, but I find Twitter immensely useful for keeping up with news organizations and the like. I use the Twitter function in Trillian on my work computer.

On the VAMP front - I tried out my little NetGear WiFi to Ethernet bridge on the VAMP and it seems to to work fine. It works so well on my BluRay player that I literally forgot it was there. http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-WNCE2001-Universal-Internet-Adapter/dp/B007CO5DZ4/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=2SDKDS2GCTZGN&coliid=I3JWR9N0FI8AQA I bought mine at Best Buy, but I can't imagine there's anything wrong with using the refurb version for half the price.

Go Jeff! Happy Day After Birthday!

A record cleaning machine is very DIY-able. $60 or $70 and a good afternoon's work and you're good to go. Just assess the junk you have available and go from there. I'll send you pictures of mine if you want.

Happy Birthday Wes!

Oh my. Analog hard drugs claim another young victim

Not me, but before I upgraded my WiFi setup, I got weirdness like that on uncompressed streams. So it could be network.

Alan and I built some VAMPs using the image Andrew from Vortexbox put together. They went together flawlessly and they "just work", straight out of the gate. They play 24/192 files natively to boot. :)

I have a few hours on the NuWave now. Pretty much like Todd said. I like it. A bit warm. Nice resolution. Top end sounds kind of like the Sennheiser HD 650s to me. A bit rolled off but nice resolution, sweet. Decent extension in both directions. No brightness or glare. It's very un-fatiguing to listen to. Nice dynamics. Good PRAT. I hear a family resemblance to the PWD, but I'll eventually get to hear it side by side with Alan's PWD, so we'll see about that. I'm describing it in a lot of the ways I described the Neko, with which I was VERY impressed. It sounds a little different than how I remember the Neko, but I think it is the same general sort of thing. At half the price of the Neko, a third the price of the M-51 (which I took to have a rather different personality in any case, in the one audition I had with it.) and a fifth the price of the PWD, I'm putting it solidly in the win column. At some point, I'd like to really compare it to the Neko. It might be able to go head to head with it. One odd thing that I have noticed is that the sound doesn't change the way I have come to expect as my amp warms up. I expect dull with a bright glare in greater or lesser degree, giving way to a balanced sound in about half an LP's time. With the NuWave, I get dark and dull at first. I'm guessing that the NuWave itself is warming, too. So leaving it on may not actually keep it warm where it matters. As long as you don't judge the sound harshly and freak out in the first few minutes, it's all academic, anyway. The amp has to warm up regardless. It's just different from the way my other DACs have acted.

Way to go Vicki! My mortgage is lingering. I need to put it out of its misery. But then I'll have to suck it up and take care of all the taxes and insurance and whatnot (which in Florida are more than and infinitely more hassle than the mortgage itself) So I'm dragging my feet a bit.

Concussions?