CarlSeibert

I just contacted the Stax distributor about replacement foam for the earpad side of my Lambda Pros. The response was that now they offer either foam or cloth, and that each is integral to the earpad. $35 and $55, respectively. That raises a couple questions. Foam or cloth? Cloth would seem more practical. Has anybody tried the cloth? Is there a sonic difference? For that matter, what's the difference between foam and nothing at all? The earpds on my headphones seem fine. I guess one could make the argument that they could be replaced based on age alone. What should I make of the bundling of the pads and foam/cloth? Is there any performance or design difference between current production earpads and older ones? And what about the cloth itself? Is it special high-tech high-end Stax-blessed fiber, or will I be annoyed after paying these guys fifty bucks to find it identical to the Part Express speaker grill cloth that I already have an acre of?

Indeed. Whenever I get around to upgrading the DAC in my speaker system, yours will be on the short list. I applaud your restraint. Quite a few products nowadays seem to go up about three hundred bucks per each good review.

Sounds all good.

Email notifications seem to be working now for me. The only obvious thing that isn't yet is the right rail watched topics thingie. What a ton of work this must be for Todd!

Good point. I found a pulldown thingie at the bottom of the page that has "Move to" selections in it. Mine defaults to "Delete", so that's what it looks like. IIRC, you get to choose a notification type when you watch a topic. The only way I could find to change it was to unwatch the topic and then watch it again. Edit: Ah, there is a dropdown on the manage watched topics control panel page that works the same way as the one on the PMs page. It has options to change notification type. You can select and change notification options for multiple topics. That's a good thing, 'cause you can periodically do a select-all and turn it off for all topics to get rid of forgotten old thread notifications.

I had chosen "Daily Digest" for this thread. I notice in my control panel that it had reverted to "No Notification" somehow. I just set it to "Daily Digest" again. We'll see what happens.

Ah! From My Settings, I can go to a Manage Watched Topics Page where it appears that I can see all my watched topics, with the usual status icons. So, the problem would appear to be with the right rail gizmo. Is there a way to make a shortcut to that "manage" page, I wonder? Edit: Yup. I can bookmark it in my browser, it looks like.

I marked the entire forum "read. That made "My Content" work as expected, but the Watched Topics rail doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. If I toggle off unread-only, a great long random subset of my subscribed threads appears. If I keep it toggled on, threads don't appear when they get new posts, even though they show "Subscribed" in the thread itself. (This one, for example)

I have read advice suggesting running two lines from the two halves of your balanced power feed (They're not phases. I don't know what they're properly called), then splitting the load between them. One monoblock to one, one to the other, sources to one, whatever. Given that I would have to disassemble half my house to run new lines, I haven't tried it, but it seemed reasonable at the time I read it.

I like the more muted color scheme. It took me a minute to look for the timestamp in its new spot. No weirder than any of us.....

Posted Yesterday, 10:44 PM jinp6301, on 16 January 2011 - 10:22 PM, said: Is there a way to quote using fast reply? Unfortunately no. I just hit the "Reply" icon in the post itself and the lite editor came up with the post quoted. I don't know if that's what you are looking for, but it's pretty cool.

How is watching a topic supposed to work? I have "watched" a couple of threads, but I don't see them in "My Content" of the "Watched Topics" rail on the forums page. Where are they supposed to turn up?

I'm concerned about the Twitter integration, too. As much as I hate to admit it, I've come to depend on it.

Happy Birthday John!

This is both true and annoying. It seems that audio software in particular is being written with zero backwards compatibility lately. The Intel-only thing I get, although it's an issue for me. Snow Leopard only? Geez. But it's reality in the market. And something to take developers to task over.

Yup. SMB has a pretty narrow view of filenames. Linux is wildly permissive. And music files have horrible names. Accordingly, I have suffered greatly. That's why I now have FTP servers on all my machines that I use for music.

I think Wayne has an EX-1 and likes it. The thing that sucks here is that you will likely have to work in hotel ballrooms and the like. That's the worst possible environment for inexpensive cameras. The DSLRs that work as video cameras can be pretty good in low light for a semi-reasonable price. (granted with all that claptrap attached to them they resemble production cameras more than news gathering ones, or alternatively are a little, ahem, minimal ergonomically) Think Canon 7-D or the unbelievable-in-low-light Nikon D3S. A D3S makes working in one of those rooms bearable in stills or video. Peter's D-700 is more or less a lower priced D3, which is still pretty damn good. But I don't think it does video, or at least not HD. One of my night shift guys has experience with the EX-1, the EX-3 and a couple of less expensive cameras in crappy light. He's off today, but I'll chat him up when I see him.

I like Linux for this sort of thing. As Grahame pointed out, I've become a big Vortex Box fanboy. I can say that Squeezebox Server on Mandriva was a pain in the neck every time I needed to upgrade SBS. If I was building something that was not going to be a desktop, where I wouldn't have to worry about a GUI and a hundred favorite applications, I would just use a distro that is really supported by Squeezebox. Which would be Fedora, which more or less was my path to Vortex Box, which is indeed built on Fedora. IMHO, the best hardware is whatever happens to be around and already paid-for, which is yet another point in favor of the Linux distro of your choice. Why AFP? Most folks have dumped it for SMB in Windows/Mac mixed environments. I still run it on my file server, out of habit mostly, but SMB is what gets used.

Mixed networks are dead easy nowadays. Just use SMB networking and everything plays on the same page. That said, Linux and Windows machines can do the old Mac network protocol if you want. They'll all do NFS if you need. They can learn to read and writes each other's disks. That's only an issue of you need to handle individual files bigger 4 GB (which comes up in video production. We handle it by using Mac native removable disks for video and the standard FAT ones for everything else.) Personally, me being me, I make sure my network is semi-secure from the outside world and I run FTP servers on all my machines, 'cause that take me around issues like SMB's stupid file name restrictions (which may not really be stupid, but they are irritating.) For reviewing purposes, you'll need an actual hardware PC up to a semi-reasonable spec and a Mac of good spec as well. I'd set it up so the review machines could be wiped clean without a tear being shed. (Different volumes - or better whole drives-with independent OSes for reviewing and real work, etc.) Virtual machines are a wonderful sanity saver, but for reviewing, you'll need real hardware IMHO. I would put my music collection on a good stable multi-protocol server where it will be safe and easily accessible. I'm a Vortex Box fanboy, but you could build your own if you want. VBox does a bunch of protocols and works as a NAS, too. You don't have to be as cheap as me, but I have < $200 in mine. You could do the same thing in a Mac box if you've got one laying around, I suppose. But Linux is best for that sort of thing anyway. For server-reviewing, you'll have to use your "review boxes" for servers because that's what the customers will have. I guess that implies a subset of your collection on a portable drive. (a FAT one) Video editing on a laptop is not fun. It won't get fun. So I would go for a good desktop and use the laptop you have, maybe with a RAM upgrade. Personally, I like Open Source software that runs on all platforms. real word, I get very uneasy about products that lock you into one platform (in other words, avoid Final Cut Pro, even if it is a good OLE). Beware that Adobe's shrink wrap licensing allows you two machines per license but OF THE SAME PLATFORM. That made it a gigantic pain to set up Bonnie's environment, since we needed machines on both Mac and Windows. You may be able to fall through a loophole on their bulk product, though. Consult your friendly (they actually are) Adobe rep. Jacob is right, you should have an SSD available for review talks that need it, although in a true server-client architecture I doubt they matter. So we're up to: Kick ass desktop Mac, a good but cheap PC, a reasonable laptop of either flavor, a POS white box to build a music server in, a fistfull of portable drives, and most importantly of course an excellent back strategy!

Or the fakes could use better generic parts, not that I think the counterfeiters would care much. Sometimes you need a big order to get the real schlock. I doubt anything is custom except those plastic shells.

I'd love for somebody to blow the whistle on how it's done. It just seems so weird. I have a Samsung WEP-200 Bluetooth mobilephone headset. When I was looking for it on the web there was a whole lot of traffic about avoiding counterfeits. At the end of the day, I bought a real one from Amazon. For somewhere in the neighborhood of 27 or 28 bucks. How on earth could anybody counterfeit a product like that for $28? Maybe mine was stolen or black market or something, but I kind of doubt it because that's been the going price ever since. On the other hand, at the beginning of its life cycle, the MSRP was about $100. I think the price was at that level for about ten minutes. So maybe if they can stay at their intended price points, the margin on some of these products is such a gouge that anything's possible. Hmmm. An 80 point margin could actually explain a lot about the product in question, now that I think about it.....

Their take on music in the cloud has supposedly been in the pipeline for a while now. Will it be better than Mog/Spotify? Will be be marketed better and sell better even if it sucks? Will they just change course and do something else? Given that with iTunes and the iTunes store as a starting point*, let's just say they are not building on the elegance of, say, the iPod. I'd say it'll be anybody's ball game. We'll see. *With due props to Steve Jobs for breaking the back of the DRM idiots and possibly saving the music industry, if not the world. But I'd still rather have a root canal than use iTunes.

Website didn't like me. I texted.

from Bonnie.............. Thanks guys, it was big fun hanging out with you. A happy coincidence that Sigmund resembles Gene, and the weekend is somewhat known as Geneapalooza. Glad you all are happy with my design. (and my death defying conversational skills............ did not realize I was so close to death)

I kinda doubt there's anybody here with a genuine pair to compare them to. )