CarlSeibert

Naw, for break in it's gotta be latin disco. That's a must. Richard Cheese was a reference. It's all about the intellectual and emotional connection with the music, you see.

Some stuff doesn't seem to change much at all and some stuff does. Beats me why. In this case, I had the broadly similar 420s at hand, so the relative change over time, one against the other, was obvious. I never have bought the 'getting used to it' theory. That was controled out here in any case.

I made a long and detailed post elsewhere. The high points are: The new model is moar better. More extended on top, better detail throughout the band, better background (or microdynamics), removable cable and nicer physical design. They need a crapload of break in - a couple hundred hours at least - and as they break in, they may actually sound worse than straight out of the box. I used a Richard Cheese album as an audio reference. I was a hopeless fanboy for the 420, so if you don't like the 420, don't listen to me. Shure SE-420 vs SE-425 (long) - Head-Fi.org Community

"Some people seek divinity, but most of us just want more bass.", as my friend Alan says. This could be cool for movies, but how many sound engineers are likely to incorporate 11 Hz effects in their soundtracks?

Weirdly, at almost the exact time you said that, I got this urge to go to Skyline Chili.

Happy Birthday!

Doug - Thanks for pointing that out, "that" be several things, actually . When I was thinking MKP, I was thinking of the Wima. I'll look and see if the FKPs will fit. The lower value output cap would make things a lot easier. More money available for shopping, or trying a couple things. Frank - That's just what we're going to do. We started out thinking we were going to do them identically, but we've drifted a little. We'll try to keep the differences controlled so we can compare and reach some valid conclusion when they're up and running. Thanks guys!

We'll be using PRP resistors, 'cept for a couple values they don't have. I think Wayne built the prototype with MKPs. Anybody have any thoughts on those scary looking coupling caps? MIT Multicaps look intriguing. They're expensive, but not heart attack inducing expensive. Has anybody used them or heard them?

A friend and I are both building Pearl IIs. A sizable portion of the cost is capacitors. I don't have enough experience to have a well developed gut feeling for value or any favorite brands. There are basically three flavors we have to chose: big-ish electrolytics that smooth power, caps in the RIAA network that are between the signal and ground and two coupling caps, smack dab in the signal path -one is two paralleled film caps of small-ish value and right at the output we have what is specified to be a 22uF electrolytic, bypassed with a film cap. There's an armload of these things, so just buying the fanciest boutique brands all the way through doesn't seem like a smart option. So, advice? Brand preferences? Should everything that touches the signal path be the same brand or price range? Or should I go all out for the two coupling applications? There are 22uF film caps (at ghastly prices, I'm afraid) so would it be a good idea to dispense with the electrolytic there? I've actually heard and respect stuff that you guys have designed and built, so I have a baseline to weigh advice here that I wouldn't have on some other forum where I have no idea who's deaf and who's not. I'll attach the schematic in case anybody wants to be specific. Pearl_II_SCH.pdf

I picked up a little pancake-tank job for, IIRC $35 with a coupon from Harbor Freight. It's not going to last all that long, but for 35 bucks, who cares. I got the coupon out of Stereophile, but I think the ad is currently running in some laddie mag that Bonnie saw at the gym.

I'm late to the discussion here, but since Grahame turned me on to the VortexBox, I've become an instant fanboy of the thing. Whether you build it yourself or buy one, it's an appliance, but it's based on a full operating system, so you can change it or update it however you want. It's got servers for Squeezebox, iTunes, Sonos and some others. You can use it as a file server (smb) It's got an autoripper that will make whatever combination of file formats you need from CDs or automatically transcode a collection you put in it. And assuming you build it in a real computer or buy an appliance that has a real processor, you won't run into the slowness problems that a lot of people suffer with NASes. One word of warning. I got an email the other day. If you want to use it as an iTunes server (as opposed to using it as a file server and mounting it as the data store from iTunes on some computer) it won't support iTunes10 yet. Supposedly, this will be addressed this week or next.

Cool. Thanks. I feel so connected. Actually, I very much like the tweets. I pipe them into TweetDeck at work so I'm ready to goof off at a moment's notice.

I quit caffeine twice. The first time was pretty much like the withdrawal sequence in Trainspotting. And it didn't last. Then, a few years ago, I got a terrible case of food poisoning. I couldn't have caffeine for a week and didn't much care, since I felt like I was dying anyway. Since then, I've been a decaf person mostly. I have no desire to go through all that again.

I haven't gotten a new-thread tweet lately. Is it just me or are others tweetless?

He's a seriously cute cat!

Bummer. He was one of the greats.

Hmmm. Pricy maybe, but nice. Pearl2, knit 1?

Good to know.......

Sad indeed. The Fugs were great. CIA man is a desert island classic.

It's always best to hang with the better class of criminals.

I've been using dbPowerAmp lately on a semi-weak virtual machine with excellent results. Getting my tags and cover art in order on the transcoded files has worked out to be a two-step process in Picard and MP3Tag, neither one of which I had used before because neither would run on my finicky Mandriva 2007 machine. But both seem to be pretty nifty. I didn't spring for the batch conversion feature, but maybe I should have. Oddly, dbPowerAmp requires a paid-for module to convert from FLAC to MP3.

Cats will do that. Back when Enigma went outside (and regularly fought with Sophie from next door) there were a couple occasions when she got wounds we couldn't see, even when we looked for them. Then they suddenly get infected. The vet says they get infected most of the time. We took to keeping antibiotic pills on hand. After giving her a pill, the wounds on us were usually pretty easy to see. Now that she stays indoors, life is much easier.

x2

An interesting point.

Nice avatar.