CarlSeibert

I just ordered some feet and one IC. Turns out the seller is Rick Roberts, who was the designer, and I assume owner, of SimplyPhysics. It's sad to see a high-end vendor bite the dust. But he's got a bunch of cones and cables for cheaps.....

I remember the feet from back in the day. At a buck a foot, I'll be snarfing some up for amps and whatnot. Who hoo. I might go for one of the cables, too. I could compare it with my own solid silver ones. There's 20 bucks worth of parts in one of my cables, which I thought were the cheapest in the whole world.

Holy cow! I didn't follow the link the first time I saw this post. Somebody tell me this is a joke, right? This person cannot be serious......

Had meeting with the City at which we basically secured victory in our three-year campaign to save the creek. I feel a few thousand pounds lighter.

I think I got a flyer from Parts Express this week or last with a similar one for $12.

I think I was listening to Colin's pair of headphones in all cases, too. I don't know if there was a difference between them and Wayne's brand new pair. I also liked the Qualias. They were delightful on Vicki's rig and on Gene's WA6SE as well. I was amazed at how light they are. I guess that's down to the excellent physical properties of unobtainium. I talked to Lamendola. He says he doesn't play with the bluesy band whose CD Ari bought anymore because they always wanted to take gigs too early in the evening. Now he has the outfit with the trumpet player. He said he didn't see the book spiking, wasn't even aware of his big fan.

What a great time! It was wonderful seeing this bunch of people again and meeting some folks in person for the first time. Big thank yous to ... well, everybody really... especially Mike for throwing the party, to Gene, who graciously shared his source with me when my lashed-together portable hard drive failed to work (as I suspected it would, actually. I've got to work on my "meet-craft". Colin successfully carried a whole rig in carry-on luggage. I was kind of wobbly just dragging stuff from across town). And the Zu guys! They worked their butts off to come all the way across the south to a headphone meet. While we were kicking back with great beer and whiskey, they were toiling to get good sound in an acoustic chamber of horrors of a hotel room. All for us. Thank you Zu guys! I was most interested to hear the He5s, which I had very much liked at CanJam. I thought they sounded nice on Gene's WA6SE (another thank-you Gene) but the whole show didn't hang together. Midrange and treble were excellent, but the bass didn't quite keep up. Dynamics weren't everything they could be. On Colin's Spud, however, it was a different story. The HE5s just sang on that amp. Midrange was palpable, the treble smooth and extended, dynamics and inner detail were spot on and the bass was coherent and PRAT-y. Colins says they're among the best headphones he has heard, and on his amp, I tend to agree. If only they could play that well my my amp. They sounded very nice indeed on Oz's Cayin hybrid, though, and that's a readily available, not terribly expensive product. My 10 watt push-pull speaker amp did a credible job with the He5s in the bass and on OK job in the rest of the band, but overall, it wasn't really in the game with the Spud and the Cayin. The Zu speakers were impressive. I have high-efficiency full-rangers in my den system and ribbons in the living room. So, I supposed I was pre-disposed to like what the Zus might have to offer, and they delivered. The midrange transparency, detail and sense of, I don't know, "tactile presence" for lack of a better word, were all present and accounted for. But the Zus took those qualities all the way through the range. I heard really excellent coherence from top to bottom, no shout or glare and microdynamics to die for. Everything was bigger and better than it is in my den. It was as if my Metronomes are a slice. These things served up the whole pie. On three watts, I might add. Very nice three watt amps, but still three watts. That's cool in its own right. I think the Zus played to my tastes, both musically and sonically. If giant scale music is your thing, these might not be your speakers. Speaking of which, more props to Ron from Zu, who explained that their products weren't for everybody - they were what they were and you'd either like them, or not. Wow. How's that compare to the pretentious, defensive bullshit you hear from reps at speaker demos way too often! These speakers are worth a listen if you get the chance. And for a whole lot of people, they could be just the ticket. I better go. Something about work. Speaking of. On Sunday a group of us went to "Jazz brunch on the Riverwalk", which was surprisingly cool, actually. Ari bought a CD from a band playing in one of the gazebos. The frontman on the home-made CD looked awful familiar. He turned out to be our medical reporter, who was with the rest of his band in the next gazebo down. Very strange.

Ate Thanksgiving dinner at Casablanca. I'm pretty sure the guy at the next table was a actor I've seen about a hundred times but I'll be damned if I can think of his name or remember any particular role. Seemed a nice enough guy. His son bounced a Play-Doh ball off Bonnie's foot. I'll think of who he is about a week from now when I least expect to. Bonnie noticed that his toenails were very shiny. Gotta go get back to being thankful for good people and stuff - this forum for example.

That Bob fellow also has SUTs based on Cinemag trafos, which are less expensive. I'm planning on doing more or less the same thing Ari did with the loading resistors (and jumpers to choose gain too) but on the inside of the box with a European-style barrier strip (which I have on hand) I figure I can just leave the lid off if I'm experimenting. It's all a little hypothetical yet as I'm still waiting for the CineMags. We'll soon know if this is easy or if I land in hum purgatory.

I'll go if I can, depending on work.

Trust me, every day at the office we see an astonishing amount of truly heartbreaking cruelty at the hands of our immigration authorities. Don't be a statistic. Get a lawyer.

Ditto. The gauge seems to do a splendid job. I wouldn't use it every day in a shop or the like, but that's not the point. And Mehran is an extraordinarily nice guy. My Shure gauge reads under. You can get somebody to weigh a bead or something and work around that, but the electronic gauge is so much less hassle to us.

I think I have acquired two more attendees, both interested in the Zu speakers. Three, if you count Oswaldo. Maybe a fourth. By the way, Art Basil is the same weekend. If anybody's interested, there is some talk of an expedition on Sunday, particularly if they do the big photo tent in Winwood again this year.

My cats don't carry stuff very far. We know a woman whose cat steals socks and puts them in the toilet. Never has been able to change the cat's behavior. She just watches her socks closely. One of my sister's dogs takes mail out of the slot and chews it. Same deal, never mind how "trainable" dogs are supposed to be. She's had to put a locking box on the inside of the mail slot. It's just something about mail, I guess.

Does anybody use Earthlinks DSL-based local phone service?Impressions? QOS? Is it great? Does it suck? It just came available in my neighborhood. I would so enjoy saying goodbye to ATT. I currently use Earthlink for DSL. It's fine. Nothing extreme to report good or bad.

I think they have some prety cool cartridges - modded Denon 103s, too.

I see that even in this, the worse year in a century, the overall turnover is trending up, too. A bit different from the spin the labels put out about a dying industry, eh? Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of fellows. Mind you, Lefstez says the big promoters are gouging their way into the same hole that swallowed the big labels. Plenty of room. They'll learn eventually.

RCA coax, Toslink and USB. No love for one over another. It's only because those are the pairs of inputs and outputs needed to connect various components.

I'll take Sally's part here. The 274B made a pretty big difference in my rig, which is to say it made a change that mattered positively to me in my system. YMMV. On one hand, I'm a little uncomfortable about what that fact might mean. (I'm not all that sure a rectifier should be that big a deal, all other things being everything they should.) On the other hand, I'm not uncomfortable with it at all. For 10% of the cost of the amp, it made it better (to my ears). Who cares why or how? I know. Designers, top DIYers and general purpose anal retentives like -ah, me - all care about such things on general principles. And all of the above sorts are represented here. But that's a different story. We're talking about a commercial product. As long as I have a warm and fuzzy that I'm not going to open up the Woo and find scorching parts and the safety ground dangling off (and I do have that warm and fuzzy) whatever works is cool with me. With all the usual caveats about personal taste, I'd tell anybody thinking about buying a 6SE to buy the Sophia and not sweat much about it.

Did you see the story a couple weeks ago about the newspaper in England that got gag ordered to not reveal that they were gag ordered? God bless Twiiter. It took about two hours to tweet the lid off that one. Then the tweetfest was in the wild to be covered by everybody. I love it when stupidity backfires. Sometimes you can beat back the hordes.

It's 2.5mm phone plug. There's not much clearance in there. I haven't heard of anybody finding a stock one that has a skinny enough body. I made mine out of a Radio Shack piece. I posted pictures of it either here or on HF. (Maybe in this very thread). A few minutes with a Fordham or Dremel and you're there. There's a little piece that's meant to be the click stop for rotation down near the jack itself that you can lock under. If you come up with an easy way to use the "real" locking shoulder, please share.

Sorry. Got stuck in an alternate dimension for a while. x2. A good quality, slow set epoxy would be my glue of choice if you should need to go adhesive route. Avoid the quickie stuff for this. I don't think I would use a filled epoxy, which may let JB Weld out. I don't quite remember its consistency.

Hmmm. The plastic thingee pivots around the brass part, right?

I asked around the office today to see if anybody had any great recommendations. The most common response was "naw, I've got a G10". One photographer said she keeps a D3 in her purse. Hmmm. She's well set up if the need to ever arises to bludgeon someone to death with her purse. One shooter recommended the Canon Powershot SD1200IS. Robert Duyos suggested a visit to Tom Craig. I was thinking the same thing. If you want to deal with a real human being who actually knows about these gizmos, Tom can be found at the Wolf Camera at Gateway in Ft Lauderdale. (Curly haired guy. Tell him Duyos or I sent you). His prices will be a little higher than Amazon or Costco, but the karmic advantages of dealing with a non-scumbag could be worth it. Besides, we know where he lives. (next door to Duyos)

Vicki, Most professionals have a Canon G-something stashed away in their laptop cases/purses/backpacks or the like. I just checked Amazon and eBay and they seem to be a bit out of your price range. And maybe a tad too big, too. I haven't bought a pocket-sized point and shoot in a while, but I can offer some generalities: A bunch of people seem to do well with the Lumixes. The lenses seem to be better than the average bear. The chimping screens work well, too. (Which is really important on a point and shoot, since never mind chimping, the screen is often the only way to point the darn thing in the right direction to make a picture.) If your camera doesn't have an optical viewfinder or has one that's poor enough that you end up using the screen as the viewfinder, REAL image stabilization would be highly recommended. I don't remember the euphemisms used, but point and shoot purveyors sometimes try to pass off a little unsharp mask in the imaging processing firmware or some sort of burst shooting scheme as image stabilization. Make sure it's the real deal. The point here is that when you use a camera with an optical viewfinder, your forehead is the image stabilizer. When the camera is bobbing about at the end of your arm, a little piezoelectric help is most welcome. I very much like the idea of throw-away batteries in a camera that I don't use often. If I forget to charge the battery, I can grab some alkalines at a seven-eleven. The how many megapixels question is tricky. It is true that there are better and worse sensor implementations at any given resolution. But words and specifications don't tell you what you need to know. The only way to know whether a camera is doing a decent job is to look at the files it creates. (At any given ISO, I might add. Point and shoots tend to get nasty noisy very quickly as ISO goes up.) That said, resolution is resolution. Old school film is equivalent to about 24 megapixels, give or take. I'd insist on at least 10 MP from any digital I'd buy at this point. Oh, and look at the corners of the frame. Sometimes the trade off for very thin pocket-size bodies is really b-a-d fuzziness in the corners. I like to go to the camera store with an SD card in my pocket, shoot a few frames and retire to my laptop to see what's what. I'll ask around at the office tomorrow if anybody has any specific and up-to-date advice.