CarlSeibert

Vicki- Ivan is adorable.

These will be my first attempt at shielded. The plan is to do basically the IC that has worked for me before - solid core silver in Teflon spaghetti around cotton core (7/32 or thereabouts) - some cotton spacing material, then braided shield with maybe foil if I feel ambitious and adjust to make it fit in an arbitrary size sheath. 1/2" seems big enough to fit it all in, although I suspect not with as much space between the conductors and shield as I originally fantasized, and small enough to fit on jacks at one inch centers. How I'll taper down to fit in the back of my RCAs...well, I haven't quite figured that part out yet. Cool. Thanks.

That they might want to sell? I'm about to place an order at Parts Connexion, but they don't carry nylon sheath. I don't want to place an order at Take Five for four feet of braid (I'd probably end up buying a set of WBT plugs or something, too.) I need about 4 feet of 1/2 inch (this stuff: Take Five Audio - Canada's Online Source For High-End Audio, Parts and Accessories - Nylon Expandable Cable Sleeve ) for a half meter pair of interconnects. It doesn't have to black. Some other color or a cool pattern would be fine (or better) If anybody needs something from Parts Connexion that's not worth the shipping, holler and I'll add it to my order.

Very. But why? And how on earth did you know to look?

What did you finish them with?

I think you can still do better at Headphone Solutions and some other places.

Don't know why I haven't noticed this thread before. Listened to some records I bought at Radio Active. Went bicycling. Some sort-of-rude person sucked my wheel for a solid five miles without saying a word. Which is kind of weird. First off, worms go faster than I do. Secondly, as a perennial weak person, I've found beneficial to be polite and express major gratitude for any wheel dumb luck allows me to get a grip on. The person is less likely to get annoyed and drop me like a bad habit.

Good Googling. "foam Teflon" gets nothing but noise. Small quantities of the foamed tape at a reasonable price could be a trick to find around here. The string idea is excellent. Shortly after I posted, I stumbled on an inspiration in my garage in the form of a bag of "Cotton T-shirt fabric mills ends" that I bought at Constantines for applying stain. They're rings of t-shirt fabric, like calamari. I think they are the off-cuts from when they start up the tubular knitting machines. Cut 'em so they're strips and they should wind just fine. A layer of Teflon tape to keep it all tidy, and the shield should slip on without too much of a fight. Another flash of inspiration. That guy skips the Teflon tubes altogether. As long as you keep it fairly well sealed, I would guess it could work really well. (Cotton being a better dielectric than Teflon. But not as good as air, which is mostly what touches the wire in my IC). An issue I've had has been a limit to how long an interconnect I could make, based on getting the silly wire into the tube. His way could be unlimited in length. Alternatively, you could do non-continuous lengths of tube every foot or so, maybe, if you were concerned about the conductors coming loose and moving around and shorting. Oh. I see that fellow uses Titebond on the end of his rope. I have used epoxy finishing resin (the kind you would use to glass a model airplane wing) and it has worked great. It's hard, but a set screw will still bite. Just nip off the little blob that forms at the very end with side cutters. Any kind of epoxy that gets liquid as it cures should work fine. Thanks guys!

What's the diameter of those cables before the braid? Then what sizes of shield braid and nylon braid worked? I have some similar cables, sort of backwards Van Haus - fine silver conductors in oversize Teflon tubes, wound over cotton rope. I want to make a shielded pair. The naked cables are almost exactly 3/8" I'm wondering if I'll be able to get them into 3/8 copper braid. Then, if I do, will I be able to get the whole affair into 3/8 nylon? On the other hand, it would take a mile of Teflon tape to make 1/2" work. Does anybody know if foamed teflon tape can be sourced? More space between the braid and the conductors might be a good idea anyway, capacitance-wise. Or cotton fabric, maybe?

Or, assuming it works out so, to be able to play the contents of a drive on the fly without scanning and subsequently deleting all the files from the DB. I'm thinking about that stack of Christmas CDs. I've never scanned them in since I don't want them popping up on random play in the middle of June, but playing them randomly on December 24th would be way cool.

I've never been brave enough to save a track as mono, either at home or for the web, for fear that something terrible would happen on the player side and a couple of planets would slip out of alignment or something. We've already lost one planet. You can't be too careful about this kind of stuff.

is out. I have it installed on this Mac laptop and my main Linux desktop. It seems faster, appears to use less memory and is more spritely all around. Plugins seem to work better on the Linux version. I haven't tried the proxy server feature. I'm happy to see that they've added a spell checker that works in vBulletin forms, like FireFox has had forever. I like that Speed Dial is now expandable to more than nine items and that I don't have to hold the mouse button down on menus on the Mandriva machine like it was an ancient Mac. (It's the little things that make me happy.) All the features that made me like the browser in the first place are still present and accounted for and working, as best I can tell. On the other hand, the RPM version(s) didn't work on my Mandriva 2007 system. I had to root around to find a static-linked bundled version in a tarball. Grrrrr. Somehow, as I get older I am beginning to expect software to actually work and I have less of a sense of humor about crap like that. I'd love to report that Operalink works better in the new version, but sadly, it still fails to sync and hoses the application if you try. On the Mac, it threw the browser into some sort of loop and I had to start with a clean profile to get Opera to even start after trying it. On the Linux box, it just ground away for a a while and failed reasonably gracefully. More or less. I suspect the failure of Operalink is really on the server side. It's frustrating because synchronization would be such a great feature if they would just put forth the effort to freakin' make it work!

My friend, Mr Fordham Tool and I had a chat with my improvised plug at the headphone end of the cable. The new MkII version looks like the picture. It locks under the little boss down near the actual jack and it stays pretty tight. If it annoys me to cause the existence of a MkIII version, I'll make the taper shallower so as to allow more of a twist to lock or unlock it. Now it's about 1/8 of a turn, which means it is possible it twist it 1/8 of a turn to the left and have it come undone. That said, I took the headphones to lunch with a couple friends today. There was a lot of plugging and unplugging and passing back and forth and the cable stayed secured. I'll attach a picture of the plug plugged into the cans as well, only to show that the ugly part doesn't show. You don't have to worry about aesthetics when you make this. It would probably be better to lock against the same surface that Shure does, but at the moment it struck me to do this, I couldn't think of an elegant way to fabricate a plug that would do that. I doubt what I have now will irritate me enough to ever revisit the issue BTW, at this point, the 840s seem to have settled in even more. The giant bass problem appears to be a thing of the past.

When I first got an SB3, I did think it was odd that that there were no buttons. You couldn't make it do anything without the remote. So, OK. Touchscreen = good. 24/96 = very good. USB attached storage = good, I guess. And they didn't jack the price through the roof. So I'm in. What's up with a hundred bucks for the wall bracket, though? What the heck can a wall bracket for a one-pound device do that's worth $100?

The fact he doesn't know that FLAC and Apple Lossless and AIFF and... are all around and available is plenty to qualify him as a "non-audiophile". Why not being "one of those people" (us) might give an opinion more weight out in the land of the unwashed is a puzzling and lamentable thing. But it is what it is. I'm pretty sure it's the other kind of compression he's bitching about - compression of dynamics. And he's right. You don't have to be one of "us" to know that most of the popular music being sold (at inflated prices, no less) sounds like shit. Young people won't develop an appreciation for either music or good gear if most of the music they want to hear is unlistenable. It's criminal.

Wow. I have a bunch of the old-style little ones with molded on handles and some of the bigger, onion-shaped ones with the hex shafts. The onion-shaped handles let you put a LOT of torque on. I haven't had one fail yet. Maybe you got some from a bad batch.

They already have a remote with a screen, but it's got buttons. Personally, I think buttons are great and I'm kicking myself for not scoring one on the cheap when Circuit City went out of business.

Bob Lefsetz, the music industry guy got his set (stereo, CD, it appears). His blog post is pretty interesting, coming from someone not associated with our audiophile fringe. http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2009/08/28/the-beatles-remasters/ Here's one of his closing grafs: Personally, I think headphones are the gateway drug to addict young people to caring about sound, but that might just be me.

Wiha System 4 Interchangeable Precision Screwdrivers being one of several options. Unless you want the P-shaped jobs that bicycle mechanics use. In which case maybe Park or the inexpensive ones from Performance. But seriously, once you've used Wihas you'll never screw anything in any other way.

There's a good reason for its existence. I'm certainly not going to get up and go across the room to touch the thing. I hear that's still illegal in some states anyway.

... which we should have mentioned earlier, actually.

A visit here Acoustics Forum • Index page might be helpful. And for what it is or isn't worth, I found those sticky strips that go on your nose helped me with both snoring and some sleep apnea related nightmares. As always, YMMV a whole heck of a lot.

Arrrrrggh!

That's eerily realistic. At least for Enigma. When we had Toots, you could just about hand her a pill and she would swallow it.

Hmm. Coming from the visual world, I never thought this through. Let me see if I've got this straight.. In imaging, you've got n-number of steps between two absolute values - black and white, or some arbitrary ink coverage values that you're printer has chosen to represent them. If you have 8 bits, you have 256 usable steps; 16 bits and you have 64K-odd usable steps. (8 bits is generally fine for output, BTW, but doesn't have enough headroom to allow for much editing - editing used here in the sense of tonal manipulation). If I'm hearing grawk right, in audio, only one end of the scale is fixed. You go down from 0db in steps that are fixed in size, rather than being proportional to some absolute value for "really very quiet". With a longer word length, you get a different value (in terms of energy, say) for your "really very quiet" value, and thus, if the "really very quiet" value is lower than the 80 or so db down that real gear can produce (or the 6 db down that pop recordings might have), then your longer word is wasted. The waveform drawn in the usable part of the dynamic range would come out identical either way. Filbert? grawk? Is this what you're saying?