Craig Sawyers

Thomas Beecham, the orchestra conductor whose quotes could fill a book, was asked by a lady acquaintance what instrument her son ought to take up: "I have no hesitation madam in recommending the bagpipes. Because they sound exactly the same when you have finished learning them as when you start learning them"

It isn't clear if the various bits of the new case are electrically connected. Many case manufacturers powder coat or anodize all the parts, and leads to odd problems with ground continuity.

They look like Quad ESL57, but they are the wonderful and obsolete Dahlquist DM10. They need more room behind them though. In the way that only Germans can, they have remanufactured the ESL57 https://www.quad-musik.de/index.php/en/products/electrostatics/esl57-qa .

I'm very sad to say that Bob Weightman, the world's oldest man, died yesterday two months after his 112th birthday after a short battle with cancer. Peacefully in his sleep. RIP Bob. An astonishingly long life well lived.

Wrong thread for that - I'll repost.

I'm very sad to say that Bob Weightman, the world's oldest man, died yesterday two months after his 112th birthday after a short battle with cancer. Peacefully in his sleep. RIP Bob. An astonishingly long life well lived.

I don't think that smoothie looks innocent at all - it looks like it came straight from a nuclear clean up operation. I tried to find a suitable emoji and failed. Oh wait a minute Seriously Knucks - I'm really sorry you had such a bad a bad and scary day. It really must have come very close to food poisoning - or maybe it was just that.

As I said - the reviewers kind of stopped at the physical appearance, which they hated. I'd forgotten how superb they were inside, and that the A100 was dual mono! I do however remember the blue flexible links in the preamp. It wasn't long after those beautiful British manufactured products were built that Cambridge Audio made decision to have them built in Taiwan. The problem was that they were too expensive to build in the UK, and were close to making a loss on every single one sold. The Taiwan outfit (forget their name - it was 30-odd years ago!) used to build them , box them (including instruction manual etc) and ship to the UK for a goods inward cost less than the circuit board parts cost (ie not counting transformers and cases) at Cambridge Audio. Looked like a dog inside, with the cheapest brown circuit boards, but worked just fine. When we bought CA from the receiver, quite a bit of the stock was from Taiwan. As part of the appearance uplift we started manufacture back in the UK to get a grip on quality.

Love it or hate it you can sure see that pickup coming. Actually looks like something out of Close Encounters...

Ah - the good old battleship grey Cambridge Audio livery. It was panned by the reviewers, as were the buttons on the CD player (they described them as reminiscent of poking dead flesh). Very unfair, because the product performance and sonics were good. However the reviews killed that iteration of Cambridge Audio (~1990). We acquired the wreckage when I worked at Wharfedale, including a massive inventory of product, for almost pocket change (at least in a corporate sense). We sold the inventory at knock down prices, and then did nothing more than change the appearance to a dark gold colour, and the dimple in the knobs became a light gold colour pin instead. After that they sold very well. I turned the Cambridge Audio technical team to the re-launch of the Leak brand, that Wharfedale owned. Among those was a very young Steve Sells, fresh from University, who I let off the leash and told him to design the best power amp he could - a Krell-beater. I got a design consultancy to do the appearance design, and Steve designed FET output monoblocks of truly heroic performance. When we set up to show that at Heathrow, I wired up the speakers and only got a very quiet sound like a tinny transistor radio. I'd left the shorting links across the back of the speakers, and Steve's design was playing the speaker cables into a short circuit without breaking sweat. Fast forward several decades, and Steve is now director of engineering at Naim. They likewise let him off the leash, and the astonishing and ridiculously expensive Statement was the result (google it). Cambridge Audio, from its foundations in 1966, has been bust umpteen times over the decades. But astonishingly it is still very much alive and still British, and owned by Richer Sounds. It was orignally founded by my good friend and mentor Gordon Edge (RIP). To celebrate 50 years from the foundation of the company, Cambridge Audio introduced the high end Edge series of products in 2016. They even incorporated Gordon's always barely legible signature on the circuit board silk screen.

Oh yes. Betamax, I bought a Betamax back in the day because it was technically superior to VHS, and the tapes were physically smaller. But VHS won the day - so I had a lemon on my shelf. Betamax, VHS - long dead formats both of them now. Like cartridge tapes, cassette tapes, floppy discs, Zip drives and quadraphonic. But who would have thought that vinyl records would make a come back?

I discovered the problem with chopping chilies in my early 20's. Then going for a wizz. It is a lesson once learnt never forgotten . That picture in the Wikipedia link is a horror story. Look at the front of the stainless steel units that the chef is standing at. And the filthy wiping rag. Sure he has some stuff organised in the foreground, but the rest of the kitchen is salmonella waiting to happen. Ugh. Can you imagine how Gordon Ramsey would take that place apart? It looks like a classic Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares episode.

Ouch. At least it wasn't California Reapers . Small knives are a real danger - I tend to use large ones, kept really sharp. A mate of mine is a pro chef. At least he was - he stopped when they had kids. The hours are stupidly long and he wanted to see the kids grow up. Pre-virus we used to have a cook-in from time to time; beer and cooking for us and wives. And watching him prepare vegetables in particular is a thing to behold. After catering college, he said that the first restaurant he joined would not let him actually cook anything until he had proved his knife skills to their satisfaction - which took 6 months of veg prep and butchery. And when he cooks our kitchen looks like an operating theatre rather the the mess I generate when I cook. He tells me that in a restaurant kitchen you have to have an almost OCD level of tidiness, otherwise you just can't get dishes out on time. I buy our cookware and knives from this place https://www.procook.co.uk/

Have a truly marvelous day, Brent - Happy Birthday!

FWIW Springbank 10 in the UK is £40, or the equivalent of $49 at today's exchange rate. Macallan Gold Double-Cask is £45 ($55), which is the cheapest 10 year, but for rare bottlings you can stump up many hundreds (not for me, though!).

Happy birthday!

Just found out (from my monthly whisky magazine) that DT introduced a trade tariff of 25% on single malt scotch whisky, in October 2019. Exports of single malt to the US from Scotland are down by 25% as a result. It is expected that it will fall further, because in anticipation of this move, US importers have stockpiled so the full 25% price hike has not been felt in full yet. Here, we have frozen the duty we pay on scotch in an attempt to support the industry, and the Chancellor Rishy Sunak is going to lobby the Trump administration to get the 25% tariff scrapped.

Isn't that Stretch's bedroom minibar?

Two boxes of Scapa in the tower. Bloody awkward bottle height - it is quite a bit taller than a regular bottle and so doesn't fit on a regular shelf. Not half bad whisky though...

We're now using bacon from these guys https://www.finnebrogue.com/naked/our-range/naked-bacon/ that has no artificial curing agents. It is on supermarket shelves and is delicious. And hardly more expensive than regular bacon.

nrop? ? I had a pair of maggies of the same vintage, but the larger size. The weakness is that the tweeter burns out - it is not a ribbon in the lower cost models - it is electromagnetic, the same as the woofer panel but with much thinner aluminium wire. Determined to limp them along, I stripped the tweeter wire off the diaphragm, bought a reel of the same gauge, and adhesively bonded it to the diaphragm. Main problem was actually soldering aluminium wire - not straightforward. Worked fine until eventually the film diaphragm split and that was the end of the road for them. The only bits I have left are the connector panel and oak strips. Anyway, beware of buying older generation maggies.

Ooh - a Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference complete with sweep arm and stylus brush. The only thing that is not original is the SME arm - it should be the iconic Fluid Arm. I lusted after these in the early 70's in a way that was almost painful. https://www.transcriptorsengineering.com/

Grief - what a mess. Why a massive, electronics shredding surge when they reconnect the supply after clearing the fault is anybody's guess. Sounds like bungling incompetence by the electricity company to me.

Happy birthday - have a great one!