Craig Sawyers

Just catching up on the sad news. Brent - so sorry for the loss of your friend. Brain tumors are not a good one - I've lost three friends to that over the years. And Todd, very sorry to hear your loss.

Yeah - the 104 series were excellent. I used to visit a rather anal hi-fi shop in the late '70's which had the motto above the door "Experto crede" which I had to look up - it was "Believe the expert" in latin. Tells you all you need to know about that shop. But one day I was in and River Song by Dave Grusin was playing through 104's. And I have to say my recollection was that it was excellent. It shows the effect that had, in that forty years later I can still remember what was playing. But KEF were at the leading edge. They pioneered impulse testing of speakers, and invested what must have been an eye-popping amount of money in the early 70's - an HP computer. This was a 19" rack full of stuff that they used to do FFT analysis of impulse tests, and do crossover optimisation based on the driver FFT responses. I was lucky enough that my wife Carole (an accountant) was given the audit of KEF - and given the opportunity of buying KEF loudspeakers at a massive discount. Because we were young and did not have much money we bought Caprice II. And enjoyed them for five or six years. Wish we'd been flush enough to buy the R105's!

Ouch. Hope it all heals quickly and you get back on the bike as soon as.

Eau de colon?

KEF - Kent Engineering Foundry. Used to make crop sprayers and agricultural machinery. It was bought by Raymond Cook in 1961, ex BBC and Wharfedale, and hence renamed KEF Electronics with a completely different focus - away went the agricultural stuff, and in came the loudspeaker designs. KEF went bust in 1992 and was bought by the Chinese. So it only existed for 31 years as an independent business. Design is done on HK and manufacture in China.

At various points in my life I've been all over that diagram

Could be Lemo's competitor, Fischer. The are tantalizingly close in appearance and incompatible.

Yum yum (not)

Happy birthday!

I was on the Isle of Wight last week. Just off the South coast of England. I took this photo (among others). This was the site of the 1970 rock festival - the largest ever with 700,000 audience. Hendrix headlined, which attracted a who's who of rock legends (Baez, Dylan, Cohen, The Who, Miles Davis, ELP, Free, etc etc) The second photo is what it looked like from the same place in 1970

A massively belated happy birthday! Hope it was great....

Woah - how did I miss this? Very happy and belated birthday Dusty!

And here is Dusty talking about Dr Who. That, lkong, looks like a time vortex disrupter to me...

And Indian restaurants. You are never more than a few miles from one. Now classes as standard British cuisine - there are 17,000 in the UK. If they were uniformly distributed over the entire land area of the UK they would be spaced by less than 2.5 miles. But since they are in cities and towns it is not a case of "do you fancy an Indian meal tonight?" it is "Which Indian restaurant to you fancy tonight?". Our little town of Abingdon (pop 30k) has at least seven. A big city like Birmingham has hundreds.

First cut the blue wire....

I had no idea she had got so old. You lose track when you listen to her old, but perfect recordings in her heyday that it was many decades ago. RIP Montserrat, a great vocal artist.

A truly great man. I didn't realise that he had coined the term "God Particle" for the Higgs Boson. Also proved the existence of two types of neutrino (there is now known to be three) way back, and confirmed that the weak nuclear force was parity-breaking back in '57. Not mentioned is that Richard Feynman was also in the speculation loop about parity breaking. When the news came out that experimental results showed that was the case, he was at CERN, and apparently jumped on the desk and did a dance of joy. IOW typical Feynman. RIP Leon. Not many of the original godfathers of particle physics left now.

Stone countertops - that sounds like the baker in you writing the specs. Puff pastry, tempered chocolate - all need those cold stone counters

I smell baking bread! Hey - I really needed that video Knucks

Thanks everyone. At times like this the support of the group means so much - you really are a great bunch. Carole's on her way to Copenhagen right now, to support Steve for the next couple of days. I'd be there too, but I've got contractors crawling all over installing a new en-suite bathroom, so I'm kind of stuck here. Damn. Sue was at home with Steve until Sunday, when a bleed (from the lung cancer secondaries) meant she was readmitted. And then it was just a matter of keeping her comfortable and sedated. She has known it was terminal for about four months when they found the extent of the secondaries (lung, bowel and adrenal), and was living with a breathing tube as a result of the tracheotomy and a feeding tube too. But she was a tough cookie, just didn't just give up, and kept her pithy sense of humour right to the last. And yes - as so many here have said - rest in peace Sue. I'll miss you, girl.

I mentioned most of this in Random Shit, but it is more appropriate here. RIP my sister in law Sue, my wife Carole's sister. After a long battle over the last year, first with cirrhosis and partial kidney failure, and then with rapidly developing cancer. She died peacefully under sedation in Denmark holding hands with her husband Steve two hours ago. I've known Sue since she was 16, and she made age 60. Carole is flying out to Denmark early tomorrow to support Steve, who is in pieces.

I used to have this thing for going for a run when there was a thunderstorm - I liked the drenching downpour (yeah OK - weird). I stopped then there was a simultaneous blinding flash and a BANG, and a smell of ozone. It must have struck very very close to me. I got home in a hurry. That was the end of my going running in thunder storms ⚡ ? ?

That really is a thing of beauty, Justin!

Happy belated too! Hope that was a great ribeye.

Happy birthday!!