Craig Sawyers

WE reissued these a few years ago; I guess they must have stopped at some point and have restarted. When they made them they were a stupidly eye popping amount of money each. And if you wanted a matched pair - second mortgage time. Oh yes - just looked at the link. $1299 for a matched pair.

Happy birthday!

Shit - we were in London today, to (a) The Cezanne Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (b) eat lunch and (c) go to a first rate play with Juliet Stevenson. But we only live an hour away. Seriously - if you are in the UK and have some spare time - come visit. Near Oxford.

RIP Peter W. Jason King was a must-watch back in the day. Interesting and strange guy with a largely fictitious past, the story of which he changed several times over his life. There is even uncertainty when he was born and where, what his parents did, or even what his birth name was - the truth of which he carries with him and may never be known with anything remotely certain. They don't make them like that anymore!

Hardly know how to start with the RIP's, they have been coming so thick and fast, but Dolores, oh dear.

Happy birthday G-man Have a great bacon day!

Happy birthday!

Have a great birthday!

Just recomissioned my BH original - the one Kevin designed in 2000-2004 with just about every transistor in it obsolete. It has been sitting for several years after I finished the KG SRM/T2 clone. Fired up just fine, and still sounds stunning.

RIP Ray. I used to run the University disco back in the mid/late 70's, and the final play was Nights in White Satin to send everyone off to bed (together). End of a legend.

Formulas for shielding effectiveness here http://mumetal.co.uk/ . They also do a standard range of mumetal deep drawn and hydrogen annealed transformer cans.

What is your application that you need mumetal shielding? The stray field from a big toroid is pretty low in the first place. Anyhow, provided the ribbon is thin you can gently bend it on a large radius without losing the properties. What it does not like is being bent sharply. Plenty on the websites of mumetal suppliers about all this.

Christmas lunch. Butchered a duck. Legs off (cooked confit style for 3 1/2 hours at 85C under goose fat). Wings off. Breasts off. Used remaining carcass, wings, neck chopped up to make a stock. Cooked breasts classic style - skin side down in cold pan, then heat to crisp the skin and render the fat. Into the oven for 7 minutes skin side up to finish, and rest for 5 minutes. With roast vegetables and Amarone. (In the Silence of the Lambs book, he eats his liver with some fava beans and an nice Amarone. When they moved to the film they reckoned not many people had heard of Amarone, so they changed it to Chianti.)

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday! Have a great one

I was as that tour in Birmingham UK. Absolutely superb from beginning to end. So glad I saw him perform on stage. If you don't have the DVD of that concert rush out and buy it.

I've got a permanent slight buzzing sound in my left ear. You think you've got problems?

Condolences Knucks and RIP. It is a really special thing for someone born in 1917 to get to 100. It turns out right now that over a quarter of people currently under 16 will get to 100 or more (UK statistic), so it will become a much more frequent thing in coming years.

Cheesus!

Well pardon me - since I have failed to answer the question, read this http://www.analog.com/media/en/training-seminars/tutorials/MT-019.pdf

It depends on what parameters are important. One thing is noise. Simple balanced input stage based generally have (a) different input impedance for balanced differential, +, - and common mode and (b) Based on 10k resistors produce about -105dBu from a low impedance drive. Although that is pretty quiet and good enough for many, with a single ended stage there is no series resistance and it is fairly straightforward to get -120dBu either with a low noise op-amp or discrete.. You *can* design balanced stages with the same noise performance as unbalanced, by using parallel unity gain buffers driving parallel low feedback resistance balanced stages. But you end up with a lot of op-amps and board real estate to achieve that. The THAT balanced input stages and drivers (Designed and patented by Bill Whitlock of Jensen) are interesting. Their input stage common mode rejection, and distortion, is superb, which is the main aim of the chip topology, but internal resistances are around 14k which again compromises noise performance. It is horses for courses, really.

I'm with you there Kevin. The sheer mechanical beauty of an A700 is the thing that gets me going. But it would collect dust. Mind you, I know of at least one long-term vinyl junkie who is so paranoid about wear that he puts them onto tape at the first play and then stores the vinyl never to be played again. To me that just defeats the whole point of the vinyl thing.

I started watching that wondering what relevance an R2R D to A converter had to a tape machine. Then the penny dropped R2R was Reel to Reel. Duur.......

Black Gate caps have not been available for a decade or so. Rubycon used to make them for Jelmax; I think there is graphite powder in there. Rubycon decided that their business model, in making capacitors by the billion did not match making small numbers of boutique parts for the audio industry, and pulled the plug. Actually they pulled it twice. First time, they were persuaded to continue. That lasted a year or two, and then goodnight Vienna. So any NOS Blackgate caps out there have been sat on a shelf for at least ten years. And if they are recent, they are fakes. And dontcha just love vertically mounted resistors. I haven't seen that sort of thing since TV's in the 1970's.

The real tragedy is that so far he has not immortalised himself with a Darwin Award.