Craig Sawyers

Woohoo! Just got tickets to see Ian McKellern playing King Lear in Chichester (UK) in October in the tiny 300-seat Minerva Theatre. Seen some landmark stuff in that little theatre. McKellern in 2011 took a break from filming The Hobbit in New Zealand to be in The Syndicate (a play about The Mob). Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth (went on to the West End, Broadway and then was made into a movie). Patrick Stewart in Bingo (a play about Shakespeare in his senile older years). That will actually be two Lears we have seen in a year. A couple of months ago we saw Glenda Jackson, aged 80, playing Lear in the West End, and it was absolutely awesome.

It is a really big thing, extreme ironing. Google it and look at the images. People try to do it in ever more beautifully crazy places.

That looks like it is in with a fighting chance

Sounds to me a bit like like extreme ironing

Yup. I'd pay money to purchase a normal bias Lambda extension cable.

Yup. The main consideration (well as far as I was concerned!) in buying where we have lived for the last 20 years was the listening room. It is actually the lounge, but was 6m x 4m with a concrete floor. So I have the luxury of siting dipole speakers 1.6 metres from the end wall. And I have a listening seat that I pull out and put in the sweet spot. Bliss.

Have a great day - happy birthday!

Several speakers ago I owned a pair of Maggie MG1C, which sounded splendid. However, they had a nasty habit of the tweeter wire on the main panel going open circuit (the tweeter on this model was not a ribbon). Awkwardly this was aluminium wire, and I guess failed by work hardening and cracking. Being a guy who does not admit defeat, I procured some aluminium wire of the right gauge, and made a jig to zig-zag it the same way as the original. I then pulled the old wire off, cleaned the film, and glue bonded the new wire on. The main difficulty was soldering aluminium wire, which needs a special flux and solder, the details of which I entirely forget! Eventually they failed entirely when the diaphragm film split. But they had a great innings!

Although he died on 8th Feb aged 83, RIP Peter Mansfield, Nobel prizewinner for invention of MRI

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to the woody man! Have a truly great one Steve.

Happy, and healthy birthday, Ed! Have a great one

We got our annual snowfall here in the UK. About 1mm. And that melted overnight. Currently 10C (50F) during the day. Feels like spring.

There isn't enough bacon in the UK to cope with a return of Grahame

Happy birthday - have a great one!

I've used both CFM60 and 55. I once chopped one in half to find out why they were so phsically big for their power rating - and saw the really thick epoxy coating over the resistive element. Much greater than that on "conventional" metal film resistors. I built the T2 with Xicons thoughout, including the batteries, and fingers crossed that is still working perfectly. But my BH (original) is built with CFM60.

The ones specified for use in KG's SRM-T2 clone were Xicon 273 series http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/351/Xicon_10312016_MF-RC_series-1022131.pdf which are 1/2W, 350V continuous rating. But you can easily buy metal film 1/2W resistors with 500V AC/DC rating. Some builders used PRP resistors, which are 500V rated. http://prpinc.com/products/leaded-metal-film-resistors/pr9372-series-leaded-metal-film-audio

Had to look up Judge Norris, but he sure looks like he was one of the good guys. RIP Judge Norris.

Norilsk, Russia Ditto Ditto Trans-Labrador Highway in northeastern Canada Omaha, Nebraska suburb of Elkhorn

That is true, but lower bandwidth is a result of greater leakage inductance, which means more radiated interference. It is not clear that there is a perfect choice - toroid or EI (or R-core) there are compromises with all of them in different areas.

This is the main supplier in the UK. Up to 5kVA. Toriodal. http://www.airlinktransformers.com/balanced_power_supply/conditioning_balanced_power_supply/

^want! Edit - want less now I see the price. But, like I said, this is head-case!

Because that how it rolls on head-case

I'd agree with that rule of thumb. For 500VA I've generally needed 6.3AT. The unfortunate thing is that this rating is way above what is needed once the transformer is energized. So in general I use a butch Omron relay with a time delay of a half second or so (which is overkill). The relay shorts out a power resistor in the range 4.7 ohm - 10 ohm in series with the transformer primary. The choice of resistor is quite important, since it has to deal with a high inrush current in the tens of amps range for some tens of milliseconds. So it has to be significantly overrated to be reliable in the long term. I tend to use an aluminium clad 25W resistor screwed to the chassis a-la-Krell. Having said all that, I have never had any problems at all with the power-on of either the T2 clone or the BH original.

Oh my - that is bad news. RIP John Hurt. Was lucky enough to see him on stage with Harriet Walter Penelope Wilton in something by Chekov (it was a weird fusion of two plays) about ten years ago. Edit it was fifteen years ago; the date of the review does not lie https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2002/sep/20/theatre.artsfeatures2