Craig Sawyers

FWIW I've been through a number of issues with my hearing over the last 6 months, all (thank heavens) sorted out now. Stated with losing bass from my right ear - sounded like a tinny 1960's transistor radio. Doc said fluid behind the eardrum, and it would clear. In the interim it went into low frequency tinnitus - sounded like a perpetual low frequency hum, 24/7. That progressively cleared up (months), at which point (two or three weeks ago) my left ear suddenly went really pretty deaf. That lasted for a week, and then that has cleared too. So I have for the first time in 6 months got total hearing back. The doc reckoned it was the after effects of a head cold back in the Spring. Fun it has not been.

French to Ottoman! Wow - I had no idea that Ottoman was a language. Could have been worse. In the late 1800's a genius called Pedro Carolino produced a phrase book for Portugese tourists visiting Britain. He did not know any English or French, but he did have a Portugese-French and a French-English dictionary. So he generated a phrasebook of originality and beauty, hauling Portugese into English through two languages unknown to him. Who can guess at what "To Craunch a Mormoset" could possibly mean. English as She is Spoke http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30411

Oh bugger. What a mark they all left on only 12 episodes. Other bad news regarding Fawlty Towers, Prunella Scales is pretty far down the road with Alzheimers.

That is truly awful.

Just thought of another - being as sick as a parrot.

Good heavens.

Dreadful, yes. Rare, but dreadful. This has happened before, when Manchester United were in a plane crash that wiped out most of their team in 1958 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_air_disaster . They recovered pretty well in due course (currently 3rd in the Premier League), even through they nearly financially folded in the aftermath of the crash.

I have a metrum Octave, their first DAC product. It reviewed pretty well (in fact excellent). And it does sound pretty good. But it is single-ended, and I've actually now gone balanced and use the DAC in my Logitech Transporter streamer. I feed the optical input from TV, and a network connection to the router (to NAS drive and Tidal HiFi). But you know the thing that irritates me most about Metrum? They grind the part numbers off every bit of silicon in there. I'm pretty much certain they do the same in the Adagio, along with the branded modules. That shows a certain paranoia about potential plagiarisation that simply grinds my gears. The only other company that I know of that does this is Audio Research, and they replace the ground off discrete part number with a three colour dot code. In a sense I can understand that, particularly with FET's which might be coded to be band matched for Idss and Vp.

You'd have to be quackers to do that

The +/- 400V looks a little close to the mounting holes, Kevin. As does the output connection.

This isn't April 1st, right? Holy carp, the things I built when I was 16 were orders of magnitude neater than that. What a disgraceful pig's breakfast.

Which one is she?

Back in the day, we got involved in building high field resistive magnets. The idea was that you would discharge a very large number of capacitors through a thyristor bank into a magnet. This was shrink fit into a thick stainless steel tyre to stop it from exploding as a result of hoop stress. Now that was a beast you did not want to share a room with; testing them was a bit of a game so as not to incinerate the test engineer 600V? Chicken feed. Here's a shot in a concrete bunker that this kit was installed. The blue things heading off into the distance were the capacitors.

A few years ago I managed to persuade my lady wife to accompany me to a high end audio show. This particular one was to showcase British Hi-Fi, and was in a hotel near Heathrow. We walked into one room, and a track that we knew particularly well by Marc Cohn was playing. Carole actually burst out laughing. I hustled her out with a hissed "Bear in mind that these guys have tried really really hard to design something that sounds that awful". Effort in designing a product is absolutely no guarantee that it will sound decent, and may actually sound acutely awful. One of the reasons that the infant (and not so infant) mortality rates in audio start-ups is to high.

No animal I know sleeps with such sheer abandon as a cat

39 of them. And two transistors (both germanium). I have two (don't ask) one with the hernia inducing 175 high current unit (internal wiring is welding cable). First time I used it I stuck a random TO220 on it, and without much effort at all blew a red hot heatsink tab across the room in a hail storm of hot epoxy shards. I've just resurrected a 576 - a much more useful all transistor tracer. Tek went through a brain dead period when they stopped wax potting their HV transformers and went over to epoxy potting. Alas in the late 60's epoxies were not too well developed, and degrade. Transformer overheats and then crowbars the LT supply feeding the oscillator. Tek woke up to this issue pretty quick, and soon turned over to silicone potting, which worked much better. So I rewound it. Bit of a faff, particularly the 1400T of 40AWG wire on the 2.7kV secondary. I wax potted it, and the 576 now works perfectly - needs a re-cal though. Sawyers re-wind in place. Left over ptfe sleeved wire lurking around from my T2 build

Have a truly great one!

There are ways around that problem, and also the tendency for distortion to increase significantly as you go down in frequency. Lundahl don't tend to mention this too loudly, but distortion of 0.1% at 50Hz and >0.5% distortion at 20Hz are not uncommon at higher drive levels (~5dBu). The way around this is to use the technique that Audio Precision do with their galvanically isolated inputs. This uses a very carefully designed transformer with auxiliary windings driven by an active circuit with negative output impedance. Patent is here http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4614914 . It needs very careful design, because if anything is out of kilter it can of course make a very nice oscillator.

Among a roughly equal mix of great and dreadful things, one of his least glorious policies was his awful treatment of gays. That was something I did not know until a few days ago, when the ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. Then I did a bit more reading about Castro, and it was quite correct. But put into the context of the time, when in the UK practicing gay guys were imprisoned for "gross indecency", or offered "chemical castration" as an alternative, it could be argued that gay persecution was a thing of its time globally.

Went to see this today http://www.nomanslandtheplay.com/ two titans of theatre - Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Awesome. The performance is being broadcast live to cinemas worldwide on 15th December for anyone interested in a typical Tom Stoppard Harold Pinter play.

Why not buy a kit from eBay? This (Chinese) kit handles +/-34V at up to 2.5A http://www.ebay.com/itm/locky-zs-Intelligent-curve-tracer-PCB-New-/112168145773?hash=item1a1dbe136d:g:on8AAOSw4shYAujt Or a Tektronix 575 ebay 262701477638 which will does up to 200V/10A characteristics.

Wow. Back in the day he and Khrushchev were responsible for the world coming within a hair's breadth of nuclear Armageddon. Love him or hate him, he certainly left his mark on history writ large. RIP.

{pet rant mode} = on It was summed up by my boss years ago; in earlier days he was a racing driver, and he used to describe such people as "all dust and wheelspin, but no forward traction". The world is full of them - bullshit merchants with the appearance of glossy form, but no substance at all. Grinds my gears. {pet rant mode} = off

I come from the North East of England, invaded over the years by various Scandinavian invaders. In my local dialect Kirkfjall is Church (Kirk) Hilll (Fjell)

That is the only problem with the LX-Mini, it absolutely looks like a drain pipe and rubber coupler. The trick is disguising it to look less like what it is made from http://www.linkwitzlab.com/LXmini/Gallery.htm