Craig Sawyers

I had absolutely no idea that Robin Williams was such a keen cyclist.

Thanks mate - will download and have a look. The Ayre stuff is pretty awesome.

I have that on CD (well, now ripped to the NAS too). Great album.

I thought I had a basic grasp of the tourbillon, until I chanced on a 3-axis version. Just a pity the cages look so roughly finished.

I'll probably configure it single ended first. The two small boards can be bal2unbal or unbal2bal. So for SE these would be unbal2bal. Then rewire tonearm in a way I have not entirely thought through yet and go balanced input to balanced output. Then the small boards would be bal2unbal just to provide an unbal output if needed. Casework will come from here http://www.modushop.biz/site/ , at which point I will be financially punished as a result of the stupidly weak pound (globally) as a result of the clowns who voted us out of Europe.

Just put it on my favourites list on Tidal HiFi - will listen to later. Useless factoid number 37a: Mark Knopfler bought his first guitar from the shop I worked in on a Saturday aged 16 http://www.jgwindows.com/about-us .

Happy birthday!

OK - completed and part tested current input balanced phono stage by Borbeli (and Sigurd Ruschovski). Better sound good - cheap to build it was not. Need the casework and build three more shunt regulators (the thing with the black heatsink). For use with Garrard 401/SME/DL103(Zu Audio rebuild)

I'm not on Amazon Prime. Yet!

RIP Ali Javan, inventor of the Helium Neon laser (in 1958!) http://news.mit.edu/2016/physics-professor-emeritus-ali-javan-dies-0929

Strange Angels. In her earlier stuff it was either speech or vocoder. For Strange Angels she had to go to singing lessons. On other topics: The Ring. Saw the whole thing live three years ago here https://lfo.org.uk/ . Each part was separated by a day, so the whole thing fitted into a week. Awesome. My wife is not a Wagner fan, but she was in tears at various points, and latched on to the massive story arc of the whole cycle. And if you like Gould, and a very strange guy he was too, buy the boxed set of everything he ever did. 40 CD's. It is particularly interesting to compare his two recordings of the Goldberg Variations, one as a young man and one a year before his untimely death at the age of 50. They are very, very different. In all his recordings you have to ignore his grunting though.

I'm a real fan of Anderson, but I don't have that. I was frankly amazed that she is now 69. Where have the decades gone?

^This. The national news in the UK is reporting many people abandoning their homes and heading out of the storm's path.

Looking at the spec for the Rigol, you have a choice of 50MHz or a bandwidth limit of 20MHz. Since the noise voltage goes as the square root of the bandwidth, and assuming you have selected 20MHz bandwidth the noise voltage you measure will be 32 times higher than you would get for a 20kHz audio bandwidth. A-weighting applies a correction for the way the ear's sensitivity changes with frequency for quiet sounds.

Yes I can do that. They key is to measure over that audio bandwidth and the A-weight it. I'll give that a bash tomorrow.

I could be going deaf (not outside the realms of possibility) but my T2, either through 007's or a 1980's pair of original low bias Lambdas is absolutely silent.

Back in the early 80's I worked for a technology consultancy (PA Technology), and to generate ideas for marketing we used to organise brainstorm sessions. One of the guys in Electrical Engineering held one on white goods. I chirped up "hey - why not put a microprocessor in them and tie them up to a modem. Then you could phone the appliance and control it remotely". Now the fundamental rule of brainstorming is you don't reject ideas; but the guy who was running it said "Oh, I can just see it now - you get home and the dinner isn't made, and the wife says that the cooker wouldn't boot!". So the potential internet of things failed to get off the ground 30-odd years ago. I'll shut up now before I get into VR.

I'm kind of lucky regarding playing. I have a Garrard 401 that has a 78 speed. And when I bought that it came with Shure M75 cartridge along with a new in box 78 stylus along with a couple of regular vinyl ellipticals.

In a moment of madness I picked up 250 78rpm discs. All classical, complete sets and soloists like Gigli. My god they are heavy - I reckon that they weigh in at 75kg (170lb). Next task is to catalog precisely what on earth I've got. Oh - the whole lot was free of charge. WAF = 0 or even negative.

Hats off Brent - that is totally great. Zoe looks like she had a superb time, and has an awesome dad.

The blue is a lot more shouty than the red for sure.

I bought a bunch of different colour coded teflon high voltage rated insulated wire (eBay) when I built the T2 (and earlier than that the original BH). It was actually a bit more complicated with those valved/tubed designs because the heaters floated at 500V (IIRC), so I twisted the heater wires, and then pulled them through glass braid sleeving as an additional insulation barrier to the other umbilical wires. That is not a problem with the carbon because there are no heaters, but making up high quality high voltage umbilicals is time consuming whichever way you look at it..

Love 'em or hate 'em, you sure as hell can't ignore them

Aaw - that's not speaker porn. *This* is speaker porn (note the fire extinguisher..) "I've bought some new speakers, honey" (sound of door slamming)