aerius

Thanks for posting those latest pics, I finally know what to do with the wooden boxes that my bottles of whiskey came in. I've been struggling to find a use for them and now I know.

Blow it out your ass, fuckwad. If we're talking about raising kids and how to be a parent you'd be right and we'd have no argument. But we're not talking about raising kids are we? Or are you dumb enough to equate the act of photographing kids with that of raising kids? Oh yeah, and it's "you're" not "your". As in you're a clownfucking moron and you sodomized your mom.

I know enough people who have kids, most of them got a DSLR and went nuts with taking pictures for a year or two, then they get sick of it or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of photos and really start cutting down on how many photos they took. They'd go from 20-30k photos a year to about a tenth of that or even less in some cases. In almost every case the photos got better when they cut down on the numbers since they are now putting more thought into the composition of the pictures instead of just hoping the magic moment was captured in one of the 10,000 frames they shot. What I'm getting at is this. It's not the camera that counts, it's the person behind it. A DSLR is not some magic tool that's required for good kid pictures, most people think they absolutely must have one but this isn't true. It has features which can make the job easier if you know what you're doing, but some of its other characteristics can get in the way and make the job harder. It's not a silver bullet, and in most cases it's complete overkill.

That only matters if you're going to carry the DSLR with you at all times with the camera turned on. How many people are going to do that? Realistically you're going to have to grab the camera off the table or whatever, turn it on and then take pictures, and if you're doing that a DSLR isn't really any faster. Focus tracking and fast continuous shooting is nice for shooting photos as the kid runs around, but again, do you really need 100 photos of your kid running around for 15 seconds? Are you prepared to sort through thousands of photos to pick out a dozen good ones? It's "spray & pray" and gives way too much work afterwards, and chances are the person will get so frustrated sorting through the crap that he just forgets about the pictures forever. I've seen it happen a lot. It's much better to follow the action with the viewfinder or screen and take a few pictures at the decisive moments, and almost any camera is good enough for this if you know how to use it. I'm doing this with a Canon SD800IS, kids aren't gonna be a problem. Unless he's from Krypton or something.

I'd say forget DSLRs unless you need the fast focus & tracking capabilities they offer for your photography, or you need the manual depth of field & focus controls which some DSLRs don't even have anymore. Hell, most lenses don't even have a depth of field scale these days. I'd personally go with the micro 4/3 system and the Panasonic GF1 which can be found on Amazon for under $900. You get a smaller lighter camera which you can stuff into a pocket and the sensor size is still large enough that you can take high quality pictures in all but the worst lighting conditions. If the lighting's that bad then you can switch to the 20mm/1.7 prime and still get the shot, or get an adaptor and slap a Leica Noctilux lens on it. Which would be pretty silly, but possible.

For $400 you should get a blowjob from your mom. It goes real well with everything.

What you really need is a set of snowmobile tracks for your bike. Fortunately, this has already been invented and the conversion kit is on the market. Ktrak

There's actually a reason for that one, our human brains do not like random crap and if presented with such in say, a random noise pattern on a screen or Led Zeppelin played backwards, our brains will want to make a pattern out of it. This is why we're so suggestible in these situations, if I point to a random pattern of scribbles and say to you "this is a martian picking his ass", you will see it, and that's how the fake lyrics work when you play "Stairway" in reverse. It's random and sounds completely wrong, your brain doesn't like it and wants it to make sense, and when the fake lyrics go up it goes "aha!" since it thinks there's now a pattern it understands. Where the power of suggestion doesn't work nearly as well is when there's already a pattern which the brain understands. If I have picture of a horse I'm gonna have a hell of a time convincing you it's a giraffe unless you're on drugs or you don't know what a giraffe is. Similarly, I doubt I'd be able to make you confuse a french horn for a trumpet, or in the speaker world, a Lowther for a Quad ESL-57, or in headphoes, an AKG K701 and Grado RS-1.

Well, it's definitely music to die for, but in the sense that I'd probably shoot myself in the head if I had to listen to half of it.

From the small sample size of the 3 people I know who have the EML 45's, there have been no failures so far and the oldest set was up to about 5000 hours or so last spring and still going strong. All the tubes are used in either capacitor or transformer coupled amps and run pretty conservatively at about 2/3 of the maximum plate dissipation.

Apparently they're the in thing these days, along with Alnico magnets. Everything old, is new again.

Solid plate has bigger bass and overall it feels a bit more dynamic. The mesh plate is supposed to have better soundstaging & detail but I can't say I really noticed it in the system I heard. My preference is for the solid plates since I like having more bass. Get the EML's and be done with it, it's always cheaper in the long run to save up your cash and buy the best in one shot instead of spending years on an incremental upgrade path.

Now that is some quality embezzlement.

For most people I've heard about they are, well, unless they get the Quad 57 to round out the collection. They'll get other speakers from time to time or maybe a 2nd system, but the Quad remains their main speaker and they end up refining the amps, sources, cables and everything else.

None of the above. Shoot in black & white and you don't need to do white balance. Personally I use the camera to get a rough colour balance then use Photoshop to fine tune it to my liking.

I haven't heard a healthy pair of Quad 63's yet, the one pair I've heard was waiting for some restoration work. Poor thing buzzed and farted whenever the volume was turned up a bit and the bass from one of them sounded a bit wonky. I've been meaning to go back and listen to them but I haven't found the opportunity yet. On the other hand I have a fair bit of experience with my local dealer's Quad 57's, he has them setup with tube amps and a killer vinyl and digital rig for use as his reference system for evaluating new products he plans to carry. It's something special, once you hear it you realize that damn near every other speaker is hopelessly coloured. Yeah it's limited in the bass and it won't go to "11", but stay within its limits and it makes you shake your head and wonder what the hell speaker designers have been doing for the last 50 years. It won't play Slayer at rock your socks off volume, but turn it down a bit and it still sounds pretty darn good, you just don't get to feel the music hit you. I didn't have much of a problem with the alleged tiny sweetspot, from what I was reading I got the impression that everything would come apart if I moved my head a couple inches. Maybe it was the good room setup that helped, but I noticed that the sweetspot was almost big enough for 2 people, it doesn't suddenly fall apart when I move my head a few inches, I could move my head a good foot or so and still have great sound, it wasn't much worse than many of the other speakers I've heard. And yeah, it'll definitely put performers in the room if the recording's good enough. You do have to be in the sweetspot to get the full effect though, some speakers can do it even if you're way out of the sweetspot but with the Quads your head has to be centered between the speakers. I love the Quad 57's and plan to get a pair some day. Could take a few years but it'll happen.

They make pretty good stuff, I've only heard their FB1i and PB1i speakers, which unfortunately are a bit too inefficient for the amps I prefer. I heard'em with a Bryston amp and they do sound pretty good, but I'd like to have more bass kick. Which the big PMCs should deliver.

Bitter cold? How could it be "bitter cold" when there's cactus and palm trees outside?

Man, you could have so much dirty fun with the display on that thing. Especially if you can find a way to program it to display scrolling messages.

I wouldn't touch a Pontiac or any other car that's from one of GM's discontinued divisions. They currently have a government guaranteed warranty program for them but I wouldn't count on that program being around in the future with the kind of deficits the goverment is running up these days. Wouldn't touch any Chrysler for the same reason, their merger or whatever the fuck you want to call it with Fiat is going to have them so fucked up that it's not even funny. No idea what to buy though in your market segment, I'm a mid-size family sedan person.

Chapter 7 is liquidation bankruptcy, everything in the company including the kitchen sink is sold off to pay its creditors, after which the company is gone forever. So yeah, it wouldn't apply. With regards to buying their shares, I wouldn't do it until the audits are complete and the revised financial info is released. Their current financial info might be good, or it might've been fucked more times than a $5 whore. I'm better off gambling my money on a roulette wheel in Vegas, at least I know what the odds are there.

Well, this is Koss' income statement from their 2009 annual report. Koss says their financial info is untrustworthy since at least the end of fiscal 2006 so that's about 4 years of fraud, or about $8 million a year on average getting skimmed off. That's a good 15%-20% of their revenues every year. Someone was seriously asleep at the desk while the embezzlement was going on.

My impressions are about the same, except for the sluggish sounding part. I don't really find them sluggish or slow, but that's just me.

Wait a sec here, you're getting a custom built EC amp and you're going to cheap out on the 300B tubes? Seriously, for an amp of that level you shouldn't be settling for anything short of the upper tier stuff. Grab the Emission Labs 300B, costly, but still not Western Electric prices.

I think Esoteric is up to 8N these days.