aerius

What you want is something like this. http://headostate.com/

In a lot of cases retailers can't afford to carry inventory since they don't have the credit & cashflow to support it. So what's going on a lot is they won't place the order with the distributor/manufacturer until they get a customer order which is why we're getting all those backorders. The manufacturers wait till they get a big enough batch of orders to do a production run, and from there it takes about 30-45 days for the retailer to get the product in store and ready for delivery.

It made all my music boring and quite lacking in emotion. Music which should be moving, epic, and emotional do nothing, I might as well be listening to an automated voicemail machine reading back the digits of Pi. That's about how fun it was to listen to a K701.

I don't. The RS-1 still has more resolution and a better soundstage. The HF-2 is more neutral, but if I wanted neutral I'd just get an HP-2 which is even more dead neutral with better resolution and a far better soundstage. Don't get me wrong, the HF-2 is good, but it just doesn't meet my needs.

The Garrard I'm most familiar with is the 401, and that usually takes a fair bit of work to get it going. In most cases you'll need to build a base & plinth for them and get the base drilled & setup for mounting the tonearm. At the same time the mechanicals also need to be looked at, sometimes a bit of oil is all that's needed but at other times it can get a lot more involved. But once everything's done it sounds fucking great and is damn near bulletproof.

Just for fun, see if you can fit an 0C3 glowtube on your latest creation. It doesn't need to do anything for the circuit other than give off a nice purple glow to let you know the high voltage supply is working.

Had a brainfart, that should say adjust the value of the resistor. cetoole's solution is the neater one, it whacks all the problems at once. If you're doing the heater bias, you already have the resistors in place for the LED.

In my case I stuck a 150k resistor in series with the LED and wired the whole thing between B+ and ground. Adjust the value of the LED to get the current and LED brightness you want, and also keep in mind that you might need multiple resistors depending on the B+ voltage in your amp so that you don't exceed the voltage spec on the resistors.

Nice work! Question: have you considered mounting the bias LEDs such that they can be seen through the top panel? It looks like it would be a bit of a pain to do, but it would give a visual indication that input tubes are up & running with the bias current flowing through them. Something similar could also be done for the B+ supply, when all the LEDs light up you know the amp is good to go, and if something doesn't light up you know where to start looking for the problem.

At an affordable pricepoint, the Acoustic Zen Adagios are pretty swank. Photos don't do justice to the shinyness of the finish.

Personally I'd go with Canons since some of them still have optical viewfinders. I often take pictures in lighting conditions where the LCD screen is next to useless because of glare so I need a way to frame the picture and make it work. If you rarely or never run into lighting conditions such as this then any camera from Canon, Olympus, or Panasonic is good to go. Go to a store, handle a bunch of them, and see which one feels most comfortable.

Just for fun, and also for something completely different, see if you can find an Ortofon SPU Classic somewhere at a good price. It's not the most accurate cartridge around, it's not going to pull every last detail off a record, but it's gotta be one of the most fun cartridges around if you want a fat kickin' bass groove for your music. I've heard a couple cartridges in the SPU lineup on an idler drive and direct drive 'table, those systems had the biggest most dynamic bass I've ever heard in any system. You're probably not going to want to use it with all your music, but if I wanted to break out a Bob Marley record for instance, that's the cartridge I want.

Could be worse, a local audio dealer put a VdH Colibri on a Project Debut just to see what would happen. It turned out to be shockingly good, obviously the 'table was holding it back but it wasn't as silly as it sounds since the qualities of the cartridge still came through. More on topic, if the used 'table was the one that you used to make those comparisons against the Galibier, I don't see anything wrong with sticking a top of the line cartridge on it. It may be a $300 'table but it sure doesn't sound like one.

Are they LCD or CRT monitors? I have 3 CRTs and a pair of LCDs, the only one that's significantly off after calibration is a 10 year old CRT where the tube is pretty much worn out. The other 4 are pretty damn close to each other with the CRTs having the edge in image quality.

My monitor's fully calibrated with the Colorvision Spyder so it's pretty close to dead on. Short of a $13k professional broadcast monitor it's not going to get much more accurate. The camera's a weak link, but if I'm careful with the settings & exposure it's fairly close and any remaining errors for this type of photograph can be removed in Photoshop. This is why I can't shoot the same photo on a sunny day, my camera would be completely unable to handle the contrast and no amount of editing can fix it. It wasn't hail, it had rained earlier that day and the air in the river valley still wasn't 100% clear. You couldn't see any fog, but if you looked about a mile into the distance everything was visibly soft & washed out. In the photo, the trees were just far enough to get a bit of that effect.

Bingo, we have a winner. The only person who'd know for certain which one is the most accurate is me, since I'm the only one who was there to see the scene with my eyes. Which goes back to the audio world and all the music which we use when auditioning equiment, doing comparisons, or just writing up casual impressions. Unless you were there for the recording & production of the music, how would you know how it's supposed to sound? Yet in countless review & impressions posts, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone else, people claim that so & so is accurate and this gear is coloured since the music they're using should or shouldn't sound that way. But outside of a few rare cases, how can you know? Of all my CD's there's maybe 2 where I was there through the entire process with the musicians so I can definitively say, "yes, this is what the artist says it should sound like", and another couple albums where I can make a reasonable guess since I've been to the venue and I know the characteristics of the recording equipment. Everything else is a crapshoot, I can say what kind of gear makes it sound best to me but I can't make a guess at accuracy. 3rd one down is the most accurate one. The photo was taken on an overcast day with small breaks in the clouds so the lighting is soft with fairly low contrast which allows more saturation on the colours. I got the picture just as the sun was about to break through so there's a few highlights on the tree tops. The rest were edited for various effects.

The problem is I thought of that and randomized the names before uploading. I knew someone was going to take a look at the filenames so I took care of that.

Same photo, five different interpretations. Some changes are obvious, others are more subtle. Which one do you like best, and which one do you think is the most accurate representation of the actual real life scene? Something to think about and keep in mind when we're out listening to gear, doing comparisons and so forth.

A few more pictures and some brief comments. The LP rig K340 setup Pixel pusher's McAlister amp Nice comfy couch Thoughts. The Esoteric UX3 is a definite improvement over the earlier Esoteric players I've heard, which were the SA-50 and either the SA or DV60. Paired with the McAlister tube amp it sounds great, none of the soul sucking dry sound of the earlier Esoterics. It was criminally fun with the PS-1, fat kickin' bass just the way I like it, it grooves, it feels, it passes the blues emotion test with ease. I also found I liked the HP-2 more than before. I've always respected it for its abilities & qualities but I can't say I've ever loved one, but I think I'm coming around on that. I do like it now, partly I think it's because my tastes have changed a bit and also because it would make a good compliment to my RS-1. Oh yeah, Philodox' apartment needs to be treated with ERS paper since the tube amps were picking up a nearby radio station. Either that or it should be wallpapered with aluminum foil. It's the first time I've ever heard a tube amp picking up radio, it was pretty cool actually.

We had a meet yesterday at his new apartment. We had all the expensive Grados. Except the GS1000. Because it sucks. Someone also brought a crappy CD player that no one wanted to listen to, as you can clearly see from the "no disc" status. We also discussed the greatness of Grado quality control, or how every Grado had the same kink right at the cable Y where the wires split. We were astounded at how every Grado from the 225 all the way up to the PS1000 had that same kink at the Y. Oh yeah, and someone said that the pads on my Senn 580 looked like they were made of panties, or pantyhose. I'd like to state for the record that this isn't true, it was made from an old skirt. I'll let the other guys fill in on the gear & music impressions.

To be honest I don't know why. Could be compensation for lack of a choke, insufficient filter stages, or lack of some form of regulation. Or maybe he had a solid state rectifier in the prototype and switched it to a tube without making sure everything was still in spec. Could be one of dozens of things, and no one other than the designer knows for certain.

2 stage grounded cathode amp with RC coupling and transformer output. Cathodes are bypassed with generic electrolytic caps. Power supply violates the maximum capacitor size limit for a 5AR4. Max capacitance for a 5AR4 using a C input filter is 60uF going by the datasheet, the Woo is 330uF.

Yup, Dave Slagle makes pretty awesome AVC's, I prefered his to the the copper S&B unit.

Currently on track 5, I'm liking it so far.

The Capitole & Prestige are close enough that it doesn't matter, at least with CDs. I'd be shocked if I could tell them apart in a blind test.