aerius

That I think is definitely a big issue, all too often we have reviews where the gear sounds great but measures like shit, or it measures decently and sounds like crap. There's a few rare components that both measure well and sound great. And that's about where it ends. Nobody outside of the DIY forums really looks at the whys behind it all to try and put together some of the pieces to the puzzles, the audio mags along with most of the online 'zines pretty much shrug it off and go "guess that's just the way it is". That is, if they don't go hardline with yet another subjectivist vs. objectivist strawman shitfest. I find that sad since the general public never gets to learn anything. The mags gush on about the gear and they don't bother educating the readers on anything, UHF is the one exception since they do have a tech theory article in each issue. Using the car mag analogy, when GM, Honda, or Lotus comes out with some new engine tech, suspension design, or other new tech gadget, the car mags will usually have a column to explain what it is, what it does, and why it's good. Stuff like VANOS, Bluetec diesel, suspension linkage design, Miller cycle engines, CVT's and so forth all gets explained. Read a dozen or so issues of most car mags and you'll know most of this stuff. Contrast that with audio mags, I could read the last 5 years of Stereophile & TAS and still not know the difference between a MOSFET, JFET, and a Bipolar transistor. I won't know what a Williamson or Dynaco circuit is, or what a Long Tailed Pair, Cathodyne, or Schmidt phase-splitter is and the advantages & disadvantages of each. I won't know why the slope of a crossover in a speaker is important, I'll know that 1st order crossovers are phase coherent and that's as far as it goes. I won't know the difference between R2R DAC chips and delta-sigma DACs, which is about as important of a difference as the one between gasoline & diesel engines as far as designing DAC circuitry is concerned. Nowhere do they explain anything about power supplies except to say "big transformers, big caps, Blackgates!", the reader is left to guess at what the fuck it all means. It's almost as if the audio mags are deliberately trying to keep their readers stupid. Cause god forbid if your readers grew brains, they might figure out that something like say, the cRaptor is a flaming turd and a safety hazard to boot. And that would tend to give them second thoughts despite your gushing reviewer praise. I feel that the audio mags have a duty to educate the readers so that they can make informed decisions. There should be tech articles, explaining for instance the pros & cons of soft dome vs. metal dome tweeters or the tech behind SE vs. P-P tube amps and speaker cabinet designs. UHF does have basic tech articles, they did one a little while back on power supplies and they're now running a series on room acoustics. AudioXpress which is mostly a DIY mag will of course get into all the nice calculations and talk about the theory & design issues, hell, they even broke out some calculus in one of their issues. You don't need to go that in-depth, but I'd like to see the mainstream audio mags cover some of that stuff on a fundamental level.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=1310763#post1310763 Of particular interest: Thoughts?

Mike Gravel (D) 92.62% match I'm wondering how I scored that high despite being in favour of drilling ANWR into swiss cheese...

Well, they basically took a Heil air motion transformer and stuffed it into a headphone. The Heil AMT, when used in speakers as a tweeter, is quite possibly the best tweeter I've ever heard.

Cheaper & easier to build. All you need is a simple CRC filter with big caps and you'll have practically no ripple in the DC. Tube PSU's have limitations on the size of capacitors which can be used so you generally need to use chokes to get enough smoothing, but then you run into the problem of the damn things hitting resonance and ringing. Chokes also cost a hell of a lot more than resistors. On the plus side, tube rectifiers give a nice delayed soft turn on, and don't generate as much switching noise as silicon diodes.

Oops, I hate it when that happens.

Click for larger image. One small correction. Ground one end of the OPT secondary for use with SE headphones. Power supply schematic in another day or 2 when I get around to it.

Gimme a day or two to clean up and post the schematics. My weekend's been rather busy.

The short version is that France has elected a government which is far more right wing than the previous one, this is partly due to fallout from the muslim riots and mass civil disobedience they had a little while back. Instead of taking a "we don't give a fuck" attitude toward Iran and tacitly supporting them like they did in the past, they've now taken a stance that's more inline with US interests. Iran basically has a whack-a-loony PM who stirs up shit and makes outrageous statements to keep himself in power. The country's in bad shape, so he does his act to make it look like it's the US's fault. They're also developing a nuclear program, mostly for generating electricity so they don't have to burn up all their oil & natural gas, the weapons part comes as a side benefit, and they want that so they US doesn't do to them what they did to Iraq. The US is probably scheming for a way to topple Iran and take their oil. Which kinda ties back to France, which is now discouraging business with Iran. Which is smart, just in case the US is dumb enough to try and whack Iran, France doesn't want all those assets getting seized or destroyed and then suffering more crap from the US which already hates them.

That, I can agree with. There is no perfect system. I can't say I agree, but I'll agree to drop this particular discussion. More than I can remember, sometimes I win, sometimes I don't. It still amazes me that Bush's support ratings are still hovering around the 30% mark. On the other hand, it's not all that surprising given the gutless Democrats and highly biased media. I've actually lost track of how many impeachable offences and gross constitutional violations he's committed, he should be in jail by now. Let's see, warrantless wiretapping & searches, NSA spying on its own citizens, indefinite warrantless detentions, free one-way trips to the Hotel Gitmo, it's sickening, and I don't even live in the US.

Let's back up for a minute here just to make sure I have everything straight. You had an accident of some sort which fucked up your jaw and took out a bunch of teeth It cost a shitload of money to put it all back together You sued the at fault party to recoup the costs You still couldn't afford the $100k+ bill Is this essentially correct or am I missing something?

Well hooray for you. In Canada, your jaw would be put back together for free, and most of your teeth would be covered as well. Your jaw gets reconstructed immediately, then they'll make a set of dentures for you so you can eat, that's all done right away and at no cost. After that, you get to sort out the percentage coverage for implants which will vary depending on several factors, like how much of your fault it was. It would likely cost you less than 1/10th of what it did, unless the cause was truly monumentally stupid. But hey, feel free to make more retarded assumptions about our system. And since you and grawk can offer nothing other than personal anecdotes, here's one of my own, involving my cousin's classmate.

And you're a jingoistic retard who's yet to provide a single fact based argument on why the US healthcare system is superior beyond "we have freedom, and everything's been cheap and great for me". Go back and read hirsch's post.

And thank the invisible non-existent sky pixie that I don't live there. And here we have a false analogy. How a headphone sounds like to a given person is influenced as much by individual preferences & hearing ability as it is by the actual technical merits of the headphone itself. The healthcare system is not nearly as subject to those factors as a headphone. You are literally comparing apples to oranges. I don't need to be in a Ford Pinto when it crashes to know that it's a fucking death trap. The NHTSA crash tests will tell me that it's death on wheels. Ah yes, nothing is 100% conclusive. There have actually been studies carried out accounting for socialeconomic factors, pre-existing conditions and so forth in an attempt to reduce the variables. Other than the rich upper class, the US still lags behind many 1st world countries, and its quality of care for the poor is absolutely abysmal. And it's only going to get worse until you kick that retarded chimp out of office.

Another thing. We get a few US TV stations up here. Every once in a while they'll have a telethon or funding drive to raise money for some kid with cancer or some other disease who otherwise can't afford medical care. Here's some kid with a year to live, and they have to go on TV to try and raise money for him, or else he dies. What kind of sad system allows this? This is the shit I expect to see in 3rd world shithole countries, not a 1st world nation like the US.

Again, I point to the results. In terms of life expectancy, low infant mortality rates, workdays lost to illness & injury, access to care and so forth, Canada consistently ranks in the top 1/3 of developed countries while the US is stuck in the bottom 1/3.

Sure, if that's how you define it. Those who can't afford insurance get bottom of the line medicaid, and no chance of getting admitted to say, The Mayo Clinic or something like that for specialist treatment even if they need it. They get sent to the nearest hospital which'll accept them even if the quality of care isn't sufficient. Those who can't afford good insurance end up in the same boat, hell, you even have a list of approved hospitals for each insurance plan, and if one of those hospitals doesn't provide the service which is needed you are still shit out of luck and paying out of your own pocket, ie, going in debt for a long time. Fact is the US system is designed for rich people, they have accesss to all the best clinics, they get to be first in line, and fuck everyone else who needs medical care. For rich people, the US has the best system in the world, for everyone else, it's pretty mediocre. The US consistently ranks in the bottom 1/3 or 1/4 among developed countries in life expectancy, infant mortality, medical sick days, incidences of cancer, diabetes, heart disease & stroke, and so on. And yet the still claim to have the "best" system.

The point is this, universal healthcare coverage means that all citizens are covered, hence, "universal". If there's 6.5 million people with no coverage, and only a million or so are illegals and therefore not citizens, that still leaves over 5 million citizens with no healthcare insurance. Therefore, it isn't a universal healthcare system.

Maybe you'd like to explain how it's universal healthcare when according to this article, there were 6.5 million Californians without any healthcare coverage at the beginning of this year.

I suggest checking your facts first. Look up the date when the universal health care bill passed in California. Then look at the date on the articles I linked. As of the end of August, the bill still hadn't been signed, though it's probably gone through by now. The incidents I linked to took place way before that.

Of course there's waiting lists, people who need surgery the most get first dibs. I don't see the problem here, they'll eventually get to you before things get too bad. Someone with a dislocated shoulder needs help a bit more than a guy like me who has a low-level nagging shoulder injury, he goes straight to the emergency room while I might have to wait a few weeks or months.

Got the link to the article on LA hospitals dumping patients on skid row. Absolutely fucking disgusting. Link #1 Link #2 Excerpt: This is your system at work. I have no words for this shit.

The big pharma companies have to pay for all those Viagra ads one way or another.

The depressing part is when you look at the bigger picture, we've arguably hit peak oil and thanks to climate change, possibly caused by global warming, many parts of the US are already running short of water. Seeing that the US needs to import over 2/3 of its oil, it ain't gonna be pretty.

There's no doubt our system has issues, that being one of them. But at least we're sorta taking steps towards sorting them out.