Yes, I can understand that there are some folks who don't use it for valid reasons. But all I can say is that if you don't you'd better be prepared to offer some assurances to prospective buyers. I mean all the guy had to do was say, "Here's a link to my Ebay profile. Please feel free to send me an email through their system to prove my identity so you can feel more comfortable sending me an MO for $XXX."
I can't believe that he made the amp so that it's possible to connect the power cords that way. With the Menace, although it uses the same connectors for all of the power connections, it's impossible to hook it up wrong due to the sex of the connections used at each end. It wasn't hard to do and was a definite design consideration along with making sure that the HV was never exposed on male pins to limit the chances of cooking myself.
Tubes can certainly make noises as the metal inside expands as it heats. I have one set of tubes (outputs) that take a good 30 minutes to heat up to operating temperature and stop making noise.
Agreed, it's one thing if the person is a known quantity but in this case the seller made no mention of payment terms until we were well into discussions about purchasing. All of a sudden it was like, "Hey, how about adding $10 for shipping and sending me a MO? How about no.
Not sure why it'd happen with an input or output tube but it's not all that uncommon with rectifiers, especially if you're running them near the max plate current. The Menace has been known to have a little lightning show in its rectifiers at startup.
Sometimes, I wear rubber gloves when soldering just to minimize the lead exposure but I've really only started doing that recently in case I have to run upstairs and help w/ Lily. Otherwise I've never bothered with gloves.
I'd wager if you measured the output of that 15V PSU it'd probably be pretty close to 16V so I'm thinking there's something else wrong with the scanner unfortunately.
It's made by the company that Dared buys all of their stuff from (they just rebadge stuff from what I can tell) but it's a bit different. No USB DAC, but switchable inputs and it uses 6V tubes instead of 12V.
I shall now make it my life's work to moderate your posts and add a princess to all of them :evil:
I keed, I keed, congrats on the MAC lappy, I do enjoy my little old Powerbook and having now owned one it'll make not having one in the future a tough proposition.
In this case the only reason was that it's essentially a 0 risk adventure. I paid less for the combo than the amp alone has been selling for on Head-Fi.
Nothing specific, no. There have been vague rumblings but with no build time these days it's hard to imagine doing anything about it for the rest of '08.