Recent content by ConradH

  1. ConradH

    Opinion: The long overdue death of the stick shift car

    Both my wife and I have been driving manual transmissions for 50 years, currently a VW Golf Alltrack and a Jetta GLI. Wouldn't want anything else. OTOH, it gives tailgaters six opportunities to hit me on every start-up.
  2. ConradH

    Residential Electric Service Upgrade to 100 amp or 150 amp?

    Go for 200. At some point everybody is going to have a heat pump. That's something like 40 amps. With electric hot water, stove, dryer and other stuff, 100 amps doesn't leave you enough to charge a car. You may not, but the next owner almost certainly will. Go for 200 amps!
  3. ConradH

    Random Thoughts or Whatever

    What I find amazing is that kids today will listen to rock and roll from 1970, 54 years ago. When I was a teen in 1970, I wouldn't have listened to anything from 1916! Hey, our music must have been pretty good.
  4. ConradH

    Blade-Oil_Newly acquired weapon / tool in my war on entropy and aging vintage units.

    I like to check the MSDS for anything that might be interesting. This apparently contains white mineral oil plus 0.1% vitamin E. BTW, I've been fighting entropy for decades and battle is always a draw at best.
  5. ConradH

    Actual watts....who can shed light on this subject?

    The speaker wire doesn't have to "withstand" 400 watts. It just has to pass the necessary current without heating up. If its resistance is low compared to the load, no problem. Here's an absurd example. Let's say you have a 40000 ohm speaker. You feed it with 20000 volts. Power is E^2/R so you...
  6. ConradH

    Turtable spindle weight

    There was a plastic clamp sold by Radio Shack way back that I still use. It has a collet clamp that can't scratch the spindle and the whole thing weighs almost nothing. IMHO, something that weighs enough to be useful isn't great for most bearings unless they were way overdesigned to begin with...
  7. ConradH

    AT-LP7 Alignment

    Turntables/arms are not designed for a particular alignment, other than the length of the slots to mount the cartridge. You can use any alignment you want, so long as you can get the cartridge at the distance and angle required. If you can set it up for Lofgren A/Baerwald, that would be my first...
  8. ConradH

    Are you traveling to see a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024?

    I'm pretty sure if you can make out the sun through the clouds, the UV will be plenty dangerous. Do some investigation before doing that!
  9. ConradH

    Are you traveling to see a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024?

    I live in the path, so traveling to my front or back yard! I'm not getting too excited, as historically the chance of being clouded over is about 70% here. The whole Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse area is a bit iffy.
  10. ConradH

    Let's start over trying to solve this amp distortion problem

    I've seen leaky coupling caps to the output tubes cause hard to find distortion. It doesn't take much leakage! Don't test them, just change them to some decently rated films to see what happens. Also measure the open circuit voltage on the inputs and see if it's really zero.
  11. ConradH

    Opinions…on an issue with tube amp

    The tubes are capable of 17 watts out in push-pull, but the amp uses four of them, so double. That's just the tube and a huge amount depends on how hard they push them and what the other losses are and how much distortion one can tolerate. Let's say it can do a clean 12 watts RMS/ch mid-band. I...
  12. ConradH

    Confused about top notch tuners and my situation

    I listen to FM in the car, but that's about it. I have a nice T-85 but todays FM is so repetitive and commercialized as to be worthless. I listen to PBS but one can only take so much of that. I don't think FM is dead, but it's probably on life support. +1 for those two links.
  13. ConradH

    Burn In - Normal Distribution?

    IMO, if you can hear it, you can measure it. There are some things where you can observe both. Measure the T/S parameters of a new woofer, then burn it in and measure again. It almost certainly will have changed and changed enough to affect the box design. Caps are easy to measure and even a new...
  14. ConradH

    Mine Have To Go

    AWA? https://www.antiquewireless.org/homepage/museum/
  15. ConradH

    How much to spend on cables?

    Sometimes I get my RCA-RCA cables free at the dump, the ones that would come with most everything you bought some years ago. I use regular brown line cord wire for speakers, making sure it's reasonably heavy, say 14 gauge. Even with most of my system being curb finds and garage sale items, I'm...
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