Recent content by luddite

Those Quad ESL electrostatics were a bit of a revelation that year. 1972 had some very expensive, very impressive gear to listen to. The Quads stood out.

The high end systems you could listen to at the stereo shops back then sounded amazing. What has really improved is recording consistency. There were a lot of very poor recordings and poorly pitched pressings (I think this is why variable pitch turntables came into play) sold early on.

My Bryston 4B delivers a mighty punch to the speakers when switched off, so I had to install two switches under the desk to disconnect the speakers before powering up and powering down the rest of the gear, just to prevent those unwanted pops. They were really loud.

I made the switch to the 8w LED bulbs a few years ago, which has made an improvement to the load on some of my circuits here, but the main reason I did it was because the new incandescent bulbs available were from dodgy countries and overheated to the point where my ceiling joists started to...

Allman Brothers on Ohne Filter video from the 1991 Germany tour... Cross To Bear. My favorite rendition of this song.

So that glue eventually failed. This might be acrylic after all. I'll try the acrylic welding glue next.

Maybe the best sound is provided off the long track outer rim, and the return trigger requires more tracking distance so it goes in the centre where the sound would be poor anyway. It'd be a shame to waste the tracking distance on the outer rim.

One of my friends returned from living in Hawaii for a year in 1969 with a real stereo setup. He wanted to impress upon me the difference between the sound we'd all been accepting from our car radios and the portable ceramic cartridge record players our sisters owned... so he dropped the Shure...

One of the original dust cover tabs on my old Technics SL-0202 was broken off inside the hinge by a family member who borrowed the turntable. There is a multitude of opinions on the internet as to what that dust cover was made of. Most of the materials mentioned are not compatible with the...

After two forced household moves and over 5 years in storage, the main system finally found a place to be re-assembled and powered up again. At first, a nasty hum had to be tracked down and silenced and the midrange pots were out of action for the first hour but finally kicked in, and...

I see that language problem cropping up again in the Wikipedia article on impedance: "In addition to resistance as seen in DC circuits, impedance in AC circuits includes the effects of the induction of voltages in conductors by the magnetic fields (inductance), and the electrostatic storage of...

These connect with other devices. Is there foolproof security protection built in?

Language can really also get the way, because resistance and power or force are used in dealing with weight, as in "the less resistance (gravitational) the less power is required to lift", which is very intuitive knowledge. In electrical terms, power (wattage) is current flow demand (amps) x...

Nothing to with sound for this listener... I liked the separates but in the end I wound up stacking integrated units for the simple reason that a turntable fits on top of them, but not on the narrower separate units I had. I noticed no difference in sound. It's always been the various speakers...

Back in the early 70's we thought those Dynaco's were the poor man's AR3a's, although we still couldn't afford the Dynaco's, either. They do sound good. That Yamaha stack looks absolutely factory new (so do the speakers, for that matter). So cool.