John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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So cool...
Just read an article on the alpha antimatter project at CERN on CNN. They are going to test if antimatter falls down or up in Gravity...
They said that they will be testing that later this year.

Huh??? What??? The confinement octupole ain't done yet!! Sheesh.

At least my techs get paid overtime.

Me...dirt.

Mr dirt, thank you..

Jn

Ps.. There's got to be some way to make money fleecing audiophiles with this stuff.
I know, "near superconducting"..

Oh , wait. That's been used..
 
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I like 'collins, cray, copeland : Showdown' re-issue, but I do not have the original to compare. I certainly would not have paid list for a gold version of a std cd. I only have a couple of the original master recordings which both sound very good. One is deliciously pointless (Jean michelle Jarre Oxygene) and another is contentious (supertramp) as they did not use the same EQ settings as the original mastering so it is neither 'original master' nor the mix the band signed off.

However neither sound contrived to impress audiophiles, unlike the sheffield track record.

of coarse none of the MOFI's anyone is going to claim sounds good are going to be for less than $50-150 it seems... claim goes unchallenged.

Pretty sure I've listened to the Supertramp one and it sucked even at the listening station at a record store so I moved on.
 
WRT repetition, the lack of repetitiveness in this track is punishing:

Global Understanding by Cryptovolans | Free Listening on SoundCloud


As for suspense, this guy has reached a fantastic fusion of chaos and repetition:

Milky Way by Shnabubula | Free Listening on SoundCloud

I didn't realize some of the things he does on that piano were even possible before I heard it. He pushes that one instrument's compositional value to the max with a controlled fusion of repetition and chaos. His music was lost on me at first but I liked it more every time I went back.

Sometimes I try to whistle along. Hard to keep up with.

The Wise Tortoise (Piano Improv + Added Layers) by Shnabubula | Free Listening on SoundCloud

Often I find indie music makers and wish they had access to better equipment and instruments. His Americana Dawn album would be incredible if played by an orchestra. He did make a version of it with traditional instruments, but I don't think it really did justice to the electronic version.
 
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of coarse none of the MOFI's anyone is going to claim sounds good are going to be for less than $50-150 it seems... claim goes unchallenged.
When £36 buys me 6 hours of Furtwangler I'm not going to buy any single LP for more. I paid £5 for my MoFi back when LPs were unpopular

Pretty sure I've listened to the Supertramp one and it sucked even at the listening station at a record store so I moved on.

I think you will have to define 'sucked'. The music may not be to all tastes but the recording and production are top notch.
 
Nowas a little diversion I have a real question for those building systems with balanced interconnects. If you look at AES48 they firmly show PIN 1 as being connected to the case, only the case and nothing but the case. If you don't have the pcb soldered to the chassis socket then you need to run wires from the connector to the board. Normally it is assumed that only 2 wires are needed as the cable screen has done its job.

But could one foresee a circumstance where the last few inches also needs screening and if so how? Normally if the environment inside my ampifier had enough grunge to audibly mess with an input I might redesign from scratch but this question was posed and I am intrigued. Mainly because I'd just never considered it.

The mil spec way is each board in it's own box, preferably hogged from solid for max bling and in this case the connection of the screen is obvious.

Next best is having a ground plane and connect the screen to that.

But for cases where the board is not laid out with a ground plane and possibly doesn't destinguish between power ground and audio ground is there anything one could do given the options

1. twist pairs and live with it
2. STP connnected to pin one at one end and board at the other
3.STP connected to pin one at one end and capacitively coupled at the board. This reduced H-field screening but goes back to , if you have magnetic pickup inside the box you built you should fix that in other ways.
4. Another method.

Semi-serious question as I realised I had only considered the 2 extremes of mil-spec or UTP only with the view that anything else opens up to making things worse rather than better.

And yes I know diagrams would make this a lot easier to understand, but my quick sketches are lousy.
 
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