Melbourne, Australia here. Where the nicest and smartest people live ;-)

[Circlotron]

http://www.bigbenpublishing.com.au/victoria/melb/city.html
Hi friends. This is the big land "downunder". Contrary to popular belief, kangaroos do not hop down the main city streets. I don't quite fit the mould here because I hate sport and we are awash with it here along with all the yobbos who base their lives around it. I have only recently revived my interest in amplifiers, having for quite a while been involved in power electronics and automotive ignitions/computers e.g. I designed these boxes from scratch. http://www.iceignition.com.au/products.htm I don't market them, just make the guts.

What got me going on amplifiers again was the utter simplicity and elegance of perhaps the most overlooked circuit ever - the circlotron. I looked toward my junk pile and I had lots of hexfets laying about e.g. STY32NB50 http://us.st.com/stonline/books/pdf/docs/6005.pdf
and at 500v 34 amps ***450 watts*** they all just started chanting "amplifier!, amplifier!, amplifier!" at me, and seeing as they are all N-channel and the circlotron fits that concept like a glove, well there was no turning back. The time had come.

I have absolutely no formal qualifications in electronics, being entirely self taught. Where I lack in strong mathematics I somehow seem to get by using applied intuition.

I don't have "golden ears". As far as s/s vs tube amps go, I think I said it in a nutshell here. It was *quite* an honour for Bob Pease to quote me... http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13588&Extension=html

Two things that struck me about diyaudio; first, that everyone is so polite and gentlemanly. Such a change from usenet! Second, the amount of Aussies here. Yes! 😛

 

[Silver Stealth]

Welcome

Hi Circlotron-man

Hope to see you at a Melbourne Audio Club meeting sometime soon, we meet third Wed of the month at the Nudawading Council Offices (Willis Room). Next meet is July 17.

Lots of friendly audio and videophiles there.

Cheers, Kendrick

 

[Jason]

Yes, lots of Aussies. I will knock up a map of the world sometime....

 

[planet10]

Yes, lots of Aussies. I will knock up a map of the world sometime....

Jason,

I just found an old floppy with a vector world-map on it -- now if i can find a Mac with a floppy drive around here, i can retrieve it. I assume you can easily generate a list of countries people are from. From there it is pretty easy to generate a tally of people from each country.

Then the hard part is generating some scheme to map the numbers to the countries -- probably a graduated color scheme lifted from National Geographic would be easiest.

dave

 

[Jason]

If you could send that thru that would be great, though... what format is it in? PSD?

I was actually just thinking about a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey kind of thing using a client side image map to record the point - I don't know if you've ever seen the tree-loot game but its the same thing.

A vector map would be be awesome though.

 

[planet10]

If you could send that thru that would be great, though... what format is it in? PSD?

It should be in MiniCad, but i can definitely make it DWG or DXF, and i should be able to get a useful illustrator (which also means pdf & eps) doc.

I was actually just thinking about a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey kind of thing using a client side image map to record the point - I don't know if you've ever seen the tree-loot game but its the same thing.

That would make it easy to do automatically.

dave