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guest speaker at work...does her presentation and asked if there are any questions. Silence. Finally, i decided to help her out and asked, "Is Elvis really dead?" She didn't seem to appreciate my question.

OMG! Secret "adult" sections of the forum. Good thing I don't qualify. My innocent mind could be warped. More prayers for Jackson. Hang in there. I'm betting things will be looking up very soon. Dave, congrats to your son. Very few achieve that much in scouting. It takes a special kid. MKP ... my sympathies. It was somewhat similar with my mom. She made it to 89 and steadfastly refused to leave a home she could no longer maintain or take care of herself. At some point, outside help becomes a necessity. Have a great Tuesday guys and cheers.

I didn't. In retrospect, I run so much in fear of damaging the 500.00 stylus in the Black maybe I should have. However, the reviews blew me away and I am certainly not sorry when I listen to it. OTOH, I've wondered if the lesser sylus would work if I were short on cash in an emergency. Anybody know? Not sure there is really any difference in the body. Must add, with a great deal of unapologetic pride, my son Thomas qualified for Star scout. 15 months to Eagle and he'll be 14. I am so looking forward to seeing him pin that Eagle on his mother! Dave

I feel your pain. I moved my mother into my old house two blocks away so I could go by everyday. That worked for about 10 years until her dementia got bad and I had to put her in an Alzheimer home. I found a great one run by two women in their home. They only take women and never more than four. Mom loved it there. I lost my mom about two months ago after a three day illness. She was 86. We just reversed our roles. When I was young, she took care of me. When she got old, I took care of her. She is missed.

Jackson is home; they reattached his cecostomy tube. They are going to study his bowel further before doing a resection.

Dave I read part of a review discussing both in the same article. The author was much more complimentary in summing up the black. The price difference is substantial. I can no longer shell out $800 like I did in 2006 for the Clearaudio virtuoso Wood. I posed the question on a vinyl forum about the best cartridge for $500 and the Bronze came up twice.

Morning Gang 91 projected, can only get a few hours in on the MCM refurb project, Bondo sure like's the weather though. Finish will be Upol bedliner (Ebay), Bad azz stuff, NOT the Common Bedliner you think of. Costco, restocking is the order of the day. Coffee should be done. Ya-All know what day it is.......Taco Time.

Best to Jackson and hang in there. Joe I didn't mention that I saw you there . I would never spill the beans on a C&C member but you were funny.

Morning Folks, ripping tunes and listening to the cans......................Sounding great for a change, Figured out how to get leaf stains off the vinyl top on the merc. a little clorox does the trick Back to Otis, Roll me like a wagon wheel

Evening gang.... All is good...Mom is OK, when I got in from the bus stop she said Dad called and he got the next door neighbor to help get Mom up. This was not the 1st time this has happend. Mom has alzheimer's, my wife does all the cooking for them. They are in there 80's and Dad will not let any outside help in. It's getting to be to much for me and the wife. We can't keep tabs on them 24-7.... We send the girls up to the house to clean and help them...but it's at the point where they need to move into a community where help is a push button away...But hey all is good for now... Was a good day at the shop.....made some coin payed some bills.....jammed out with the Klipsch..... Wishing all a good night...catch ya in the A.M. MKP :-)

Took care of my mother for 12 years before she entered a facility. No regrets! Well there are always some regrets and second guessing, but a labor of love. Know I am not unique. 90% want to stay in their home as long as possible. All of my Spanish customers who knew said I would be blessed. I feel I was blessed already, by her companionship and storytelling. Yes Wardsweb, role reversal! We all do what we can.

That was to be our little secret, Of course to see anyone there means you frequent there as well.................... Sancho, Jackson continued prayers

So beware... Dave

Good morning, y'all. Jackson is having surgery this morning; thanks for your continued prayers & thoughts.

Snow? What it that?

no such thing as a NICE SNOWBLOWER, they all s$%k (Agreed easier than a shovel though) I thought they all blew.

quite happy that I know I'll never need to own one of those....lol

What Passlabs unit is that and how does it sound. The amp is a X250. It is top notch for sure. I have several friends who run Pass Labs. I have never seen one go out of class A. They are a serious work horse for discerning listeners. I like that they don't get edgy on the top end and have plenty of power for solid bass.

Jackson has been prayed for Sancho!

Thanks for not telling me...and a very special thanks for not inviting me.

now you tell me. so there are some rogue, unmoderated sections? now you tell me. so there are some rogue, unmoderated sections? now you tell me. so there are some rogue, unmoderated sections? Wasn't going to tell you Steve but there is the ultra secret section of the forum that you must enter through the back door. Those members sit naked at their screens with the camera rolling and compare bodies. There are sub sections for endomorphic, ectomorphic, and mesomorphic types as well so everyone fits in. The moment you put a stich of clothing on you are banned for life. PM me and I'll tell you some of the sights I have seen there and perhaps drop a name or two. Don't worry C&C group....I won't spill the beans on any of you

now you tell me. so there are some rogue, unmoderated sections?

What Passlabs unit is that and how does it sound. Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk

Others feel the same, it's certainly not mandatory. There's several other section I never go to as well as my interests lie elsewhere, so you're not alone.

Morning yet again gang I do not care to post in the BS forum for many reasons, i did not come to this forum to partake in the subject matter. The whole internet is full of that, in fact, when i looked this forum over upon arriving, if i would have known/seen the subject matter, i would not be here. I came for Audio and stayed for friends interested in the same, as well as a few hobbys mind you! END Weekly Rant/Polk.

Good Monday Morning Gang Woke up Chilie on my mind, season must be ready to change. Crawlin around in these Bass Bins is the job for a youngin! im sore from twisting/turning/grunting. And just think this is my first BassBin and im not half done. Maybe drinking (More) during refurb would help. Waiting on breakfast, Coffee is doing the trick.

REALLY? My brother just shows me a piece of junk mail that he got from a place called “LoanMe.” I’ve seen their commercials on TV. They’ll give you a $10,000 loan and charge you 187% interest. 84 monthly payments of over $800 to repay them…whoever was desperate enough to accept this loan just put themselves in a heck of lot worse condition. Talk about preying on a person that is already in trouble. Disgusting. I told him to write them a nice letter telling them if they’ll reduce the interest rate to 100% then he give it further consideration. I also said start the letter, “Dear Loan Shark."

Car update Just got a text from my body shop friend.....over the weekend he told me not to order any parts until he gets a quote from his source for panels... I had found a guy on ebay and he quoted me Hood - $150, Fenders - $45 x 2, Radiator support - $80, Headlight Housings - $60, SHipping - $20...so $400 Friend just text me saying he can get it all at his jobber rates for $300...

Not so much YET. The boy is first chair viola in the orchestra and first chair trombone in the top band...both after one year. His ears are extraordinary. But he has shown very little interest in listening yet. Give him some time and I believe he'll come around. Perhaps his ears are so good it all sounds like crap. I don't know. At his age I could hear well into the low 20k region. Don't know if that is the case with him but he made good sounds with a violin from day one...and that is very rare. Dave

I hope everything goes well for Jackson, also for you and the wife, it's really hard to see a kid have to go through this. He has a lot of people praying for him.

I did the same thing for my mothers last 5 years, the hardest part was making sure she didn't feel like a burden, which she would sometimes say, and keeping her occupied and included in everything. She was in a wheelchair because of loss of part of one leg with a broken arm which wouldn't heal because of diabetes, the hardest part was moving her back and forth from chair to everywhere she need to be, like bathroom, bed, sofa and car. She did well and never complained and seemed to like being around everyone and all the grandkids. We did the best we could to make her feel normal, well as normal as my mother could be. I would say overall everything went well.

I know how you feel, ours are Oak and I just oil them, it's really tough to get in and oil everything. It's partly why they have been oiled only twice since I built them and really need to be oiled again but It's no fun so it get's put off. I did get my granddaughter to dust inside them once, she is tiny and done a good job, they really need this again also.

Well, I made the leap as I was in receipt of a bonus. Good thing, since my drilling company is now half the size of last year at this time and just having a job at all is a blessing. The Arabs will get my bonus this year. Dave

Quick question Dave. Did you happen to audition the Ortofon Bronze before buying the Black. If so what did you think of the Bronze?

Morning folks. A rainy Monday so not much cookin here. Pulled the vinyl off the shelves this weekend and been going through cleaning and playing one or two. Big surprise was a worn cover of Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" revealed a pretty quiet LP. I bought a bunch of records after getting an inheritance in 2005 and just filed them away. Forgot what I had. Found a lot of 180g jazz and a nice blues collection. And yes dtel the LF likes to listen with me. I hope everyone survived the weekend intact. Not all the news has been good on C&C lately. Lets hope that changes. Jake is hanging in. Got his first dose Glucosamine yesterday and the pain reliever should arrive today. LF beside me reading "A walk In The Woods" in preparation for the movie version starting Sept. 2. I've read it twice and will be taking LF to the movie Thursday for her birthday and then dinner out. A great read by Bill Bryson about hiking the AT. Good job on the autos Jason and Joe. Cheers Ladies and Gents

Chuck, I'm so sorry about the miscarriage. Kendall, continued prayers your way. Luther, stunning work. To the rest, good morning and may Monday go easy on you.

Another Monday and back to reality. I did have a great time yesterday afternoon over at my friend's house. I rearranged his system (he isn't able to lift gear) and then we spent hours listening to music. It was a blast.

My dad lives next door. He is 76 and doing well. I feel very fortunate to have him healthy. I have a lot of respect for you guys that care for your elderly love ones at home under tough circumstances. God bless you!

Discussed it with my fornication source over the weekend and we've decided to go ahead and have the whole car done....some dings dents and such repaired and complete repaint....I'm going to do the majority of the body work with my friend doing the chassis work and spraying the car for me....he thinks I can get it all done for under $1000 Car has super low miles on it and is now running like a top averaging 34mpg.....may make it a father/son project and fix it up for him to take in 2 years when he turns 16

no such thing as a NICE SNOWBLOWER, they all s$%k (Agreed easier than a shovel though)

Gary....what's the verdict on the new pre or did I miss your review? Nice snowblwer jj

Forgot to mention.....tell your son "well done" for me Dave. Is he still interested in the old mans audio passion?

Any reason you didn't go with duratex? Duratex looks and Feel's, like bedliner. Once you experience Upol, there is no going back, pricey, but worth it.

Nope, Dave is EVERYWHERE Chuck, not quite sure what to make of your thoughts of entering through a back door to watch other naked forum members. Maybe a bad souvlaki last night? Maybe that's just how you roll? My condolences to your GF

LOL! Firestarter! Seriously, I don't even know what you mean, "a lost cause" arguing with these replies. Your opinion is always interesting, and to me arguing is not only tolerated, but encouraged! Of course I mean "argue" in the higher sense that we defend more than one side of an issue, an exchange of ideas. It's how I learn the best sometimes.

Mornin' guys and thank you all for the prayers and kind words. Daughter in law is doing ok and will heal emotionally in time. On the other hand, my daughter is within days (hours?) of giving birth to our second grandson so there is much for which to be grateful. Blessings to each of you. Chuck

OK who has a trick for getting stains out of a vinyl top on a car, I have so aero cleaner degreaser and it helps but wont remove, I tried my professsor amos it does a tad better than the aero but still want it better on the plus side the aero takes every stain off the paint, just spray on wipe off I believe the old 85 merc sat under trees for a bit with no care and the paint and top looked pretty bad, the paint can be saved with a little buffing, the top is questionable Joe

Thank you for prayers & thoughts, y'all. Jackson had to stay at the hospital; he's looking at a probable bowel resection soon...

Every once in a while I run into a problem I can't figure out, because I don't have all of the test equipment that I'm supposed to have. Never felt a need for them since I'm mostly just a builder. My thinking was that as long as I could test the networks to make sure they're passing a signal, and sound good when I hook them up to my LaScalas, then I'm good to go. This only works as long as I don't branch out into new designs that I can't test, and sure enough, the first time I tried to do it, I got bit real bad. About a year ago I came up with what I thought was a pretty nifty idea. What I liked about the idea was that it was simple, and "simple" means I get to maximize the quality of the parts, namely the capacitors. An ever increasing popular mod is to use the big honkin BMS driver with Dave's or Greg's mid horn, and one of the aftermarket tweeters. I really like the sound of the Type AA built with the Jupiters or Jensens, and the idea that came to me was to scale the primary cap for the new impedance, and let her rip. The only real problem I had was finding someone with the setup to help me nail down the attenuation, which would effect the capacitor value. I also ran a poll, and the consensus was that 12dB down sounded the best. However, I still needed the opinion from someone running the setup, because I knew that all of the opinions were from those running ALK-like networks, which incorporate the swamping resistor -- so I couldn't be 100% sure until I got someone's ears on the project. Results led me to believe that I had to at least provide two settings, -12dB and -15dB, which was easy enough to do. On the last set I built, I removed that option, deciding just to trust the math and go with -12dB down. I told the customer that it was an easy fix if he needed more attenuation. After receiving the networks I got a strange response. I was told that while it was evident that a lot of good things were happening, something didn't sound right. "Hi Dean. Well I got them hooked up. Bass is overpowering the mid and top end. By the time I turn it up enough to actually hear the vocals, the bass is pounding and shaking the room, literally ... I really like what the caps are sounding like, they just are way, way low." After some troubleshooting, I told the customer, Jay, that these would have to be sent to my warrant department. "Warranty Department?" "Yeah, you need to send them to Bob Crites. He don't always hear real good but he's the best troubleshooter there is. Where do you live? "Arkansas" "Well, shipping won't be to bad then." "I can drive to Bob's, he's about 40 minutes from me." "Would you mind?" "Not at all, will he care if I just show up?" "I'll let him know you're coming." "Will he be okay with this?" "Oh yeah, he loves a good puzzle, and gets that nice warm feeling because I screwed something up - and then I get the test equipment lecture. It's painful, but I only have to endure it every couple of years or so." "Okay, I'll head over." What transpired after that was a series of emails that amounted to this: "The traces look terrible. Something is wrong, but I can't figure out what's going on." "I couldn't have messed it up that bad, it's only got six parts. I'd say bad autoformer or a bad cap, but it's both networks." "Yeah, it's strange. I'll figure it out." "I hope so, because this customer has been waiting two years, and he's been issuing death threats." Okay, what ensues next is the craziest of rides. "Well, By now we have replaced every part, one part at a time and it still does not work. So, now we are down to things like bad solder joints, something conductive where it should be insulating, something insulating where it should be conductive, misaligned dilithium crystal, intermittent flux capacitor operation or ... I am going to reheat every solder joint." One day later ... "To show you how crazy this is getting, I have just taken all the stand-offs loose and insulated them from the board in case the finish or wood was conductive. That was not it. Heated up all joints, no change. Used jumpers to connect to each end of each wire to rule out a broken wire inside the insulation. To summarize: Have replaced every part, one part at a time. Breadboarded another one that tests good. Heated up all solder joints Jumped every wire Reminds me of “Y” School in the Air Force. Troubleshooting Crypto Equipment, the instructors would put in a bug and time us finding it. They would do things like put in a marked 5 ohm resistor that really measures 50 ohms or take a wire smaller than a hair and solder it between two points on the back of a circuit board. A wire so small as to be invisible at a quick glance. I must be missing something, but darn if I can think of what it could be. Got to finish up the shipping for the day right now." Okay, at this point I'm starting to worry. Bob usually has things figured out for me by the end of the day. My biggest fear was a bad batch of capacitors, because dealing with distributors and manufactures is a nightmare, even if you have solid evidence from a state of the art spectrum analyzer. I also had the problem that it was a new product, and there several in the field using them. This of course left me with the question, why isn't anyone else complaining? I did have one odd experience with a single customer who told me they sounded great, and then later told me they were unhappy with them. Because of the contradictory feedback, I wrote that one off as a fluke. At this point, it would be more interesting to hear the rest from Bob's point of view. If he isn't up to the typing, I can finish, but I would like to give him a chance, because he tells a great story. Jay will have to decide if he wants to jump in or not. What started this was my own personal experience with my LaScalas. It really didn't take long for me to figure out that I really liked what I heard from the Type A and AA using the Jupiter and Jensen capacitors. I'd been down this road before, and even though I already knew what I liked, I decided to go through it all one more time, building up some Universals and a set of SuperX's. During this timeframe, I found Alex Crespi from Uptone Audio, who had parted ways with Robert Hovland, and had resurrected the MusiCap. Alex hooked me up with his single distributor, and in no time I was ready to listen to a set of AAs loaded with the new version of the MusiCap, one of the finest film and foils ever made. The sound was outstanding, but after a couple of hours, I decided that I had to knock 3dB off of the midrange. I'm fully aware that many like the stock setting, but It just doesn't sound balanced to me. However, and I've been very vocal about this -- if I build with Jupiters or Jensens, the stock settings sound just fine. When given the choice or ability to attenuate, almost everyone, without exception, will choose to take a little bit off of the midrange. Now, there are two ways to do this; the first is to choose your attenuation level, and then rescale the primary capacitor value so the crossover point stays the same. As you attenuate, the reflected impedance that the amplifier sees from autoformer goes up, so the capacitor value goes down. Now, this is very cool, because it allows us to use some very good capacitors at the primary position and otherwise (because smaller good caps cost much less than larger good caps). There are two "downsides", 1) the attenuation level is fixed, and 2) impedance changes with frequency, and though this is completely normal, zero feedback amplifier designs will find their frequency response tracking the impedance, which will result in non-flat response. The HF is tipped up somewhat because of the higher impedance, but in my experience, SET listeners actually prefer this. Regarding the fixed attenuation; if the math is right, and you employ the use of parts conducive to a positive horn listening experience -- you won't find yourself second guessing your autoformer settings. The second way is the way most of us are used to seeing; a resistor is used to "swamp" the network back to a relatively stable 8 ohms. This allows for "on the fly attenuation", since no matter what setting you choose, the impedance "seen" by the amp stays roughly the same. There are other considerations, but I don't want to discuss any of them except one: The 8 ohm impedance. The lowered impedance requires a very large primary cap. With the last iteration of the Universal, this capacitor value went to 56uF. So, the trade off is this: to get adjustable attenuation, you have to stay with a metallized capacitor at the primary position, and for me, that's is the complete antithesis of what I'm trying to accomplish with my high end builds. My choice in build is to eschew adjustable attenuation and a large metallized primary capacitor in exchange for properly fixed attenuation and something like a Jupiter or Jensen for the primary capacitor, which is responsible for passing/carrying the majority of the full range signal to the rest of the network/drivers. So, I built a pair of networks consisting of seven parts, and with exception of two parts, built exactly like a Type AA. The additional part is a .40mH coil running from tap -12dB to squawker positive. The other change is the Jupiter primary capacitor, scaled down because of the higher impedance. If anyone wants to takes a shot at trying to figure out what I messed up, knock yourself out. A big "thank you" to Bob for taking the time out of his busy week to not just figure out and rebuild my networks, but for saving an important part of my product line, thanks Bob!

Upol seems to be bedliner material as well.