efzauner

I think it's all about mass, and isolating the motor in a huge plinth. The idler wheels are dead nuts accurate on the speed, whereas the belt tables are always playing catch up. You might want to read this thread when you have a few spare weeks of time on your hands: http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?eanlg&1075644493&read&keyw&zzjean+nantais It's the longest running thread in Agon history. I bought my Thorens off the guy that started that thread, and he probably converted 100 people over to the Lenco way of life. Mike I dont understand why you say that the Belt drives are not accurate. Many if not most of the top TT today and in the past such as Rega, MicroSeiki etc. are belt drives with no problems with speed control or accuracy.

Mike, I have had a Dual 510 since late 70's also and am looking to upgrade. What made you decide to get a thorens to replace the Dual 5000? Why do you think it is so much better? I wish I still had all my StereoReview mags from back then! I am looking at something that also runs 78s. I have an old Lenco L70, but just getting a new idler will run me about $75. Well, I have been doing some reading on the idler wheel tables, and hear that if setup properly, and if they are quiet, they can destroy most modern higher-priced tables. This would include the L70, L75 and L78 Lenco's. I bought a TD-124 in immaculate condition with a huge custom made plinth. The table weighs almost 60 lbs! I also just bought a mint SME 3009 arm and a Denon DL-103 cartridge for it. I am hoping this combination does it for me. I should have it all back together in a day or so, and then am waiting on my BBX to come back from Mark with the Cream option. It should arrive next Tuesday. I'll get pics posted soon, and will also post my impressions. If I find that the improvements are minimal, I will probably sell the whole lot and go back to the reliable, underappreciated Duals I have been using my whole adult life. Mike I recall all the reviews in the 70s about the new belt drive TT. I thought that they where much better in terms of rumble, wow and flutter etc. The belt added a level of insulation between the motor and platter. I do not understand what the advantage of an idler drive is today.

and the add say: "Please note that this item appears to be pulling apart and three of the speakers appear to be damage" But you know, you cannot trust appearances. These speakers just may be working. Bid with confidence! I have read some disclaimers in Ebay, but this is ridiculous!

Mike, I have had a Dual 510 since late 70's also and am looking to upgrade. What made you decide to get a thorens to replace the Dual 5000? Why do you think it is so much better? I wish I still had all my StereoReview mags from back then! I am looking at something that also runs 78s. I have an old Lenco L70, but just getting a new idler will run me about $75.

Mike, I have had a Dual 510 since late 70's also and am looking to upgrade. What made you decide to get a thorens to replace the Dual 5000? Why do you think it is so much better? I wish I still had all my StereoReview mags from back then! I am looking at something that also runs 78s. I have an old Lenco L70, but just getting a new idler will run me about $75.

it sure does not sound like glass, more like plastic. And in one shot of the window after he exits you see it bent inwards. So he covered the bottom part, bend the plastic sheet inward and climbed under and out.

That is a good deal. There is no such thing as digital or analog wire. It is the same marketing BS that puts "Digital" on speakers, headphones and other analog products. Characteristic impedance is only important at high enough frequencies where the wire is a significant portion of a wavelegth. At audio frequencies, or even at the low data rates used in most CD player digital outputs, you do not need to worry about characteristic impedance, only lumped capacitance, inductance and resistance.

seems to me that they where having fun. Not taking themselves seriously. Seems like Shatner has a serious side (Star Trek and some other serious shows) and a fun side, like this video, and shows like Boston Legal.

When something like this happens, you need to apply problem solving steps similar to the scientific method: 1: what do you observe. Answer: Intermittent crackling from tweeters at all volume levels. Tweeters look physically ok. 2: Create a hypothesis of the problem: What has happened or changed in the system since the last time you listened: Answer:someone else playing loud; The moon is in Virgo; I moved the speakers alot ; neighbour's bratty kits stuck pencils in the tweeters; Someone played it loud etc... 3: Test the hypothesis on the observation: Which hypothesis would best cause the observed response? Answer: Not moon in Virgo... Not pencils (permanent at all volumes, and may see marks) Maybe playing loud. Moving speakers. Maybe, could cause wire disconect. 4: Devise more tests to to check hypothesis and eliminate some: Ask if someone listened loud. Ask if kids where here. Test if mids and woofers also are intermittent. Check speaker connectors. This narrows it down to connections. 5: Establish theory/rule for future: If tweeter or mids are intermittent, probable cause is bad connection. I learned this method at work many years ago as part of a Kepner Trego problem solving course. It basically applies the scientific method to problem solving. I have used it many times over. During the course, examples where given of real incidents, where people jumped to conclusions and put all resources down that path without proper problem solving methodology. One can also use criminal investigation as a prime example of this method, or see how the innocent get put in jail when you ignore evidence that does not support your conclusion.

I have a Sears Craftsman radial arm saw and a big belt drive Delta table saw. The radial arm saw gets out of adjustment so quickly. If I want to use it for any fine woodworking, I have to spend a morning adjusting it and cleaning the slide first. The whole arm mount is so flimsy, it bends very easily. I would not recomend a craftsman, if you want a radial arm saw, I would sugest a more pro model such as a delta. On the other hand, the big Delta table saw is now one of my most used tools. It rips and crosscuts very cleanly, built like a rock, never needs adjusting!

they actually have variable xover freqs Low to mid is variable between 50 and 200 or 500-2K mid to high is variable from 3k-10k. So you can have a 3 way a la typical heritage between 500-800 and 5K . I hope that my LaScalas can work with the 5OO hz bass to mid. slope is not adjustable. or you can use it for pair of lascalas, with a sub, the main bass bin and a mid/high keeping the standard passive network. This is not a piece luxohifiesoterica, but at $30 a pop delivered to my door, It was a deal I could not pass. They are not used YET. I have not clue as to why so many of them suddenly showed up. Perhpas Pioneer obsoleted them and was liquidating stock via ebay.

I don't see anything wrong with using CD inputs and turning up the volume. The volume on most amps is just a potentiomenter between the preamp and poweramp. As for phono stage input, sure you will get more gain, but you also have the RIAA equalization boost at low freqeuncies. As for cancelling sound from the push pull. Of course the pushing of one will cancel the pulling of the other when the distance between them is half a wavelength. Using an infinite baffle is supposed to prevent that. Or better yet, I am thinking of building a box around the rear of the woofer to completely enclose it and prevent any cancellation from the rear radiation. I may call the new enclosure "Acoustic Suspension" . :-) Are you mixing up push pull with Isobaric? In an isobaric the second woofer also has an enclosure around it. It does not produce any sound, but just helps the main woofer.

DId I see a 99 cent power cord in one of the pictures? That will just ruin the entire system. Especially the air suspension. Imagine all that noise and emi causeing uneven air pressure! The pump motor is a difficult inductive load. For that you need at least a double helix wound, Mongolian silver cable with Egyptian Camel tail hair insulation. Hand wound by virgins under 10 years old from the South Solomon Islands-very rare these days. You did know that the estrogen in teen girls causes the Egyptian Camel hair to go stiff. Right? These guys just have not got a clue to what they are doing!

OK on the spelling, hope you give me some slack too! Family was over today, had some BD cake and coffee too late. Cannot sleep now. I am not sure why Toshiba developed it since the digitized dvd soundtrack is not that high data rate and is easy to send over coax/RCA. Look at 100MBit lan cables over twisted pair! They are now working on 10Gbit over very much the same cable! Perhaps it was a marketing thing to differentiate themselves. To be honest, I do not know if the TOSLINK has error correction, not all digital links do, and there are many different forms of digital communication, many ways that the analog signals can be encoded into digital. Like I said, Digital and Analog can both work when done correctly. Compare CDs to SACD. Both are digital, both use error correction, but they use different sampling and encoding techniques and sound different. As for engineers using the best quality etc., yes we do, we use the best quality that will make the product meet its technical, reliability and cost requirements. Agree on overinflated checkbooks=overinflated ego, but that is normal that you will want to feel good after you spend the money. I have said in other posts, I don't so much worry about the millionare spending $1000 on a power cord, but more the average Joe spending $1000 on a HT system and $500 on fancy speaker wire and interconnects. The $500 would have been better spent on better equipment, and some simple good quality but not overpriced cabling. I do turn green and my clothes start ripping off my back when I hear stuff like putting speaker cable on top of glass spacers to keep them off the floor; just like glass insulators are used in high voltage power lines. Or a lot of the other BS going on out there.

Nothing that fancy with me. Started with the RCA tube console in the living room. That got replaced by some cheap crap with BSR changer in the early 70s. Ripped up the RCA console and boxed it so it would fit in my room. Then nice neighboor gave me his Heatkit w5m, Lenco L70, with a big Goodmans speaker, 12" with woofer. Then in maybe 1977 got a Pioneer SA7500II, Dual 510, Shure M95. Do not recall what speakers I used, All I remember I could not afford all at once. Any Montrealers remember ETCO electronics, I think on McGill College below Dorchester (before it was changed to Rene Levesques) Had my first fantasies with LaScalas at our high school dances. Gave the Heathkit and Lenco to a friend, Tore up the Goodmans to see how speakers where made. I may still have the magnet in my toolbox!. Maybe 1978, got a pair of Large Advents. Got them at the Audio Shop downtown. Boy they sounded great running of the big MacIntosh. sometime in 1984 purchased my first CD player. A hitachi. Still works. It is in our bedroom. 3 year old son seems to not abuse it too much. Mid 90's got maried, had kids, moved, stored stereo in basement. Friends mom gave back the heathkit and Lenco. 2003 Got a set of nicely finished Heresys used in Montreal, another set on ebay. Pair of Lascalas from Dodger (thanks Rob for introducing me to Win) in Rochester. HK HT receiver on Ebay. This was for new big HT room. Also got a second Heathkit on ebay in Albany. last summer I put the Advents (and a second pair from ebay) in the home gym with some not well known brand (ICC?) of power amp. A month ago: Realizing that HT room is still way off, I dusted off the Dual, put in living room with an older Pioneer amp found in garage sale driving the nice Heresys. Rack cost 5$ in Garage sale. Took out the old LPs, got more at, yes you guessed it: at Garage sales. Next project will be restoring the 2 Heathkits. The one I got from neighbour still works. The one I got on ebay needed a new powertransforme, got that on ebay, but have not fixed it yet. Have no clue if rest of amp works. Should be working on it this summer. Then I will see if I can get the Lenco running . I did clean it up, and seems fine except for the Idler. It is rock hard. Need to find a replacement. Looking for a decent CD player and perhpaps a better cartridge for the Dual. I cannot believe that the Lenco will be any better, despite all the nostalgia about the old gear.

Oh, and one more thing: Bose is a privately held company. There is no way to verify the $1.7B revenues that you claim. Also, I would love to see that Forrester Research study. You can see a brief summary of it at www.forrester.com, but you have to pay $775 to get it. So I have no way of verifying how the research was done to really evaluate what it means. I would also have to compare it to past studies to see if Bose is improving or declining. So what does it mean? Maybe that Bose does so much advertising that so many people believe the ads. A Bose sales man once told me that Bose does more research into acoustics than any other company in the world. That may be true, but again, they can say what they want and no one can refute the claim because Bose is private and does not publish how much it spends on product, R&D, Marketing etc.

All that you state is quite true. But there are many flaws to the argument: 1: Market awareness does note equal quality product. GM and Chrysler have huge market share in the US, yet Honda and Toyota beat them in quality. 2: Customer satisfaction may not be a judge of quality if the customer has not experienced anything better. My dad thought that Ford was the best until my brother in law got a Honda and showed him how much longer it lasted and how much less maintenance and repair it required. Then my dad purchased a Honda and has owned nothing but since. 3: Listening tests alone may be a good judge of quality sound only if the listener is trained on what to look for. My parents still think that the $100 stereo they got in the 70's sounds great. They have never listened to anything better. 4: One of the last magazine to write a fair review and test of a Bose product was ConsumerReports. And Bose sued them. That is why magazines no longer do reviews, not because Bose does not publish specs. Magazines can do their own tests. 5: If Bose really things that so called esoteric material is not needed and too expensive, why are their paper speakers still more expensive than others that are made with esoteric stuff, like silk dome tweeters and poly woofers? 6: The only reason companies open up their own retail stores is because they have not got good business results thru regular distribution and retail outlets. A Bose only store allows them to completely controll the entire buying process and allows for no comparison to other products. I have owned a retail store and I know what the wrath of Bose is. When a customer came in and wanted to buy a Bose system, my sales rep made the mistake of doing his job by asking what the customer was interested in, and showed him the Bose system and other other quality alternatives. When the Bose sales manager got wind of that, he threatened to cancel my contract. That is the action of a company wanting to control product image and fearing comparisons. And last but not least, if Bose believes so much in their phsycoacoustic research then why do they not publish them in peer review journals? I would like to see a listening test from Bose that shows that an Acoustimass system that tests out to about 45 to 13.3 KHz +/- 10 dB sounds better than other speakers that test out flatter and with lower distortion.

I have nothing against digital, and I did not say that TOSLINK is no good. I just wanted to say that digital and optical links also have transmission issues. Those 10Gb fiber optic cables need amplifiers and signal reconstruction at regular intervals. To compare a Toslink to a 10 GB single mode fiber link to sending signals to Mars is apples and oranges. That is why I said "other kinds of distortion". An in depth technical discussion of the issue is beyond the scope of this forum and is better suited for www.ieee.com. But if you say that digital is OK because it works for your thousands of miles of fiber, the we should also say that analog is better because we have millions of miles of telephone cable. It all depends on the execution and the tradeoffs made to achieve the overall goals. Both systems will work very well if done properly. Both can result in bad music if done poorly. The problem with the snake oil people is this: If you have not done grade one math then you are not capable of refuting their statement that their $1000 cable makes 1+1=3. So you believe them and spend the money. The same is for EM theory: Only in advanced undergraduate university levels to you begin to learn enough to be able to see thru the bullshit that is spewed from their mouths. The layman is doomed.

Mid 70's: LaScala's in our High School audio system used for dances and in the lounge. Ya know songs like Styx Loreley and Suite Madam Blue, LedZep STH, Eagles One of these Nights and other songs to dance with your SweetHeart.

regarding digital signals, they are just as much affected by the media aka wire or fiber that transports it. Yes, they may be just ones and zeros, but add noise, loss, and other more complex distortions and one and zeros get mixed up and cause errors. For the fiber optic TOSLINK, there is the electro to optical conversion and back again at the other end. The fiber itself, the light having to go thru the air interface of the connector, connector reliability, dirt on the connector etc. It is not as black and white as that. The same digital signal on an cable with RCA connectors can be just as reliable if not more. We have been transporting electrical signals for a hundred years or so and we understand the issues very well. As for the difference between the $4 power cord and the $99 dollar one, I have yet to see any reliable double blind study that shows that anyone can tell the difference.

Electromagnetic theory applies at ALL frequencies. It is just that at audio frequencies most of the effects are so small to be insignificant. The problems is that the snake oil people find some neet effect at RF/Uw and then tell everyone that it is important at Audio. Knowing EM theory lets us see thru the BS. The reality is that only someone self taught or with a college degree learns enought to understand. The remaining 95% of the population are the targets. The Electomigration effect on ICs is actually a DC effect, but only a problem on very very small conductors as found on ICs. If we do some estimates, like I did, we can quickly see that it is caused by current densities a few orders of magnitude higher than found audio interconnects. That is how we take theory or observations, do the calculations and determine what we need to worry about at the power/frequencies we care about. An experienced designer knows what to worry about and does not make all the detailed calculations every time. The anoying thing is that the snake oil people make us do the same calculations over and over again to prove them wrong every time. And then they give us more bullshit so that they save face and can continue selling $10,000 speaker wires. Another area applicable to both microwave and audio is wavelength and characteristic impedance. In Microwave or RF design we can regard a transmission line simply as a lumped LC if the length of the Tline is less than about 20% of the wavelength. This also applies to audio. On an IC at 20GHz, a wavelenght is a few milimeters and we cannot always make the lumped element simplification. At 30KHz, a wavelenght is about 6 miles, so we do not care about characteristic impedance of any normal length interconnect, just their lumped LC. At video frequencies of 30MHz like those on HD component video, wavelength is about 10 meters, so we do care about 75 ohm characteristic impedance of video cables. So you get an interview between a knowledgable audio guru and a snake oil company president that goes like this. Audio Guru: Tell me how your speaker wires work: Snake oil pres: We have patented blah blah based on Maxwells equations covering the blah blah effects of electromagnetics on blah blah. Augio Guru: but at audio frequencies those effects are only .0000001%. Do you have any measurments or double blind test to back up your claims: Snake Oil Pres: But Einstein proved that blah blah .00000001% is significant because of blah blah. We have 1000 happy customer that never returned the products during the 90 day money back return period. Plus Patents blah blah cover our design, and research paper blah blah by Sigmund Freud shows double blind tests to be unreliable. Audio Guru: But that Einstein calculation has to do with light traveling to the next galaxy, not on audio signals traveling thru speaker wire. And that patent covers a method on how to manufacture better sounding piano wire by putting some silver in it, not how adding .0000001% silver improves the sound of a piano played thru copper wire. Furthermore, that Freud study showed that pubescent boys could not tell the difference between B and B flat when cheerleaders practiced outside the music class window and the double blinds where open. So again, please prove to me your statements. Snake Oil Pres: You must be jealous that I am making millions of dollars selling this crap and you are obviously biased agains my company and if you publish any of this you will hear from my lawyer.

The concern was with bias supply conductors to the transistors.

Just finished a 3 day course in Microwave IC design. One of the topics was electromigration on the gold interconnects on the IC. It is a problem for ICs. The suggested rule of thumb is a maximum current of about 10mA for a gold interconnect of 1micron wide by 1 micron thick. Much more than that and the gold atoms will be pushed around by the electrons and can cause opens. So with all this snake oil abound, I am sure that some cable companies make use of this fact to sell their super fancy expensive crap. A quick calculation reveals that the current would be 10000 amps in a 18 gauge wire! So any snake oil suggesting that electromigration is a problem in interconnects is a load of BS.

Why not answer this question scientifically: Do some research. 1: What temperature can a plasma TV withstand: Get info from owner's manual . So I checked the Pioneer owner's manual for the consumer plasmas, and they give no info. So I checked the industrial/Business plasmas and they say operating temperature range is 0-40deg C. That is a maximum of 104 degrees F. That actually seems low, as I can think of many places where plasmas are used and the temperature is higher: bars, outdoor sports events, etc. It gets that hot in a house in the summer, etc. 2: What is temperature above fireplace: Put a thermometer where you want to place the plasma. I would say that if it stays less than 110deg F then it is ok. The issue is not if things will melt, but has to do with being able to dissipate heat. The hotter the ambient temperature, the less heat can be dissipated, and the internal temperture increases.

Lets not forget what these small but powerfull subs are supposed to do: be small. I do not believe that the manufacturers expect them to outperform their big 12 or 15 units, but not everyone wants such a big sub in the pristine living room. It fits the market for a powerfull sub, in a very small box, yet with some compromise in absolute low end.