Travis In Austin
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Posts posted by Travis In Austin
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Beautifull stuff Richard, all of it, the views, the deck, the new room. All for naught, for soon you are going to be overtaken by bamboo.
Travis
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I have yet to hear them, I had a chance to listen to them in Hope last fall but he were predicted to have a hurricane pass through here and I had to cancel my trip.
Still looking forward to my first listen.
Travis
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If you take the pi over the square root of the price times the hours of listening enjoyment divided by days owned adjusted for leap years minus the present value of the gas money to Delaware plus the WAF factor (which is very high in my case since I paid nothing), I am confident that I am still in the lead.
That formula is correct except it is the future value of gas based on the price of gas the day you left your driveway to pickup the speakers, converted to today's value by using the CPI as published in the WSJ on the 1st Monday of the last month of preceeding quarter
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Mic Stiffy,
Nice score, but I think score of the century goes to J.C., for buying a pair od Klipsch KPT-MCM-4-T Grand speakers that were demos for under $3,000 at a buiseness liquidation auction. I think my own score of 9 TSCM Bass cabinets wuith 2 TSCM high frequency cabinets for arround $1000 rates as second place due to condition and missing high frequency cabinets, but that is only my opinion.
Roger
I think I have got that beat, not in the quantity department, but the quality deparment. Late last year I got a mint (never been used, still on pallet, still in wrapping) pair of TSCM's for well below $1,000 out of a small town movie theater here in Texas. It is the only thing I have scored on in that department, just sheer dumb luck.
I have never lucked out on Craig's list ("oh those just sold, I will let you know if he backs out but he is bringing me $500 cash for these mint Khorns that were my dads, but the jokes on him, I would I have given him $500 to get these big ugly things out of here. Tell you what, give me your number and if he no shows I will sell them to you for $450" or similar variation, just adjust the price based on the product)
It is tough to beat a free pair of Khorns, and they were not a beater pair of Khorns, those were, and still are, a set of mint horns. I am way more impressed with Gary's lp finds for a buck then his free near mint khorns. I bet he has found 10x the value of those khorns in near mint valuable vinyl for buck. The thrift stores we have here in Austin are all picked over, stuff pulled for acution, etc. I have never found anything worth a darn. I have gone to self storage auctions, where they sell the contents because of non-payment of rent, and no luck on anything. Sure heard a lot of great stories. "You should have been here last month, who storage shed full of lp's, stored correctly, blah blah blah." I never seem to find that stuff. By the time I was factoring in the time to try and track it down, the time being wasted, it was cheeper to just buy it at the record convention here in Austin. The hunt, while fun for awhile, kind of got old when you just are not finding anything worth a darn. I think with ebay there is just so much more demand for these types of things. It has just created such a hugh market for this stuff. I mean before if you had a 1970's Mac amp you had no idea what it was worth, where to get rid of it, etc. Now any 16 year old kid can tell you what it is worth instantly, or a 1A/1A Six Eye mono KOB is worth. As a consequence this stuff is not being sold in garage sales or making it to thrift stores like it used to.
Travis
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This part really cracked me up because I "have been there, done that":
Don't mention it to John Atkinson, who had to revise his measuring technique to accommodate this beautiful monster. We nearly broke our backs hoisting the speaker onto JA's rotating platform thingie. "One, two, three, and up!" And I felt the familiar tightness in my lower back and then the shooting pain from my *** to my thigh and I fought through it and we lifted and we lowered the speaker onto the wood blocks and in my mind I cursed like mad while I pretended that it didn't hurt at all. "That wasn't so bad."
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With regard to the comments about Stereophile, I agree with a lot of them, but I don't think it's wise to stereotype anything, even an audiophile magazine. As with any product, whether it's cars or speakers, when you have folks giving opinions about subjective elements you have to take everything with more than a grain of salt. Before everyone jumps on the bash Stereophile bandwagon I did want to point out a couple of things:
Sam Tellig is a regualr contributor to Stereophile and someone I have always found to give pretty accurate and useful information on products. He gave La Scalla II's an A RATING and BOUGHT THE DEMO PAIR for his house, and still has them. He added supertweeters to them and apparently loves them.
I can't remember off hand who reviewed the Blueberry Xtream preamp for Stereophile but they gave that preamp a B rating and stated that it sounded everybit as good as anything up to twice the price.
As much as I can't stand Fremer, I do find I am forced to read his self-promoting "Analog Corner" every month because he is someone who does feature new and different products related to vinyl more then anyone else in his business. The problem is you just can't trust anything he has to say about them. (He is the one who swears that a 3K Furtech vinyl demagnatizer really works)
As Dr. Larry mentioned, I have always liked the fact that Stereophile does test some of the products they evaluate and includes Atkinson's test data and discussion of that data along side the review. With my very, very limited technical knowledge I have been able to learn quite a lot by reading the comments of the test data, and comparing this data with other similar products. It is interesting to see that there is in fact obective test data you can see wide differences in, and, more importantly, cost does not always equate with better specs.
Congratulations to Klipsch on the review. Lest we forget, the readership of Stereophile is who Klipsch would be targeting when they came out with this product. Klipsch made it clear the Palladium was developed to compete in the high-end audio market. If the price point isn't a clue, I don't know what else would be. Whether we like it or not, I don't think there is another publication out there that is going to target this marker better then Stereophile. It will be great to see those cool Stereophile reprints of the article sitting out at stocking Palladium dealers and at the CEMA show in the fall.
Amy, as you well know, Stereophile has a manufacturer's response section in the back of the magizine where you get to respond and comment on the review. Sometimes the response is for the review in the same issue, which obviously means the manufacturer is sent an advance copy of the review and allowed to submit a response, and others give their response in a subsequent issue. I have not recieived this issue yet, so I don't know if Klipsch has a response in or not. If not, and you haven't done so I hope y'all get one in. It is a great opportunity to tie up loose ends, etc.
Travis
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New speaker and sub power cables
I like the sleeving, where did you find that?
Travis
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I quit, in part, because of this thread. It was time for me to quit, Gary had the info on Chantix he shared, and I haven't smoked since I quit in late June of '07.
I reccomend Chantix at least once a week, it works.
Travis
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I really liked the K 25 if you had the light. You could get the lab to do a 4x5 internegative and blow it up to 16 x 20 and see no grain, it took something above 30 x 40 to even see grain. The reason you could get such fine grain is it used a process of dye coupling, whatever that is. Kodak used to have the corner on that market, and then they got pounded in anti-trust cases. Larry will remember this, maybe even Michael, but when you bought a roll of Kodachrome it came with a "mailer" to mail the roll back to a Kodak processing plant. This is when Kodak put the film in metal cans so it would not get smashed in the mail, and the cans were great for storing other sfuff. The mailer included postage prepaid to Kodak, and they mailed the slides back to you. In other words, the cost of the film included processing. The Govt. broke that up under antitrust and said they had to allow others to process it. So they were forced to sell others their processing equipment, etc. If I am not mistaken it was Berkely Labs that sued them and won.
But I must say that I shot way more Ektachrome, and most of that was 400 pushed to 1600. Back then you could bring a camera to a concert, and as long as there was no flash you could shoot away without any problem. It was great stuff.
What ever happend to Ciba Chrome for prints, they had some great papers.
Travis
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Roy had a similar tragedy occur in connectoin with an experiment involving pigs.
I would have thought the cournty music mice would have been crying and sucking down a beer, and the metal music mice would have been baning their heads on the cage.
Travis
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This looks like it covers pretty much everything about the company. I forgot that the founder died in 1998. In mentions the purchase by the Music Direct owner. It also has a listing of all of their issues, old and new.
http://www.mofi.com/productcart/pc/viewcontent.asp?idpage=14
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From Wikipedia:
Current MFSL releases include SACDs and LPs, as well as the traditional Ultradisc II gold discs. The original company folded in November, 1999 when their main distributor went bankrupt, taking a large chunk of deliverable money with them. In 2002, the label was resurrected by Music Direct and has been producing well received Super Audio CDs, GAIN 2 Ultra Analog Limited Edition vinyl, Ultradisc II Gold CDs and Ultradisc CD-Rs since then.
That would be the case Gary, the Music Direct guy bought the name out of the bankruptcy. I don't think there is anything about the new MoFi that is from the old. I don't even know if they master or stamp in Japan like they used to. It is a very similar deal to Acoustic Sounds owning APO records and doing reissues. As I recall the new MoFi got it's new start by coming out with Patricia Barber (who is also from ChiTown) in 45 rpm.
I have the Ltd Ed Little Richard that came out recently and it is very nice compared to the original pressing.
Edit: I forgot to mention that, if my memory serves, this guy grew up in the LA area and got started by recording trains and the sounds they make. I believe MoFi 001 is a sound effects or train LP. I have a prerecorded tape on the MoFi label that is recordings of trains. I have no interest in trains, but got it because of MoFi label. I beleive he went from those modest beginings to the audiophle lp market.
Travis
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Did you just say "vertical member"?
Always talking shop, tsk tsk.
Those are so nice laminated. I see you wanted strength and toughness so you went with paint, but I bet they would look great with stain or clear.
Are they done, or when when they be ready for you to listen/test out?
Travis
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If you have access to a machine shop, and connections at a lazer cutting or water jetting and finishing shop, they'd probably cost you less than 100 bucks and less than a few hours time to complete a set. I can email a higher resolution PDF file of the part drawing if anyone wants it. I also have it in a 3D solidworks model, as well as DWG and DXF formats at my office.
I'm just a lawyer. We are not smart enough, nor have common sense, to be around things like lazer cutters or water jetting. I didn't even realize water jetting was used to cut metal. It sounded like you were an industrial designer or ran a shop so I thought I would ask what it would cost do have your place do it, I didn't realize that it involved different locations/vendors doing multiple functions.
They sure are nice.
Travis
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If you have access to a machine shop, and connections at a lazer cutting or water jetting and finishing shop, they'd probably cost you less than 100 bucks and less than a few hours time to complete a set. I can email a higher resolution PDF file of the part drawing if anyone wants it. I also have it in a 3D solidworks model, as well as DWG and DXF formats at my office.
I'm just a lawyer. We are not smart enough, nor have common sense, to be around things like lazer cutters or water jetting. I didn't even realize water jetting was used to cut metal. It sounded like you were an industrial designer or ran a shop so I thought I would ask what it would cost do have your place do it, I didn't realize that it involved different locations/vendors doing multiple functions.
They sure are nice.
Travis
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Marty,
That is BEAUTIFUL. Wow, I am really going to get you some turntable deminsions now.
Do you have to use a special type of plastic because of the heat?
Travis
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Temporarily using a "Benchmark DAC1 USB Pre", but I have a Juicy Music BBX in the shop for service that was very good with the MC250 so i can only imagine it will pair well with the VRD's.
MM,
What vinyl rig/cart are you using with the BBX/VRD combo?
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The VRDs suck, and I have a pretty long list of complaints.
1) They're too heavy
2) The tops are too shiney and it hurt my eyes when sun hit them just right
3) The tubes weren't bright enough to read my CD labels at night
4) I had to learn to use a screwdriver the size of a toothpick
5) I had to learn the difference between vdc and vac
6) They didn't keep my room warm enough when the temperatures dropped into the teens (forcing me to turn on the furnace)
7) The manual was poorly written -- no warnings at all about the dangers of dusting them while operating (my swiffer caught on fire)
8) No 1 ohm taps
9) No in home service (the loon actually expects you to troubleshoot issues over the phone), and trust me, he'll make sure you get electrocuted at least once just to make sure you're paying attention
10) He doesn't offer his own preamp, so you're stuck using a Juicysomethingorother, which is nothing more than a overpriced mousetrap.You left out:
11. You have to go out a by a VOM so you can use the thing
12. The stock tubes are pretty much fine as they are so you look silly spending a lot of extra money for high priced NOS tubes
13. Name suggests tube rolling but after a listen you just want to do that, sit back and listen, instead of actually tube rolling
14. The manufacturer laughs at you when you ask if he reccomends going to a high $ AC power cord
15. The designer does not have much of an opinion about ANYTHING. He lives up in Michigan (I think he is the only one left in that State), and he just kind of goes with the flow on everything.
16. The customer services sucks--no way the guy is going to stay in business when he keeps helping people out with their VRD even if they didn't buy them from him
I really enjoyed the review that started this thread. Brought back some good memories when mine first came through the door. I bought my VRDs from a forum member who never really used them and Craig was still on the phone from set up, etc. I later sent them to him for a tune up and check out, and the sumbitch wouldn't let me pay him. Finally had to find a vintage pre-amp (MX 110 ) to send him in order to give him any money, and then he got that sounding so good I had to get it out of the country.
Can't go wrong with VRD, glad you have things the way you want them.
Travis
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Well Doc,
How, how prey tell, am I supposed to do that?
Travis
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Thanks for the great queston, and the answer. I have always wonder that myself. I listen to a lot of 2 channel stuff, but some home theater as well. I am in the process of getting my Jubs set up and didn't really feel like I was going to need a sub to supplement the music at all. For HT I figured I would need a sub because they use so much low end for special effects and so forth.
Travis
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Welcome to the forum. There are a number of threads on dating by S/N that you can search for, but I am also sure that someone will post the guide for you as well. I beleive T is 1978, but like I say, someone will post to let you know for sure.
Travis
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double
EARTHQUAKE
in General Klipsch Info
Posted
I with you on that one DTEL. I was in Santa Barbara in 1971 for the Sylmar quake and I was in Candlestick for the Loma Prieta quake, I managed to miss the Northridge quake somehow.