Travis In Austin

Wild mushrooms?

We have a lot of Forum members on dial-up. No fault of their own other than the rural or remote areas they live in do not offer DSL. If they unknowingly click on this thread their computers can be locked up for minutes or possibly require a reboot. No one needs to look for a bridge though. They can get higher download speeds then DSL via sat/direct tv. Travis

I like Gary's size better then Michaels's photos, I can read the date of release and all the fine print on the label without reading glasses. Gary, in the future, please post at least that size, and preferably larger. Anybody with dial up can just skip over any post of yours. There is no excuse for being limited to dial up, it is not rural vs. city. Anyone in North America can get high speed internet via sat. Travis

Is that outside City Hall in Dallas? Travis

Great shot James!

..............."You have as much time left as GOD allows you to have..............When he's ready for you, he will take you........" Buck, It can not be said in a better way. We can watch our diets, not smoke, stay away from physical things that are bad, drink 25 gallons of water, and run 100 miles per day. BUT, when it is your time, when The Man pulls your plug...........No matter how much you run or watch your diet,......Your a$$ is out of here and I don't think that we will mind the results. Check out Dtel's signature. As my extended age makes this theory more difficult to live, (I try) he has nailed it, and I will continue my quest to "not leave anything on the table". Better burn out than fade away........? Regards, Terry Just a side note about the water. Driking 25 gallons of water in a day would probably kill you. You can die from drinking too much water, believe it or not. We always hear about 8 full glasses, but depending on the climate, amount of activity, gender, this can be too little or too much. On average an adult male needs about 12 cups of water per day. Your body actually needs more then this but we get water from other sources such as fruits, vegies, etc. The ideal situation is for your input to equal or slightly exceed your normal output. Depending on the indivudual this can be between 1 to 2 liters per day. Since no one is going to measure that the other way to tell is that your urine should run clear or slightly yellow. Travis

Never, and I mean never, store you tapes in a refrigerator. The humidity is usually way too high. The ideal storage is vertical, in between 60 to 70 degrees, with 50% humidity or less. For more information the National Archives has commissoned studies on tape life, best conditions, etc. There website has tons of information on this along with the results of the studies: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/5premature_degrade.html Short of a climate controlled room, you want them in a dark closet, stored vertically. If your home has AC, and not prone to big temp varations of 15 degrees or more, they will be in pretty good shape if you keep your house at around 70. Hope this helps. Travis

no ribs required....just come on down and lunch will be on me..... have a blessed night, roy Roy, I sent you an email

Another shot. Yes Virginia, there was a time if you were an Audiophile you went with tape instead of vinyl and looked down your nose at folks with lp's. One generation closer to the master, no eq. back and forth, and no issues with trying to get more out of the grove wall. Alas, the evil record companies started going to high speed duplication at only high speed, and the quality suffered, and the poor R2R nearly became extinct. Here is another view of what they looked like:

Glad to hear about the remaster, but I heard there was a lot of new stuff, as many as 10 bonus songs on one of the CD's, an early take of Strange Days that was omitted from the LP, only to be the title of the next LP, etc. I am curious to hear what they sound like. As of now I prefer these, 7.5 IPS original Reel to Reel tapes. This is my back up set, all still sealed, which I keep around in the event I wear out one of my working copys. While I agree with Gary, the red label Elektra's are nice, these blow away any vinyl copy I have ever heard. Travis

Keith, Congratulations, I am anxious to hear your thoughts once you get them set up. There are a few threads on tubes, I think if you search for "VRD" and "Running" you will come up with a lot of responses. A very good reccomendation I got early on was to run them with the stock tubes for awhile before you to any rolling. I think you will find what Mark101 has stated, it is very difficult to get any noticiable improvement over the stock tubes. Travis

Which is next weekend isn't it? I sent you a PM, Travis

Jorjen, Man you really are a die hard 49'ers fan. Do you own anything that is not red and gold? I grew up in the Bay Area, a Raiders fan, and (hold on for this one), a Rams fan. You poor guys had Brodie and I think the Rams won the West 8 years in a row, maybe longer, until y'all got Joe. One thing is for sure, going to Candlestick (tickets were easy to come by back then) in blue and white sure toughened me up, worse then being a boy named Sue. I sure prefered when we went to home games in Oakland. What area is your Cabin in? We did the same thing growing up, your kids will thank you big time for that later on. Travis

Dave, Glad to hear that you are going toi be ready for the Easter Bunny's delivery. I am really impressed with how much you were able to do on that thing. I don't think I would have attempted half of what you were able to get in good working order. I will let you know when the package flys. Travis

Very nice of you to offer them on here free, and rudamentry fits right in with Michael's ability, he is after all in technical support.[8-|] Travis

Arthurs, What part of the metroplex are you in? I really want to talk to you about those prototype speakers. I went to their web site, some beautiful stuff. I think it is beyond my DIY ability, but would love to talk to you about them some more. Travis

Michael, Email me your cell, I don't have it here Travis

I'm sure they would make you a great deal, seeing as how you can get them all day long for 13K a pair with free shipping. See http://www.vanns.com/shop/servlet/item/features/542999796 Travis

Michael, Do I have your permission to use for screensaver? Travis

Phil, I also meant to say in my original response that you really should take Larry up on his offer. In fact, you should try and see if he will let you take your whole TT rig and some LPs with you to his house and you he will get you set up like nobody can. He has been a wealth of knowledge and help to me. Plus, you will get to see how one of your lp's will sound with a very, very, very high-end cartiridge on one of the best tracking tonearms on the face of the planet. Of course once you do, you will never look back. Travis

Larry, I agree that a better cartride can casue less noise if you go from an eliptical to line contact like the Transfiguration and the Koetsu. Thus, moving from say a Shelter with eliptical, to a line contact will for sure cause less noise, that is a proven fact. However, in my post of above, I was talking in general terms. I think moving from a low cost MM, Ortofon, Shure, to a high dollar MC a record with groove damage is going to become much more apparent. However, I don't believe the noise our friend is describing is going to deminish with a better cart. I agree with you, that once you move up beyond a certain level, better cart will make noise less noticable.

The pen, as you so aptley demonstrate my good friend thebes, is mightier then the sword. Someone has to venture out, someone has to find new ground worth defending, worth saving, worth resurrecting (Its Easter). Travis

Phil, I forgot, do you have the link to that web site? I think what you may be referring to is most folks would say after you do a good wet cleaning of a record, either with orbitrac, or disk doctor, whether by machine or hand, you do not need to clean it from there. I agree with this. But you do need to do a dry clean before each play. With a brush such as the _________ dang the brand is escaping me. It has carbon fibre plus a felt pad to clean surface dust with the felt and groove dust with the carbon fibre. I am too lazy to go up stairs and look, but they are sold everywhere. Travis

Mallett the Easter Bunny dropped something off something at my door for you by mistake, I need your address, you have an email from me. WIth regard to pops and clicks. There are a lot of threads and topics here about cleaning records that you can search. The orbitrac is a highly reccomended system by everyone I know who uses it. I cannot reccoment highly enough the Disc Doctor brushes and cleaner. You can use it manually as well. There is another system you can use available from Garage records where the record sits in a bath of cleaner and you rotate the record manually. I don't agree that you have to live with pops and clicks if you listen to viny. I have an original Miles Davis Kind of Blue 6 Eye label in both stereo and mono, both of which are almost 50 years old and neither one of them have a pop or click on them. I also have some Blue Note Jazz lps that no matter what amount of cleaning or treatment are simply unplayable. The surface noise is horrible. There is not a visable scratch or nick in these records, they look beautiful, but sound so scratchy they are worthless. What's the difference? Pop typically more of a function of static electricity. Everytime you play the record, clean it in a circular motion, put it in or pull it out of a sleeve (that is not anti-static) you are developoing static. The way to get rid of this is to buy a Milty anti-static gun. They work, they last forever, and you will love it. Just don't try to take it with you in carry on luggage (that's a story for a different time). Now clicks, which are a bit differeent in sound, are usualy caused by scratches in the record. You hear a brief click and then about a second later a click, and so on until the needle is no longer going through that scratch. Nothing you can do about that. There is a polymer product for sale that claims to eliminate or reduce the noise from that, but it's crap. Then you get to the surface noise stuff, in the quiet part of the lp, like the lead in groove, between songs, you hear noise, a grinding, raspy noise. A good cleaning MAY compleately eliminate that noise. If the noise is from dirt, dust, beer, smoke (tobacco and otherwise), mold release compount (Max would spell it mould on that side of the pond), etc. that has built up in the grooves you can get that out of there and it will play fine. However, is someone has played the record with all of that gunk in there, espically multiple times, then you are screwed. As someone already stated, this stuff gets burned or etched into the groove walls. I cannot remember what the tempratures folks claim are reached in the groove wall by the pressure of the needle, but it is quite high, way more then you would expect. Cleaning is essential to keeping a great record sounding great. A good wet clean on any record, new or used, and then dry before every play will keep your records noise FREE. The other problem is damage caused by an old type stylus or worn needle. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid my parents got us "phonograph." A box with a turntable and a speaker built into it. On that tonearm there was a needle that you could filp from 33 to 78. There was a stylus on one side and you could flip it over to the other. Some were even mono and stereo. These "el cheepo" needles were saphire. They were designed to be used for 100 or so hours and then replaced. Of course they never were, they were played until the saphire practically wore off. While that was happening the needle was destroying the groove walls. The same thing happens with an old worn out diamond needle. The diamond needles is using tracking at a fraction of the weight as the saphire because they were usually on much better tonearms and in much better cartridges, but diamonds don't give and they can do a lot of damage in a hurry. They can even do more damage if they track at too light of force rather then too heavy because the needle is not sitting in the groove well, it is bouncing from side to side. THERE IS NOTHING you can do about this damage and only a good cleaning and a subsequent play is going to tell you if that is your problem. So, you want to make sure you have a good stylus that is in good shape. Someone recently mentioned that the audio stores used to have microscopes that could check the condition, but none do now. I would not even know what to look for if I had acess to one, but I am told it is pretty evident when you see a worn cartridge. Outside of that you need to keep track, in some loose way, of how much time you have on the cartridge. Now to your question, can an improved cartridge/stylus make the noise more noticeable. Absolutely! A great cartridge can turn an lp that was almost noise free into your worst nightmare, because that is what you are paying for. To get more information out of the groove wall. Usually, you are going to pick up more noise with a better cartridge but it is relative. If you had a fairly decent one before, and have no noise, you are not going to pick up anything more if you move up. If you had a an inexpensive one with a stiff cantilever and move way up to one designed to get every possible vibration out of the groove wall you are going to hear things you never heard before, both in the music (the good stuff) and in terms of damage in the grooves (the bad stuff). The shape of the stylus also plays into this. Conical vs. eliptical vs. line contact. An eliptical is going to cause less wear then a conical, and a line contact is even better because you are going with it's shape you are going to get less groove noise, and you will also get less wear. With regard to home made record cleaners, there are bunch of receipies on the net. Before you use one I would reccomend that you get a record that you don't really care about, that you know is relatively noise free, and try out the home brew and give it a play. Some of the suggested home brews leave a lot of residue, that will result in damage either to your record, or your stylus. Oh, one last thing, with this type of question, if you ask 10 people you will get 15 different opinions. Of which 10 will be pretty valid, 2 will be tounge in cheek, 1 will be off topic, and 2 will be so far out there you don't know what they are thinking. Hope this helps, Travis

That was a major bourbon buzz killer. I had to think to much and it shifted my whole preception out of whack. What about cool cats just wanting to get into the groove? Can't we be netural? Must we gird our loins in order to dig the beat? Rather then be a champion of my camp, I think I will brave the mighty unknow, and follow the lot of the crusaders, the explorers, the conquestadors--gaining satisfaction that I might tread where no man has ventured before. Outside of that, I think I will fix another bourbon and play some Doors and get back to where I was before. Travis