pauln

I clean every record before I play it, always have for 40 years - they are still clean and quiet. Used records may be damaged and will likely be filthy. A used record that "looks perfect" may be ruined - you can't tell without hearing it. They can be cleaned, but they can't be fixed if ruined - the main way most records were ruined was by rough handling, playing them on crappy tables, not cleaning them, leaving them out , etc. A new record requires being cleaned before playing for the first time in order to remove the mold release... hardly anyone ever did that and the mold release was welded into the groove walls the first time it was played. He is an easy way to clean records: You will need: New paint brush 4" wide with sharp bristles (not plastic, nylon, or any of those with stubby ends; get either boar hair or special fine end fibers) Liquid made from 4 parts distilled water and 1 part isopropyl alcohol and a couple drops of Dawn dish soap Microfiber dust free cloth A drying rack or a mounted rod narrower than the spindle hole Clean a record: Spread a clean bath towel on kitchen table Place record on towel Dip brush in liquid and "paint" the record grooves holding the brush vertically and going round. The grooves will hold tight to the brush and you can go round either direction. If the record is filthy, wipe it off and rinse the brush after the first couple of orbits, then resume As long as the bristles are verticle you are getting the best effect; you can't press hard enough to hurt the vinyl, just go round and round for a few minutes Then flip it over and do the other side Then rinse it in distilled water using the rinsed brush to help - don't just dump the water on it, use a little with the brush, add, brush, add, brush... until it is clean Dry with the cloth moving with the grain of the grooves Set up the record in a drying rack or feed it on to the mounted rod (I use a radio antenna sticking out from an open drawer) Wait about 30 minutes Put record in New Record sleeve ===== This will get your records as clean as possible short of a record cleaning machine with vacuum. If you hear noise on them after this, they were originally ruined and can't be recovered.

Oh come on, how can you not like a song like....

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions? Joni Mitchell

Just something to keep in mind... The Heresy I had a difference from all the rest of the Heritage line (Cornwalls, Belle, La Scala, and KHorn); all the rest were tall and had the tweeter and midrange up pretty high from the floor, the Heresy on the floor has its horns down low. Since the Heresy produces the most bass when on the floor pushed all the way back into a corner, the fix for the mid and tweeter was in the crossover network - the taps on the autoformer gave the horns a +3dB gain more than the rest of the Heritage line. So with more bass from being in the corners, and more high end to compensate for being down low on the floor, the overall result was to smooth out the extremes. Now this works fine if you put the Heresy on the floor in the corner, but a lot of folks like to set their speakers up on stands a la audiophile style. That does two things; reduces bass, and makes the high end a little bright... the two most often heard complaints about Heresys. When I had Heresys (for 30 years) I changed the taps on the autoformer to knock it back down, and as for the bass; I never thought of them as being too light in the bass - seemed just fine for music. Not sure about the H III... with the slant base it is clear that they still want you to put them on the floor, but by slanting them up to direct the highs upward I'm not sure if that means they changed the balance between the high and low in the network. I use to slant my Heresys up sometimes and never really decided whether it made much difference. The main thing is to get them into the corners and toe them inward.

I remember the Altec magazine ad from the early 70's... JBL had discovered that more recording studios were using JBLs than anything else and had been repeating this every chance in every ad. The implication was that they were fine stuff and you should remember that when buying your own HiFi speakers, "What better to hear music in your home than the same ones prefered when making music in the studio"...etc. Altec sent someone to check it out, and sure enough they found JBL everywhere. Rather than just chalk it up to tough luck, the guy asked the studio people why they preferred the JBLs. They said they really liked the sound of them. They went on to elaborate that when you sit in a studio for hour after hour listing to the same tracks over and over while making little adjustments, you really need a speaker with a lot of coloration to exagerate the changes. The Altec add quoted the studio folks' reasoning about why the JBL was so popular for use as a studio monitor.

A lot of folks use speaker sensitivity to mark the border above which tubes will sound best, below which solid state sounds best. The area of agreement I've seen seems to be in the 90's; tubes best for higher sensitivity, SS best for lower because they deliver current. The reason for the fuzzy range is personal variation in how loud they like it.

What you saw is correct; tweeter mounted from the inside, but so is mine... Those four nuts on the tweeter front face connect to the z-brackets, then the z-brackets bends back, then to the side (on each side inside) where they screw to the motor board from behind. The part that recieves the tweeter nuts bends into the cavity, then bends again toward the outer side to attach to the face wall inside - hence the "z" in z-bracket. It sounds like you saw from the inside, and my picture is from the outside...

"I am that which is. I am all that is, that was, and shall be. No mortal man hath lifted my veil. He is alone by Himself, And in Him alone do all things owe their being." Ludwig van Beethoven - (he was existential before existentialism was cool)

The last of the La Scalas had z-brackets for flush mounting the tweeter (pix is my 2005) I think the La Scala II has front mounted flush tweet and mid, but not certain. PWK said in the Dope from Hope that it didn't make a dimes worth of difference.

There are a couple of ways to get rid of duplicate rows, depending on how many rows comprise each entry, whether there is a blank row between entires, and whether that number of rows is the same for all entries. If each entry is just a single row, and you have duplicate rows for each one, with no blank rows, the solution is pretty easy to do "manually" in Excel. 0] Save a copy of the sheet (always)! 1] insert a new blank column to the left 2] Put the number "1" in that column next to the first entry 3] In the cell below the one with the "1", put a formula that adds 1 to it. If the "1" cell is A1, put =A1+1 in cell A2 4] Fill down from A2 down to the A4000 or whatever is the last entry 5] So now you have all the rows numbered from 1 to 4000 6] Select all those numbers in that column 1 through 4000 and copy, leave the column selected, paste special, and choose "values" 7] So now you have the same list of numbers, but they are as if you keyed them in, not equation results. This means they won't change when you do subsequent sorts 8] Insert another column to the left 9] For the first cell (A1), put in a test for even or odd by entering this formula where B1 is the next over cell holding the 1-4000 numbers: =mod(B1,2) What this will do is divide the 1-4000 number by 2 and indicate if there is a remainder by showing a "1" for yes and "0" for no. 10] Fill down that testing column so when you are done you have a colume of alternating 1's and 0's, the numbers 1 through 4000, and the data entries with duplicates 11] Now you can see that every record you want to keep has a "1" in the first column, and those you want to delete have a "0" there 12] Select all the columns and rows, and do a sort on the testing column with the 1's and 0's 13] The result will be basically two complete lists of your records, with all the "1" records together, and all the "0" records togather 14] Select and delete all the rows that have a 0 in the first column and what is left are all the wanted records without duplicates

In the last picture, do I see the layers from bottom to top are foam, tile, and tile? I was expecting you to put the foam between the tiles (or is that what you did?) Either way, I think this is a far better approach than the similar popular method of placing a slighty inflated small radius bike tube between two solid layers. I always wondered how those folks ever got the turntable to stay truly level. I've also seen people make a sand box kind of affair on which their turntable sits... I sure don't like the idea of having sand anywhere close to my table or records! Your solution ensures the table is level, and your test confirms that it works well. My turntable has a sprung subchassis that isolates (floats) the platter and arm from the main chassis. In fact, the subchassis has an additional sprung subsystem from itself that isolates the belt drive motor. A final thought just comes to me... if you go to the trouble to make a thing like this, why not add one more helper - a sheet of fine mesh wire screen between the layers? Most folks have their components arrainged where the turntable is positioned above the amps. Having the sheet of metal screen serves to block any EM sources below it, might they be from the amps or CD players or other possibly EM noisy gear...things with integrated chips and clocking crystals.

You may be able to store things like that in the cold if you cover them with a blanket and run a line under it with a light bulb left on all the time. A long time ago I had a place where the washing machine was on the back porch. Using the blanket and light kept the water in it from freezing. May keep it drier, too.

" I play music at about 80 db and still get more satisfaction..." Most folks get the idea of dynamics in the louder direction. When your speakers reveal the dynamics in the softer direction...very satisfying indeed.

"Life is short.... Enjoy every minute....." Ironsave DJK's message was the same, just more informed. I would interpret it like this: "Life is short (so don't make it shorter unneccessarily)... Enjoy every minute (with less smoke, fire, shocks, and burns)" I have to sympathize with DJK. As a guitar player I've been in many forums where someone is asking about how to do something inside their tube amp. Often it is clear that the person is totally ignorant of the danger, and when warned that the power supply caps can kill him, he writes something scary like, "No problem, I'm not stupid; the amp will be turned off while I'm inside it." When warned that they don't seem to grasp the danger, an all too frequent follow-up response is, "Hey, why are you harshing me. Just so you won't have a cow, I'll pull the plug totally out of the wall, man. Then there can't be any danger, so not a problem." I've seen a few of these guitar amp repair threads where it looks like some kid is really preparing to test Darwin's theory. The lengths some of the knowledgable folks go to in order to gain these folks' attention and ensure understanding of the message makes DJK's polite repetitions, social theory presentations, and final quoting of chapter and verse all look pretty mild mannered, to me.

Last one, just to show how pretty the piano black looks...

another...

Closeup topless...(!)

Before I got the turntable off the floor...

I've never owned them, but I've read here and there where some folks have put them all the way back into the room corners because of space issues. The back firing passive/active speaker (don't recall which is which) when facing close into the corner is reported to make the bass very loud... maybe that's what they meant?

"what was the phrase (loosely) ? "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" Hard to get common ground established" There's always hard science... E=mc^2 +/-3db I'm still pushing for the new DDT protocol (Double Deaf Testing)

I did try high power a while back, although it was an older amp (Carver M-500t 250W/ch). It was impressive and pretty good sounding; even at low levels you could certainly tell that the amp had a strong hold of the speakers and was quite eager to make them move! I'm not saying it was not a good match for the La Scalas, it was kinda fun, but then I'm sure if I had left it hooked up for any length of time it would have eventually ended up testing the local police response time. I have an old Sansui from the early seventies that I put in sometimes. It's rated 28W but the power transformer and caps are the size usually found in 100W amps. It sounds pretty sweet with a lightly rolled off top end and a firm bass with no real low bass - similar to my SETs but not as amazing; still a very fine sound. I guess I'm a SET kind of guy. As the lead guitar player in a few bands, I get my fill of the thrill of loud music, so when I listen at home I just play it easy.

I watched the whole thing and was most interested in the very last part about the difference between SS and tubes (output impedance). He said that tubes amps "hear the room" because their higher output impedance allows the room's influence on the speaker to back EMF into the amp, where that gets sent back to the speaker... The implication of this is curious... If you assume that the main frequencies under this effect are those with the most power (the bass/mid bass) and that they act primarily through the woofer (because it shows the most surface to the room), and if the effect is based on the shape and size of the room; what do you have? It sounds to me like what you have is an amp that changes its production of bass in real time based on the way the room itself responds to bass. The question then, would be; does it put a bassy boomy room under control, improve a bass poor room, or does it make thigs worse? It would be nice to discover that by hearing the room the amp "corrects" the room... I assumed this would be mostly the woofer above, but now I;m wondering if big horns offer their front surface in a way that magnifies the room sound back to the driver (the same way the old ear horn worked for people with hearing loss)... the opening of the La Scala mid horn looks like it offers about 100sq" of surface to the room... more than an 11" speaker. If the principle works for the high frequencies, does that mean a large room (that already sounds big) gets less added spaciousness, but a small room gets more added spaciousness? Does this also suggest that the effects of speaker placement in the room are more crtitcal with tube amps? I really liked the interview, that Bob Carver is a smart guy... funny how much he looks and sounds like G. Gordon Liddy.

Regal beauties indeed! Get a hand truck, some bath towels, and a strap - moving them is "easy". You will be surprized how small they look in about a month...

russ69, I'm sure you know that tube distortion is mostly 2nd and some 3rd harmonics (easy on the ears) as opposed to solid state distortion (additional higher order harmonics). If folks prefer high power to have enough reserve headroom to never approach clipping, I can see that aspect supporting the "never too much power" perspective. Especially for solid state amps. The design of the amp (tube or solid state, class A/AB) will determine if the low levels show any crossover notch distortion. This is the distortion I was refering to at low levels. Since it happens when the signal crosses the "0" line, and since with complex music waveforms this crossing frequency is not harmonically related to the music; even a little it is very disagreeable. And since its level is constant, its portion of the signal is greater at lower levels where one is most likely to hear it. I'm sure that very fine amps that have their bias set properly do pretty well to avoid it. I wonder how many folks using less power make the move to class A, especially with tube amps?

"My definition of a good loudspeaker is one that can accurately reproduce the musical information it is fed." There seems to be two big points of view in audio; one says "fidelity to the source" and the other says "sound like the real thing". It gets kind of confusing beyond that...