boom3

Yeah, all that unused space is tempting. After cleaning the fireplace and having the chimney cleaned and wire mesh put around the opening to keep the birds out, we plugged the vents. We took plastic garbage bags and stuffed them in the vents, then filled the bags with Great Stuff foam. When we need to unplug the vents (not that we ever use the fireplace) we can simply pull the bags out. Great Stuff is indeed "great" but they make a less aggressive version now that is easier to control.

Well, that'll teach me to insert a long Word doc...the message retained the line breaks even after I deleted the text...maybe it retained the original cells from the table. Oh well, live and learn. The PDF has the graphs at least.

Hey Jay! Did you march yesterday? Some of my friends over there did. I use a Scott 333B tuner from 1964. The tubes have all been tested and are various brands. The last replacement were with NOS MIL tubes. I introduced you to Terry, the guy who aligned it for me. The only prob is that one of the internal caps in one of the AM IF transformers is shot, which maens it can't tune above about 900 KHZ. Since I have other radios for AM DX this is not a factor. Here is an edited (just for privacy) statement from Terry on it. Sorry about the length of the posting. 333B edit.pdf

My 02 advice; let it pass and enjoy the music

We've had good luck with our Toshiba (bought 2001) and Samsung DVD players (one single disc HD, one a 5 disc changer). Buying a cheap (not that you would) DVD player, one of the 40 dollar WalMart wonders is a waste, they all seem to die in a year or so. I had one in second system in my study and that's what happened. Bought a Phillips el cheapo+ ($70) and it works OK so far... All our DVD players also play DVD-A, a format that we like even if it's nearly an orphan now. You may as well buy a DVD-A compatible player since the discs will be around and there are some wonderful productions out there in that format.

I'd be very cautious, escrow in overseas transactions has a reputation for a high rate of fraud.

Yes! Yes! Yes! If you must have them shipped, pay Craters & Freighters about $250 to do it right. Cheap shipping=damaged goods.

Maybe Penncrest, which was J.C. Penney's brand...?

The forum auto-censored the kind of cancer Betty Ford was so open about...oh c'mon folks, we're adults here and don't need to be protected from that word...[*-)]

His family, particularly Jack and Betty, need to be recognized for their courage to speak frankly about alcoholism, drug use and breast cancer.

Hopefully, Santa will not find himself forced to land by F-16s, sent to Guantanamo Bay, or "rendered" to some country where torture is A-OK...

What is the one song that will pick up, give you NRG, and change your mood? Maybe it's more than one? My suggestions: Potato Head Blues by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. Tallulah Bankhead is said to have played this before going on stage to rev her up and get her over stage fright. Walk, Don't Run, by the Ventures Venga Boys Are Back In Town, the Venga Boys. A much more recent Hi NRG thumper. Encore En Fois (sp?) The clubs played the grooves off this one. Roundabout, by Yes. Nostalgia from my youth. First movement of the Karelia Suite, by Jean Sibelius

Lear is credited with the 4 and 8 track, but RCA marketed a similiar system in the 50s. It went nowhere with consumers, but was adopted for radio stations for commercials and news spots. In the 60s, B&O or maybe Nordmende had a similar system in Europe, but it was a special single open reel and drive, not an integrated cartridge ala the 8 track.

I knew Microsoft had bought an "interest" in them, did not think it was total. But once the camel's nose is in the tent...

The mid horn certainly is not optimum, but changing it out means you no longer have a Cornwal, now a Corn something else, which is OK if that's what you want. You might consider changing the mid and tweeter units to the CW II K57/K79 models. The CW II is believed by many to have better midrange and treble than the CW Is. However, the K57/K79 units are somewahat rare compared to the K55/K77s. Bob Crites CT125 is a drop-in upgrade for the K77, I like it much better than the K77. To my ears the worst part of the Cornwalls response is the 80 Hz or so hump in the bass. I tamed this partly by pulling my Corns out of the corners, about 2 feet. I also have that Yamaha YPAO program, not a perfect EQ but I think, with a degree of manual tweaking within the settings, it helps. What really tamed this boom was putting a sub in the system, uusing the THX recommend crossover at 80 Hz.

As far as customer service...that is vanishing thing. Manufacturers, starting with the PC makers, discovered there was a huge aftermarket community of users and tweakers out there. So they shifted the majority of customer service to that community and off their books. I use two Corel products heavily (WordPerfect and PhotoPaint). Both are excellent products that are far better than Word or Photoshop. Corel's customer support is you either buy a service plan or use a public forum, or look at a list of FAQs. Corel has alienated an important part of their base by not issuing Mac versions of either software in several years. Some PC industry customer service has been shifted overseas as we all know. Now "Frank" or "Bobby" in Mumbai (Bombay) will answer the phone. Gill's experience isn't unique... reading between the lines it sounds like reverse racism...I saw a lot of that in D.C., and to an extent, in pre-K New Orleans. Apparently historical racism justifies present-day reverse racism, a sad and self-defeating strategy. The reason (I think) that people flame on forums, have road rage, and don't even try to get manufacturers to help them is a feeling of powerlessness about real life. So virtual life becomes their real life and they feel free to abuse each other on the Web and the road. It's amusing to see people rant on forums or blogs. Some people are actually listing their blogs on resumes, silly at best and dangerous at worst. Here's a news flash: The decision makers in this country do not care what the bloggers, chat rooms and forums are saying. The only value these venues have for politicians is to raise funds for particular causes or elections. The decision makers take these funds and forget the opinions that generated them. Witness the cyncism of the current administration for their core supporters in the hinterlands. I was involved some years ago in a controversy about a well-known printer manufacturer .There were some real, albeit inconsistent problems, which the OEM was slow to acknowledge and resolve. A special forum was hosted about this. Instead of a class-action suit (which might have had merit) the forum folks flamed each other to a crisp, even threatening to to sue each other for their opinions. The forum host shut it down in disgust. The OEM, BTW, did fix the problem, and printer technology advanced in the process.

I think the dtels use Corns and Fortes together...suggest you PM them...

Apologetic? No. Really loud about it? Nope. Part of this is the Puritan conditioning not to talk overmuch about one's material goods. Part of it is to be a well-rounded companionable person who gets along with a wide range of people. Never wanted to be a monomanical know-it-all. I work primarily with engineers, EEs and MEs, and the kind of audiophoolory that goes on makes them laugh. Some of these guys have multi-kilobuck systems they bought after carefully reviewing the products. I may not agree with every choice they made, but I can't argue with their deliberate approach. They (and I) have many interests and audio is one among many. Not to mention that our spouses and children are the focus of our lives. I and most of my audio-savvy peers have reached our personal levels of audio contentment and aside from bigger video monitors or easier to use remotes, our tweaking is done. I know I need to rebuild my CW II crossovers. That is a function of age, not tweaking per se.

Casual is ar happenstance relationship between two events, such as me and a co-worker wearing blue shirts on the same day. Causal means one event causes another. I must stress that we all need to use the same frame of reference to make this meaningful and not sophomoric. Every transducer has an irreducible level of distortion inherent in its design and construction. Distortion increases with increasing output level. It is entirely possibly that a direct radiator could start out with a lower level of distortion at, say, 80 dB than a horn. A well-designed horn will have a lower level of distortion at say, 100dB, where the direct radiator's distortion may be intolerable. As Paul observed (paraphrase) acoustic suspension speakers go from fine to gross distortion in the difference between 'background' music levels to levels approaching live performance.

In support of John: As we say in the social sciences, correlation is not causation.

I'm replying in the thread because PMs or e-mail via the Forum has not been reliable, IME. My chief compliant ( small one) about the XT is that the optical viewfinder framing is a little off. I also wish it had the tilting LCD screen like our Canon G3 does. The G3, BTW, is an utter POS. We can't even give it away. The file transfer from the XT to a PC via USB tends to be slow, so I just put the card into araeder attached to the PC. Canon'sDigital Photo Professional is OK as a RAW importer but it ain't great and somewhat counter-intutive. One of these days I will get a 3rd party RAW utility. I assume you are aware of the Michael Riechman's Lumious Landscape site. Michael is a Canonite also and gets to play with kilobuck stuff I will never see in retail, much less own.

A late chime-in here- on the road for 2 weeks. We have the Rebel XT also, and we bought it because we are Canon-ites (family tradition dating to to 1950) and we had several good lenses for our Elon II 35 that fit the XT. We keep a 28-105 F3.5-4.5 on it normally and that is our workhorse. I'd be glad to share notes with you (or anybody really) on the XT and our experiences with it. We also have a Canon S9000 printer and hope to upgrade to one of their 10 colour models next year.

I had an SX-1250 some years ago. A wonderful piece of gear. Capo is right on about checking the DC offset. The 1250 has P-P output so you should get very little offset. IIRC, it has 120 w/ch/RMS into 8 ohms I replaced the electrolytic input cap on the phno preamp with a film type. The preamp is underneath the tuner board in its own little metal enclosure. I'd still have my 1250 if one channel output had not blown and taken the driver board with it. I stil have the tuner somewhere. The tuner was excellent.

Of course monkeys can type....just look at any number of blogs, particularly the political ones

Hey, take Mike to Elizabeths, Chartres at Gallier. Better than Masperos, although not as Colorful as the Clover [][]