Def Leper

There are tons of good used turntables on ebay. One good brand to look for is Technics. Most are direct drive models with decent tone arms and models like the SL1300 are semi-automatic. A recent ebay sale of a 1300 included the excellent Shure V15-III cartridge, with often sells for more by itself than the $150 (incl. shipping) that this outfit sold for. Look for semi-automatic operation and higher model numbers (SL-1300 vs. SLD2) and avoid DJ models like the SL1200. Pioneer and Marantz have some very good semi-automatic models too. Avoid Garrard and Dual only because they had some very cheap models and you can overpay if you don't know what you are buying.

The C-150 is one of the most common Edison Diamond Disk cabinet-style phonographs, and is most often found with a mahogany cabinet. While most phonograph makers built and sold a very wide range of features and build quality, Edison models were generally a substantial cut above the competition in mechanical build quality but tended to have simple, utilitarian cabinet work. Some important things to look for: 1. Oak cabinets are rarer than mahogany, and usually look much nicer as the mahogany finish tends to turn black. Edison players usually have gold-plated parts which is the sign of a higher-end machine. 2. Reproducer style. Unlike the bulk of 78's, Edison recorders were vertically recorded, meaning the stylus moves up and down rather than side to side. An Edison reproducer will have a diamond stylus on a rocker arm on the bottom of the reproducer, and you want to make sure the stylus is intact. Some phonographs came with both an Edison and a Victor-style reproducer that is interchangible. I've seen Edison phonographs in shops with a Victor-style reproducer mounted, no Edison reproducer, and a collection of Edison records--- not a combination that works. 3. Edison records are much thicker than conventional 78's, about 1/4" thick. You must have the Edison-style reproducer to play these. Antique dealers seem to think Edison records are more valuable than conventional 78's, but they really aren't. I rarely pay more than $2 or $3 for any 78 unless it is a rare record. 4. Testing the record player is simple. Crank it up. A good player like an Edison will take quite a few cranks. Turn on the turntable and put your ear down to the top of the cabinet and simply listen. The most prominet noise is the centrifugal speed governer, which usually has a simple weight and spring arrangement with a pair of felt friction disks. Adjust the speed control back and forth to listen to the regular. You should be able to slightly hear it working but it should not be very loud at all. The next thing to listen to is gear noise. If you can hear a lot of gear noise, the gears are worn and the player will likely fail sometime in the future. Last is thumping and pounding. This is a more occasional noise and is caused by the spring motors slipping due to a buildup of sticky grease inside. This can be fixed with cleaning the motors, which is part of a pro reconditioning and is not as serious as worn-out gears. 5. The turntable itself should run straight, round and flat, but minor turntable problems are not as big an issue with 78's as it is with LP's. You should not pay more than $250 for a C150 in good working condition, including a Diamond Disk reproducer in good working condition and no major problems. Pay more ($300) if the player has both Victor-style and Edison reproducers (there is usually a tray for the spare reproducer next to the horn behind the front grille panel-- lift up and pull out at the bottom to remove the panel.) To go as high as $350, the cabinet should be oak and in excellent condition, needing no refinishing, a clean original grille cloth in the grille and a good, clean working mechanism with both reproducers and some records. To this date I've never seen an Edison in a condition meriting this price, although I've seen a lot of sellers wanting to get it.

Somehow they missed in the top ten "Sitting on your arse in front of a computer posting top ten lists."

Metal studs should be fine, and make a much nicer wall that the typical wood scraps that pass for studs at the local big box home improvement store. You can stuff them with blue foam insulation for extra sound absorbtion. Make sure you use panel adhesive (or the denser sound control adhesive) at every joint and the drywall interface to lock everything together tightly. A wonderful sound control material for media rooms is Homosote, which you should be able to get at most Home Depot stores. It's a sound-deadening material in 4X8 X 1/2" sheets. Best way to use it to build floating panels covered by acoustic material. You can cut the panels in just about any way that looks good to you. Tall, vertical panels look great (2 feet wide) and can be mounted with several horizontal furring strips, 1/2" or 1" thick. This forms a trap cavity that is very effective, and you can change the look of the room by changing the covering fabric. For maxiumum sound deadening, use a solid layer of homosote under the sheetrock. The ultimate sound control is to layer as follows: layer of homosote on back of studs layer of homosote on front of studs layer of sheet rock on front of homosote floating homosote trap panels. You can set a bomb off and not hear it in the next room. What you will hear is being transmitted through the floors and ceilings. The only warning about homosote is that it is a ground paper/cellulose material and you should not use it in a damp basement unless you properly vapor/moisture shield the wall first and use a dehumidifer. It's also NASTY stuff to saw and very important to use a good dust mask when cutting.

My biggest LP investment to date has been a VPI 16.5 record cleaning machine. The quality source material has been, and remains the biggest challenge in getting good sound, not my turntables. As an old geezer, most of my records were purchased first hand and about 2/3rds of them are out of print recordings that are simply not available in any other form, hence irreplacable. Being able to properly clean the records has had the most dramatic impact on the playback quality. I have several turntables and cartridge combinations, and none are particularly expensive. I would encourage you to avoid becoming an equipment-obsessed "audiopile" and get a good, basic turntable/cartridge rather than an inflated 'collector' model like the TD124. There are a lot of great tables from the 'golden age' of consumer audio- the 1970's and 1980's with great names like Marantz, Pioneer, Thorens and others, and you can find them at very attractive prices. If you spend more than $300-$500 for the table, arm and cartridge, you are spending way too much for your first turntable. After getting some vinyl to play, you'll find (especially if you grew up in the CD age) that the noise and dirt will drive you crazy. If you love the sound otherwise, the next step should be a way to clean your records, and a vacuum-based machine is the only way to go. After that, and as you acquire more vinyl, you can improve your system piece by piece as your tastes and interests dictate. Don't think that throwing piles of money will do much good though-- I've listened to my own records on turntable/arm/cartridge systems that cost more than both my family cars together, and didn't feel the modest improvement in sound quality merited the astronomical investment.

Gorecki Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Sounds" & Three Pieces in Olden Style Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra Cond. Antoni Wit Naxos CD 8.550822 You know this is going to be a hit when the cover is embellished with Munch's "The Scream". What's inside is not depressing at all, but some beautiful pieces that I would almost describe as classical techno/new age leaning heavily on the strings. Wonderful to listen to after a bad day at the office followed by an A--hole-laden commute home.

Gosh, after reading your post and re-reading mine, I have to wonder if you got a load of crap with your oatmeal this morning. If you want to completely ignore the topic being discussed and simply flame somebody, use the messaging system. That will help keep you from looking like such a jerk and give me a chance to reply in kind. With respect to your fifth question, yes, I am.

Tsk, tsk, please convey accurate information. DOF is a function of aperture and reproduction ratio. A digital camera has exactly the same DOF at a given aperture and reproduction ratio as any other camera. As you note, the problem with getting shallow DOF with many lenses is the small maximum aperture. In your detail shot of the beaded wedding dress, I don't see anything but disadvantage to using shallow DOF. Most of the shot is out of focus, and if you're trying to show the details, a much smaller aperture setting would work better. Given your closeness to the subject (high magnification) and distance from the background, you could have gottem much more in focus while still dropping out the background. You might also want to look into Nikon's 85mm Micro tilt/shift lens. You can do some superb selective focus techniques that lend themselves very well to weddings and can't be done any other way. The firework shot is especially hard to do technically. You'll get better results if you dial in at least -1.5 or -2 stops of flash compensation to keep the flash sensor from averaging the scene (much of which is dark) and burning out the foreground highlights. You have the same problem with the dad-daugher dance shot, badly burned-out foreground highlights because the flash overcompensated for the dark background.

One of the classic internet flame styles is the spelling or grammar flame, almost always employed when the flamer can't come up with any intelligent reply to the subject at hand. Truly the hallmark of an incompetent debater. (or Bush administration spokesperson.) ________________________________________________________________ This post has been spelling and grammar-checked by R-U-Serious.com's patented flame-out software.

Actually, I'd say that the 59-cent question, but the answer is obvious. It's in the Twilight Zone.

I see the router sitting on top of the panel, but how do you cut those rectangular holes? Do you make a set of templates as guides? What tool do you use for the round holes? I'm familiar enough with using my router to know you're not doing it freehand. I'm asking because I've designed a pair of "sideways" speakers (side-firing woofer) based on the cornwall to use in my home theater system and I'm interested in some of the basic construction techniques used by someone who's done this before. That might be a good subject for a mini-article by itself. Even details that you might take for granted (like what type of router bit used to cut openings) would be helpful.

Yeah, most likely porno videos when she gets old enough. She just signed a six-figure delvelopment deal with Carson Daley's production company, believe it or not. All based on her goofy youtube videos. Yeah, that's how things work today. Internet turns poor jerks into rich jerks if the other jerks with too much time on their hands like to watch them making jerks of themselves. Meanwhile some very hard working, talented non-jerks who have actually studied and worked for years to perform for real........go unnoticed. Devo was right.

How do you get into these situations? To use an automotive analogy, you're sitting at a traffic light in your Ferrari and some guy rolls up in a Dodge Neon with a NOX kit and challenges you to a drag race. A real Ferrari owner would look at the guy as though he was a dung-covered cockroach and hang a right turn when the light changes, leaving him to go to the next light to find an insecure Mustang or Celica owner to bait. The sound quality of your system is highly subjective. If you really think it is objective (and matter of competition) then you are well on your way to becoming one of those pathetic audiopiles with a system that costs $100,000, sounds like $1,000, and looks like R2D2 expoded in the living room. Good speakers are crap-amplifiers, and will highlight every defect and shortcoming in the recordings you listen to. Mediocre or poor systems do the opposite. They hide or mask much of what is on the recording, so much so in some cases that very poor recordings end up being passable. That's not a virtue, in my opinion. Will your Klipsch system be judged better because the same recording sounds worse on it than on the Naim system? I doubt it. That's an indictment of the listener, though, and not the system. Do yourself a favor and hang a right when the light changes. Your over-testosteroned friend will go looking for a Sony or Harmon Kardon owner at the next light.

I'm using an adcom 5500 200w/c amp (GTP450 pre) with my Cornwall 1's. Plenty of headroom, low noise, and nice punch/dynamics with the Adcom. I tried a vintage scott tube integrated amp with the cornwalls and loved the sound at lower volumes, but I've gone back to the Adcom system because at higher levels (or source material with wider dynamic range) the Scott simply ran out of steam in the loud passages. Tube distortion when overdriven is certainly easier on the ears than solid state clipping, but it is distortion nonetheless and very unpleasant for me to hear.

Yeah, most likely porno videos when she gets old enough.

Actually I think what they are doing is rationalization, not justification. Justification implies that the actual goal is to achieve the 'reality' of the performance. As I mentioned, I believe the real goal is to have the best (sports car,wine, camera, golf clubs,stereo, boat, gun collection, wife, house) or any of the other typical alpha male pursuits to lead the pack. I'm not handicapped by this disease and I realize I can never reproduce a performance realistically, so I concentrate on getting the best performance for the dollar. That's probably why my system cost around $1,000 instead of $100,000.

You're getting great advice here. Bob Crites really helped me out with my 'garage sale' Cornwalls. I had one bad midrange diaphragm and the original crossovers. Bob rebuilt the crossovers to bring them back to original condition and sent a replacement diaphragm. You can always tweek later if you find something in the sound you don't like.

One of the things I like best about the trend towards tube equipment is the desire to put tubes out front and put them on display, rather than hide them in a box. I hope the next trend will be to incorporate the high-quality look and feel of the controls and displays of some of the better equipment of the 1970's and 1980's like Marantz with openly displayed tubes. As we can see, even crossovers can be packaged in a way that allows them to be put on display rather than hidden in the back of the box.

Since when has audiopile-ism ever been about the music? It really isn't. It's an addiction akin to all the other consumer addictions. The point is to spend your way to superiority over other audiopiles.

Jeeze, now I've seen it all. Looks like something out of a Roger Corman movie. No, on second thought, Roger Corman has better taste than that. Bet you need those $10,000 speaker cables to make 'em work right. Die-ah-ree-a.

There you go, you've discovered another amazing device that liberates all that hidden detail on those CD's. The Bedini Clarifier customers will go nuts. Now buy a quantity, package them up with the nifty little secret cable, and sell for an amazing low price of $19,999.99. (or whatever that translates to in Drachmas or whatever is the Greek currency.) Every audiopile whill be dying to have a set to compare against their $30,000 turntables, $10,000 phono carts and $15,000 cables. Can you come up with a set of ear buds with "special" ultra-audiopile cables (the size of welding cables) for a few thousand more? If anything, this just shows the danger of being a vinyl junkie-- virtually any form of modern technology will appear to be magic. (all posted in a spirit of good clean fun with tongue in cheek.)

Being in the car business, I'm looking forward to seeing it.

It's definitely not for the crowd who thinks comedy involves little more than toilets, genitals, and four letter words. I can honestly say it's one of the few comedies I've seen in the past few years that was not predictable. Now bring on Robert Altman's "The Prairie Home Companion."

Big Band Jazz Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass Umbrella Records Direct to Disk 2-LP set Limited Edition (was also available on single LP volumes 1 and 2, and Umbrella CD but unfortunately abridged.) all are out of print. There's just something about a big band playing jazz that is hard to top. Great mastering and some of the nicest trombone recording I've heard.

Probably easier to say a quality amp that can drive a low-impedance load.