Ray Garrison

How many examples do we need to come up with before this sinks in? Sigh... Here's another. Take a rocket engine. No wheels, no body, just a rocket engine. Lay it on the ground. Light it. Assume it doesn't fly up, but just shoots off along the ground. Will it move? Yep. How fast? Real damn fast. Now, lay it down on a conveyor belt. Light it. Start the belt. Will the rocket move? Yep. How fast? Not quite as fast, because there's some drag, but I be it'll go a lot faster than the conveyor belt would. Okay, so speed the conveyor belt up until it's moving as fast as the rocket, in the opposit direction. That is, if the rocket is moving at 1,000 mhp north, the conveyor belt is moving at 1,000 mph south. (This means that the relative speed of the rocket to the conveyor belt is 2,000 mph.) Now, attach some wheels to our rocket and repeat the test. The *ONLY* difference is the additional mass of the wheels (slows acceleration a bit), and the reduction of drag on the surface by replacing the rocket body sliding along the ground with the wheels rolling on the ground (goes a lot faster.) The only difference between the rocket engine and a jet engine, of course, the the jet doesn't carry it's oxidizer with it, but otherwise exactly the same. Attach some wings to our rocket engine. Will it take off? Off course it will. I think I've finally come to understand the problem. There is a finite amount of intelligence in the world, and the population keeps increasing.

"Now, if you took a mass that generated a gravitation force in equal magnitude as that of the earth BUT IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION, you would in fact stop falling down that hill. Remeber, the forces are completely offsetting. In your example, Ray, you are countering a non-accelerating force with an accelerating force. It will not work." That is *EXACTLY* the point. Using your terms, the conveyor belt is a "non-accelerating force". It exerts *NO* force on the plance, other than the minute amount of force due to the rolling resistance of the wheels / bearings. Your example of putting another gravitational force in the opposite direction would be the equivalent of mounting another pair of engines on the plane, pointing in the other direction, *NOT* moving the ground under plane. Take another example. A sea plane trying to take off going upstream against a current. Can it? Depends on how fast the current is flowing. The plane must generate enough force to move its pontoons through the water at whatever velocity is required to take off - around 65 mph in a Cessna 152, for example. Let's say the engines can exert enough force to move the plane through the water at, uh, 80 mph. If the river is flowing at less than 15 mhp against us, we can take off. If the river is flowing at faster than 15 mph against us, we can't take off. The pontoons exert too much drag and we can't reach the required 65 mph airspeed. Wheels on a conveyor belt have, for all practicle purposes, no drag. The belt can move beneath us as fast as it wants, we'll still take off.

You are so *COMPLETELY* missing the point. The car generates forward velocity by *PUSHING AGAINST THE GROUND* with its *WHEELS*. The plane generates forward velocity by *PUSHING AGAINST THE AIR* with its *ENGINES*. There is *NO DRIVING FORCE* associated with a planes *WHEELS*. All they do is rotate freely in response to the relative motion between the plane and the ground. Whether the plane is moving forward, or the ground is moving backward, or both are moving, it doesn't matter.

I can't believe this woke up again. This is such a simple question and it gets over-analyzed to death here. Here is the simplest analogy I can come up with. The plane's engines exert a force on the plane. They push it forward. Let's replace the engines force with another force. Say, uh, how about the force of gravity. Instead of igniting jet fuel and oxygen to generate a "longitudinal force vector" (aka "push"), tilt the ground so the plane is rolling downhill. If we tilt the ground steep enough, and the plane gains enough speed, it will generate lift and begin to fly. Of course, eventually we come to the bottom of the hill and smash into the ground, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Now, while we're rolling merrily down the hill, before our wheels leave the ground, start up our conveyor belt, moving in the opposite (uphill) direction. Will the plane stop rolling downhill and come to a stop (relative to the ground under the conveyor belt)? Will it begin rolling backwards, up the hill? No, unless our wheel bearings cease up or something. No matter how fast the conveyor belt moves under our plane, we're going to continue rolling downhill faster and faster. Eventually we'll lift off. The belt could be moving at any arbitrary speed under us, it's not gonna matter. All it does is make the wheels spin faster. That is, if our downhill velocity is 50 mph and the belt is going uphill at 50 mhp, our wheels are turning at the equivalent of a 100 mph taxi. Likewise, if we're going downhill at 50 mph and the belt is moving uphill at 1,000 mph, our wheels are revolving at the equivalent of a 1,050 mph speed. Doesn't matter, we still roll downhill. Now, put our plane on a level surface and replace the force of gravity with the force of the engines. Same exact thing. Duh.

It's like thunder and lightning The way you love me is frightening You better knock, knock on wood, baby

RE the RCA cord and Hummm.... I've used a few different AudioQuest interconnect cables in an effort to convince myself that they're making a positive change in my system, and in every case I found the termination to be poorly engineered. Or executed, whatever. Especially with the Topaz model. The outer jacket is stiff, it's jammed into the big metal barrel connector, and has a little set screw that supposed to hold the jacket in there. No strain relief. When the jacket inevitably works itself free, the sheild wire and inner conductor are exposed, and start flexing back and forth. Solder joints give out quickly. (I know I know, why did I buy more than one set of this cr@ppy cable... I'm an idiot, please have pity.) I'd guess you have a failed or failing solder joint on the shield wire on the hummy interconnect. Of all the interconnects I've tried, I actually found the Radio Shack Goldens to be the best constructed in terms of the way the wire is mated to the connector.

I had a Mercur XR4Ti (turbocharged 2 door sport couple built by Ford in Kohn, Germany) that I loved. Was in a parking lot in the Lake Lillinonah marina on New Years Eve doing doughnuts with a buddy, threw the fan belt without noticing. Engine eventually overheated to the point where it died. Opened hood, turbo housing was glowing bright bright cherry red. Threw snow on it till it cooled down. Next day found turbo waste gate had welded shut. Drove the car anyway for awhile... turbo boost was awsome with gate welded shut. Eventually holed a piston. Traded car toward a Subaru SVX. Both were very unusual cars, never saw many on the road when driving them. Both performed well. Liked SVX better. SVX totaled in t-bone collision (not my fault) in 2002. Since then have been driving boring cars, currently 2006 Jetta.

I was just thinking... whether you can be happy using a 45 SET with KHorns or Belles or La Scalas or whatever aside for a moment, aside from a handful of other speakers (Avantgarde, Lowthers, Edgarhorns, Carfrae, Beauhorns, some of the big Tannoys) are there any other speakers you could pair with them?

Watt's with the blue shirt?

My last shot was a mole, not a guin. A mole. Get it? Geez, I crack myself up....

It was a little tongue in cheek, but I was trying to make a point... what I consider really loud, but fun, exciting music (example - playing the William Tell Overture and pretending I'm standing in front of the orchestra conducting, or playing Creep loud enough so the "Barr na narr, Barr na narr" chords that follow the first "...I wish I was special..." really hit you hard) is, to someone else, (Cut throat?) noise. Okay, fine. He thinks it's obnoxious, dangerous, non-musical noise played waaaaayyyyyyy too loud for any possible reason, I think it's cool. I doubt I'm gonna be happy with a flea watt DHSET amp, while he might never find the need for any more power. To each his own. That's why there are so many different kinds of speakers and so many different kinds of amps. I also like Scotch, by the way. Johnny Walker Red. I'm sure there are people who would say Nobody needs to drink anything like that.

I always find these sorts of "Is this enough power?" discussions interesting. Mostly because I appear to be so far out in left field compared to what the general consensus appears to be. When I had La Scalas in a 17 X 21 room (tile floor, cement walls) I found my little Rotel RA830BX2 (30 watts / side) to be just barely enough power, most of the time, with most music, and not powerful enough fairly frequently. I used a Jolida (don't remember model, 6550A tubes, 70 watts / side) and found it okay most of the time, but I prefered the sound of the Rotel if I didn't need the extra power. Also tried a bunch of other stuff (Acurus DIA100, Krell KAV300i, variety of Adcoms, Golden Tube Audio Se40 {?model?}). I never had the chance to try an SET (300B, 2A3, 45, whatever) so I might be completely wrong, but I can't imagine being satisfied with the power output. It occured to me that perhaps the problem is we're not using the same metrics here. When you talk about listening at low levels, or loud levels, or background music, or intense music, what do you mean? Here's my personal yardstick: Background music - you can hear someone talking to you if you're close to them. "Normal" level - you can hear someone talking to you if they're really close, or they're shouting. "Pretty Loud" - you can't hear anyone unless they're standing next to you shouting at you. "Loud" - you can see someone's mouth moving, but you can't hear what they're saying. "Really Loud" - You can't hear yourself shouting back "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" "Awsome, Dude!" - You don't notice someone slapping you on the back because it feels just like the kick drum.

DFQ? BTSOM. RAOFLMAO. TEOTWAWKI. <3

Cool song...

I work closely with FedEx every day. Checked with a few friends. Only thing they can come up with is there was a reason to believe that either the integrity of the station security had been compromised and had instituted lockdown procedures, or there was an ongoing problem with theft that they were combating.

uh, okay... First, the reason your report is printing 5 pages is you have two records in your table, and each record takes a smidge over two pages to print, so the report is 5 pages long. Anyway... What you've got here is one huge table with about 230 attributes. I was hoping I could take a quick look at this and give you some help, or a least a couple of pointers, that might get you going with the project. However, I think it's going to take a bit more than that. I'm crushed with getting my new system up and I'm afraid I don't have a lot of time to help you. Hopefully another database guy (girl?) on this forum will see your post and can jump in. If you want to start working on this, the first thing you need to do is read up a bit on relational database concepts, particularly the ideas of normalization and what they mean. The MySQL website (www.mysql.com) has some excellent tutorials on this. You're using Access, of course, but the basic ideas and concepts are the same. The way you've got everything in one table here will lead to huge amounts of frustration for you down the road. Just for one example, you have a column called "Licenses". I'm guessing that there might be zero, one or more than one license associated with each record in the database. How are you going to search for them, report on which vessel has which licenses, ensure that if some license must be present that each vessel has one recorded, that sort of thing? What you'd want to so is set up a "child" table, called "licenses", which is linked back to your "master" (or "parent") table, where the File_Number that identifies the parent record is used to link each record in the licenses table back to its parent. Sort of like this: Master Table: | File_Number | Owner | Vessel_Name | yada | yada | yada... Licenses Table: | File_Number | License_Type | License_Number | Date_Of_Issue | whatever... Now, you can have an unlimited number of different kinds of licenses linked to each vessel. If you wanted to list all the vessels that had a type "xyz" license, you can ask a simple question like "show me all the vessels on file that have a license recorded in the Licenses table where the license type is "xyz". Or, in SQL, "SELECT * FROM master_table, licenses_table WHERE master_table.file_number = licenses_table.file_number AND license_type = xyz". I really which I had more time to help you with this, but I don't. Of you're still working on it after the first of the year I might be able to. If you *do* try to re-work this and get stuck on a specific issue, feel free to email me - ray@periship.com - and I'll try to help if I can. Good luck, Ray Garrison

uh, okay... I'll take a shot here I think you're saying you have an Access database that has one table in it, and the table has 22 columns. So far I think I follow you. When you say you made (got? wrote? found?) a "report", what exactly do you mean? Did you use a report writer of some sort (Crystal?) to write a report? Are you trying to create a VIEW within Access to look at the info? What, exactly, did you do? What are you *trying* to do? What is the database supposed to be doing? Why Access? Is this running on your local system, or is it hosted on a server someplace? I'd be happy to try and help, but I need to understand more about what you're trying to do and how you're doing it... Ray

I used to have a pair of KHorns a few years ago. They were in a room that was about 17 X 21 with 8 foot ceilings. Without boring everyone by going through the whole story again, the most moving music I ever heard through my system happened when I was driving the KHorns with a pair of Adcom GFA-555 amps bridged into mono (600 watts into 8 ohms) fed by CD player's line level output (no preamp) driving the amps at max level with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I don't think any SET amp ever made would have provided quire the same catharsis.

Come on, Bob, You're supposed to be a engineer. Just put on a cheater plug, and flip the plug around. This reverses the polarity. Duh. I did this with my microwave once by accident, and until I figured it out it kept freezing all my dinners. Ray

Just to reiterate this point: ANY fix applied to the INSIDE of the foundation walls WILL NOT WORK. This would be like trying to patch a tire by putting a piece of tape on the outside of the tire. As soon as you start inflating it, the pressure will blow the tape off. ANY company that suggests applying some sort of magic goop to the INSIDE foundation wall to stop the leak is a FRADULENT COMPANY. STAY AWAY FROM THEM. I am embaressed to admit this, but long ago I spent a short time (not short enough) working for a "basement waterproofing company" that did this. I was given a kit that I carried to each lead. Kit had magic powder that would expand when it got wet, and a whole bunch of glossy handouts taking about how wonderful this product was. Idea was to demonstrate expansion of powder when wet, and explain how plastering this stuff into the crack in the wall would fix the leak as it expanded and sealed the wall. They kept score like we were playing golf, with par figures, bogies if we had to "do the drop" below a certain level, eagles if we were able to negotiate bonus dollars for extra services. Common ploy was to visit mark (uh, lead, excuse me), talk for awhile, hit them with some price X. If they bought, great! Eagle! Slam Dunk! Schwiiing! If they balked at price, take out cell phone, call "home office" (actually managers line, who would attempt to crack you up while on the phone by uttering all sorts of obscene suggestions) and ask if the "crew" that was "working on that job down the street" had finished yet, then "call the foreman". Surprisingly enough, they always had just finished, had some supplies left over, had billed the extra time to the previous job, and could do this job for something much less than X. I had no idea what I was getting into when I applied for the job, was in serious financial trouble at the time, had no choice but to actually go out on a few jobs. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have a pair of KG-4 I've owned since 1985. Over the years I've driven them with a whole bunch of different things. Amongst them was an original series GFA-555 (the one with the big flat black handles), and a 5800. I found that the Adcoms didn't sound good when used at low output levels - into less sensitive speakers (Acoustic Energy AE-1, for example, or B&W 801f) they sounded pretty good, but into the KG-4 or any other Klipsch I tried it with (particularly La Scalas) they sounded thin, hard and grainy - sort of like it had a higher level of odd order harmonic distortion at lower output levels. The best sounding solid state amp I found was an original series B&K ST140 ( ? model, the one with 70 watts/side), which happened to be a MOS-FET design. A little Rotel RA-830BX-2 (which I'm still using) sounded pretty good, too.