DirtyErnie

Please don't throw the drivers away, I'm sure the Garage Sale section would be friendly to you. 😉

From the recording studio side: it's alarming how sensitive some of these microphones are. I've had to scrap tracks because someone left the fan on in the bathroom 20 yards down the hallway in a brick building, and cancel a session because Creedence Clearwater Revisited was playing 2 miles away. You couldn't hear any of this with your ears, but once a track was compressed and gain'd-up, there it was; Proud Mary....

Can say from recording and mixing that .5-2 dB change in levels can certainly change the 'flavor' of a mix, might change OK to GREAT . If you were looking for a math answer, I got nothin'.

You want my address? 😛

I had a similar experience with some KG2.5s. Most of my difference was in replacing the electrolytics, but I definitely understand what you are saying about the 'muddled crossover' sound. It was NOT a subtle difference by the time everything was done.

Well, people spent good money on this literal box of Bullshit. What did we expect from profiteers and lemmings?

Had a worn-out stylus re-tipped by Steve at VAS, nude Shibata. Got a test LP, ripped it straight into the box at 192K. There's some static to handle, 1KHz distortion was under 1% without applying the RIAA filter. Balance is ok, but i need to try again with the anti-skate set right, the turntable actually levelled, and I might have to tweek the cartridge in the headshell a bit. (maybe I should use less than an 86KHz bandwidth for the spectrum plots, but the frequency sweep aliasing draws parabolas, and that's cool.)

I usually find myself turning up the center channel 3-5dB makes my wife stop complaining that she can't hear the dialog.

Why not set up a motor/generator if you're going through the trouble?

Moving Onward, it looks like I'll be sending out at least one original ADC QLM34 Mk.III stylus out to get rebuilt. I tried the $40 'eliptical' option off ebay, but it's the allegedly swiss knock-off that gets a lot wrong. It also has terrible hiss when the needle hits the groove, even after the groove was cleaned with wood glue peel (that Titebond 2 thing works!!). The rig is: PL530 straight into a Presonus Studio 24C desktop USB interface. Would this be responsible for the hissing? It doesn't happen when the table is turning and the needle is out of the groove.

Maybe I missed it somewhere along the thread, but why have you built four of these? Great work, hope you enjoy them!

Connect to media center, run 'Quad' or 'surround' for movies. Get fifth Cornwall for center. 5 of those should preclude the need for a sub (mostly).

Have they spoken yet?

RE: Silmic 2: One of my past forum-crawling binges led me to the notion that the Silmic were best with discrete-component amplifiers and Nichicon really shined with ICs. Take that for the price of the paper it's writen on, but I could see that being why NP likes them so much. How are the PIOs treating you lately?

I'd think if you ran the Audyssey auto config it would figure it out. That receiver would recognize that you didn't have a center channel and push appropriate audio to the speakers connected to it.

Peppermint oil in the same location might work. My other methods would get me perma-banned.

^^^ Seconded. Please post, we promise to be nice.

I have a pair of CF2 from ~95 or so. The horns have always seemed a bit hot and the bass kind of shy. First series cap on the treble is a 1.8 uF, have been thinking of stepping that down to a 1.5 or 1.2 to bring the level down some. Need REW or something, after the babies grow up enough to give me a half hour...

The room appears to be small enough that 1w through a LaScala would drive a sane person out of it. It doesn't take much speaker to make decent bass at normal listening volumes in that sort of environment. Although a coaster or something between the speakers and subs sounds like a good idea.

Also play bass. Fun thing about that instrument is that we almost never hear that 40Hz fundamental, most cabinets start rolling off below 80-100Hz, and uprights roll off far above that. Probably what gives the LaScala that 'texture', it really brings out the harmonics that are the bass sound.

I found some forum posts of a russian guy that put in a bunch of effort to get the LND150 to act like a 12AX7. He ended up with a negative voltage source, a string of Schottky diodes or somesuch, and a few resistors feeding the Source to get the curves bent the same as a 12AX7. There was something about the variable resistance - vs - current of the diodes that made them work right. He also had a resistor-diode series between Source and Gate to get the +v grid current happening for guitar distortion. Allegedly, his Marshall 2550 preamp sounded spot-on to an identical circuit card with a real 12AX7. In my own stuff, I'm doing a source-follower with the diode-resistor 'grid-current' string to drive the tone stack on a 5F6A/JTM45/AC30 type of circuit, and a local-feedback stage to invert and add a few db of post-EQ gain for level-matching between channels. Seems to work pretty well. If it was me doing HiFi, I'd probably do local NFB to get the gain where I wanted it, then maybe a split-load FET inverter/driver into local feedback power tubes, but that might not sound as 'good' to a lot of ears. Haven't had enough time to play with electronics lately, have been playing with babies.

Big fan of the LND150, for the same reasons.

The only problem I'm seeing is that the CF3's aren't spread around the room for proper surround. 😵

Budget is kinda 'up against it' as far as buying new cartridges is concerned, and there's a surprising amount of options available for the ADC QLM series. Great threads are out there online, most agreeing tha tthe cartridge body itself can accept and work well with any of the 'better' ADC styli available. I think the limit may be more in what stylus compliance I can get away with on that turntable. My thought right now is to get a stylus like the one you linked to, do some measuring and listening, and maybe just roll with it. I If the system resonance works out, I might grab a Shibata-style higher-line ADC cartridge for ripping to digital. All EQ and RIAA comp will be done digitally.

I'll definitely check that out, thanks!