What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[Cubdriver]

and transducers are the only really interesting bit of audio these days.

Regards, Dan.

and room acoustics. That's where your money should go and not to fancy electronic voodoo equipment. Room acoustic treatment is usually ignored since you can not buy it easily like electronic equipment and voodoo mains cords and alike.

I'm pretty sure that the Audiofools will see that differently. First you need to make sure that your IEC plugs are gold plated, then you need to balance the cable on teak wood bridges so that they don't just lie on the floor. Then comes the copper that needs to have been extruded in the correct direction so that the electrons flow best and we haven't even started on the capacitors made from unicorn tears by naked virgins. Obviously none of this is measurable with the insufficient equipment that we "non-believers" use, but the "trained ear" will notice an obvious improvement in (add some non-defined unit of clarity, dynamic vibrance or whatever here).

McBryce.

Don't forget that cryo-treating everything will improve the sound noticeably (though immeasurably - our stupid instruments are no match for a golden ear!), too - make the highs higher, the lows lower and expand the soundscape.  I'm surprised none of them have advocated getting a dewar full of liquid nitrogen and spraying it on the walls and furniture to cryo treat the room!  (Perhaps we should suggest they dip their heads into LN2 to cryo treat their ears!)

-Pat

[McBryce]

Forget the Cryo, I'm just deeply embarrased that I completely forgot to use the word Soundscape in my post. Oh the shame of it all!

McBryce.

[Cubdriver]

Forget the Cryo, I'm just deeply embarrased that I completely forgot to use the word Soundscape in my post. Oh the shame of it all!

McBryce.

Shame!  Shame!  Shame!  Shame!   

 

It never ceases to amaze me that these people will swear that their insanely high end system sounds /noticeably/ better with the addition of a $2500 AC mains cable to power their CD player.  If your system is nearly perfect, then how can it sound noticeably better?  And if it can sound noticeably better, then it must be far from perfect.  Making an almost perfect thing noticeably better sounds rather contradictory to me.  (But then again, I probably have a tin ear and can't hear the increased lushness that adding expensive little holographic stickers to the ICs and capacitors in my equipment can provide.  I'm such an acoustic philistine!)

-Pat

[dmills]

Nope, you cryo your ears by entering your listening room, closing the door, putting on a classic recording, then taking a 250L dewar of LN2, close the windows and spray the lot around the room!

Hint, consider how much atmosphere will be displaced as 250L N2(l) turns into N2(g) and warms to room temperature.....
That ~20% of not nitrogen in air is important!

[mmcgraw74]

Last Month I bought the Tektronix 4041 GPIB Controller.

But look what I found today!

The Keyboard !!!!

Wow! That keyboard is very rare.

I just powered my pair of 4041's after storage in my garage since 2000 - and they both still work!

I was also able to recover all the files on the 4041 System Verification Tape!  See my thread on
vcfed.org: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?75275-Tektronix-4041-computer-from-the-early-1980-s-WORKING!!&p=622704#post622704

I also created a github repository where I uploaded all the files from the System Verification Tape, and the option ROMs I had in my 4041:
https://github.com/mmcgraw74/Tektronix-4041-GPIB-Controller

I found posts in https://groups.io/g/TekScopes/topic/29991395?p=Created,,,20,2,20,0 titled "Tek 4041 GPIB Controller" where we discussed how to use the 4041 keyboard interface, and my steps in creating a copy of the System Verification tape from my posted files.

[Messtechniker]

Indeed, the room is the thing in the first instance, but you ever tried to tell someone that?

Regards, Dan.

Yep. Frightens the life out of those audiophools. 
Because doing room acoustics requires real knowledge, experience and the right measuring equipment for frequency decay time measurements and room nodes. And you need a lot of time. But that's 

[mansaxel]

Prismsound DScope III audio measurement set.

Been after one for ages, superb bit of kit for what it does (The AP has a slightly better generator, but the DScope software is IMHO much more usable).

All good things come to ebay if you wait long enough.

Utter, thorough, long-lasting envy. Congratulations.

"Why does this Sonifex clock say that it's got good WordClock in when it's fed with Blackburst?"
(actual thing that happened this week.)

[McBryce]

Bought a "broken" Asus MemoPad HD10 for €20 to use as a screen on my Andonstar microscope. The supposed broken bit is the wlan, but it's not broken, WPA_suppliment_conf is just corrupted. Now in the process of rooting it so that I can swap the file and get wlan running again.

McBryce.

[Mr. Scram]

and room acoustics. That's where your money should go and not to fancy electronic voodoo equipment. Room acoustic treatment is usually ignored since you can not buy it easily like electronic equipment and voodoo mains cords and alike.

I asked my local witch doctor about it and I bought 10 pounds of gold plated free range room acoustics. Where do I put them exactly?

[McBryce]

and room acoustics. That's where your money should go and not to fancy electronic voodoo equipment. Room acoustic treatment is usually ignored since you can not buy it easily like electronic equipment and voodoo mains cords and alike.

I asked my local witch doctor about it and I bought 10 pounds of gold plated free range room acoustics. Where do I put them exactly?

I'd suggest you put them where other free-range items tend to come from

McBryce.

[Mr. Scram]

I'd suggest you put them where other free-range items tend to come from

McBryce.

Funny, that's what he suggested as well.

[mansaxel]

Oh I am sure I can build a better THD setup, even a much better THD setup, but 100+dB down for audio, do I care?

I mean it is not like ANY loudspeaker is going to manage that at significant power (-60 is a stretch for most of 'em), and transducers are the only really interesting bit of audio these days.

Regards, Dan.

Fully agree. One puts the money and effort in electromechanical transducers. It is the hardest, most challenging piece of the chain, whereas the rest is solved for most practical purposes today, especially so if you're able to have a completely file/stream-based delivery chain.  Consequently, I've got a SL1000 record player in radio kit-out (wheel undercarriage, RIAA with balanced output, local monitor speaker, fader start, 78RPM option, wiring loom with DIN 41622 Messerleiste, etc) and active monitors made by swedish company Audio-Pro back when they did good things.

[tautech]

10 additional DSO's to add to the other 20 coming......now wondering if that will be enough to meet the current market interest. 

[dmills]

"Why does this Sonifex clock say that it's got good WordClock in when it's fed with Blackburst?"
(actual thing that happened this week.)

Let me guess, 1/2 rack PTP generator, box made from stainless steel for some weird reason?
That will be because the software is ropy as fuck!

And Sonifex well know it, we found ours made better PTP when we unplugged the GPS then it ever did with it plugged in (Idiot thing would re do the PTP master election every time the number of satellites changed, turned out this annoys Embrionix kit).

Get Meinberg you will be much happier.

[rsjsouza]

10 additional DSO's to add to the other 20 coming......now wondering if that will be enough to meet the current market interest. 

Quite impressive, tautech! Nice to see the business is booming.

[tautech]

10 additional DSO's to add to the other 20 coming......now wondering if that will be enough to meet the current market interest. 

Quite impressive, tautech! Nice to see the business is booming.

Thanks. 
It's been a very interesting couple of months here in NZ and towards the end of our Covid lockdown sales jumped I think as hobbyists found their old gear not up to their requirements after having the lockdown time to really get on and use it.
Lately, now small business can see the light of day again and they also have had time to consider their projects and futures, sales to them have also jumped as they now have a lot more confidence.
The next year or so will be interesting. 

Still, the whole of NZ is a quite small marketplace of just 5M that I can cover with just me and her......smaller than many cities around the globe but way more spread out so I get very few buyers calling in person which is a little sad as I really enjoy discussing what they are doing.

[mansaxel]

Get Meinberg you will be much happier.

Oh, yeah. The single thing we're using Sonifex clocks for is to lock on to Wordclock, because that's not a thing our Meinberg does. Yesterday we had the final sync ( ) meeting on the new clock infra. When the old BB/Tri-Level gens we've got are EOL (like two years ago...) we're buying another Meinberg and two Tek SPG that'll be steered from the Meinbergs. Order goes in next week, IIRC.

[rsjsouza]

10 additional DSO's to add to the other 20 coming......now wondering if that will be enough to meet the current market interest. 

Quite impressive, tautech! Nice to see the business is booming.

Thanks. 
It's been a very interesting couple of months here in NZ and towards the end of our Covid lockdown sales jumped I think as hobbyists found their old gear not up to their requirements after having the lockdown time to really get on and use it.
Lately, now small business can see the light of day again and they also have had time to consider their projects and futures, sales to them have also jumped as they now have a lot more confidence.
The next year or so will be interesting. 

Since the beginning of this crazyness I always expected a boom due to the suppressed demand. The isolation may have left more money in the pockets of people (at least the ones that still have a job).

The million dollar skill is to perfectly sense the new demand boom, so you don't end up with excess inventory.

Still, the whole of NZ is a quite small marketplace of just 5M that I can cover with just me and her......smaller than many cities around the globe but way more spread out so I get very few buyers calling in person which is a little sad as I really enjoy discussing what they are doing.

I am familiar with this as well; in a past life we had to cover the entire South Ameirca with a relatively small market (in US$)

[tautech]

Yes well I thought I did with my biggest order ever in Jan getting held for a month as a result of China's lockdown so got a small airfreight order in to cover backorders and now very nearly all has gone. 
So if what's coming keeps me in stock for the rest of the year who cares but they are usually very steady sellers so they will go.
The only risk is the level of the buyers pocket !

Just 2 mounts ago Siglent were expecting me to be up on last year and I told them not to be so silly. 
Fun times. 

[BravoV]

Used, cheap and a pair of DELL PERC H730 1GB cache with BBU RAID controller  , bought two in order to reduce the risk of RAID controller single point of failure for swmbo's rig adventure -> HERE.

[Mr. Scram]

Though I don't like Adobe's business practices, I can't deny it's still the industry standard. I've heard good things about Affinity Photo being an alternative and considering they now have a 50% Covid discount, I thought I'd give it a go. I was prepared for some frustrations and issues as all alternative software tends to have, but am surprised to find I can just jump right in and get on with things. It's not just good enough to avoid having to deal with Adobe, it's actually good. I've spent a few days opening and editing my existing files and exporting them back and forth, putting it through it's paces and it consistently managed to impress me. I like to so much I've now also bought their other apps. It's essentially just Photoshop with small but worthwhile enhancements, except without the cloud and subscription nonsense. At around $30 it currently is an absolute steal. Even their terms and conditions are very reasonable as you can install the programs on as many of your personal computers as you like. Bye bye Adobe!



https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

[Zucca]

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

They don't do video editing SW? Too bad.

[BFX]

HP3236B to my collection I love those PSU

[deadlylover]

HP3236B to my collection I love those PSU

For some reason I like the look of the banana jacks HP uses. 
I think some of the newer Fluke calibrators had jacks that lit up, I don't wanna know the price of those...

The Keysight M9260A I picked up for 3 grands, after some cleaning, ADC/DAC binning and aging, achieved -122dB best case loopback THD and worst case (with sensible amplitude) THD of no worse than -118dB.
With its default ADC/DAC, it still works better than its paper specs, and my tweaking only improved it by around 2dB on average. What's mot important is I made its two channels more symmetric, which only serves to satisfy my OCD.

Thanks for sharing, I've always wondered how those perform! -122dB THD is still limited by the ADC and is just about what the best can manage without notching, do you remember off hand the typical THD+N performance?

The old ShibaSoku am51 will do -130dB THD easy, about -111dB THD+N mainly hampered by the ancient venerable 5532 opamps. The older ShibaSoku 725 can go down to -120dB THD+N with some basic mods (opamp swaps and fixing some ground paths).

After months of searching I've finally found and set up a Cisco 3802 access point. Fulfilled a lifelong dream to get wifi to max out the gigabit ethernet cable (using a cheap Intel AX200 wifi adaptor). 
I know I know wired is still king, but I'm too scared to crawl under the house and route some ethernet cables.

[med6753]

Tek Type 106 Square Wave Generator. Cosmetically it's a "10". Not a scratch on it. It does have some electronic issues that need to be worked out. Details in the TEA thread.