Jump to content

General WTF Moments


Cogeno

Recommended Posts

Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes being played in mono on a friend’s single channel Bluetooth speaker in my back yard sounds really strange with the way it changed how the guitars sound.

I’m going to have to play this one on the real sound system in the living room later to compare against this somewhat ‘modified’ version.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes being played in mono on a friend’s single channel Bluetooth speaker in my back yard sounds really strange with the way it changed how the guitars sound.

I’m going to have to play this one on the real sound system in the living room later to compare against this somewhat ‘modified’ version.

I wonder if one channel is coming in quieter than the other affecting the sound. Sort of like how AM stations today with FM simulcasts lose part of one stereo channel when they mix it down to mono.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Downsview 108 said:

I wonder if one channel is coming in quieter than the other affecting the sound. Sort of like how AM stations today with FM simulcasts lose part of one stereo channel when they mix it down to mono.

That's the big question, what was the bluetooth speaker doing?  I don't know if it was playing only one channel and we were hearing one side, left or right only, or if it was summing them to mono and we were hearing L+R but phase cancellation was producing some strange results with how the guitars were recorded and mixed.

It was the only song of the evening that was affected in a noticeable way too.  All three of us around the fire pit sat up and took notice but none of the other music before or after stuck out like that on that bluetooth speaker.

On that note, seriously on the to-do list to be completed by next spring (hopefully a generous enough deadline but with the way I've been making progress on things around here, maybe I shouldn't be so optimistic...) is a decent outdoor sound system for the back yard.  The bluetooth speaker that friend's brought over a number of times is the tinniest bass-shy thing that's only marginally better than getting out a smartphone and playing music over the built in speaker.  One of my long time friends gave me a pair of beat up KLH speakers on the weekend.  He thinks one of the tweeters might be toast and they're still in my truck so I need to get those unloaded and check them out, but if I can get them working well, they'd be perfect for outside use because they're cosmetically in sad shape already so I guess I have part of a checkmark on getting that done already.  I was thinking of finding a suitable pair of Cerwin Vegas on Kijiji except these speakers fell into my lap.  If the lady next door doesn't like the bluetooth speaker playing quietly 120 feet away from her house, she's going to be in for a real treat once I get a real sound system set up out there.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, Wayside Observer said:

That's the big question, what was the bluetooth speaker doing?  I don't know if it was playing only one channel and we were hearing one side, left or right only, or if it was summing them to mono and we were hearing L+R but phase cancellation was producing some strange results with how the guitars were recorded and mixed.

It was the only song of the evening that was affected in a noticeable way too.  All three of us around the fire pit sat up and took notice but none of the other music before or after stuck out like that on that bluetooth speaker.

On that note, seriously on the to-do list to be completed by next spring (hopefully a generous enough deadline but with the way I've been making progress on things around here, maybe I shouldn't be so optimistic...) is a decent outdoor sound system for the back yard.  The bluetooth speaker that friend's brought over a number of times is the tinniest bass-shy thing that's only marginally better than getting out a smartphone and playing music over the built in speaker.  One of my long time friends gave me a pair of beat up KLH speakers on the weekend.  He thinks one of the tweeters might be toast and they're still in my truck so I need to get those unloaded and check them out, but if I can get them working well, they'd be perfect for outside use because they're cosmetically in sad shape already so I guess I have part of a checkmark on getting that done already.  I was thinking of finding a suitable pair of Cerwin Vegas on Kijiji except these speakers fell into my lap.  If the lady next door doesn't like the bluetooth speaker playing quietly 120 feet away from her house, she's going to be in for a real treat once I get a real sound system set up out there.

LOL. I haven't heard too many Bluetooth speakers but the best sounding one I have was a Beats Pill. The bass was surprising. I usually listen to headphones anyway so I don't know too much or care too much for speaker quality. I heard of KLH I think.

Quick question for you about phase cancellation. Would that affect the sound of a stereo phono cartridge summed to mono or is it better to get a real mono cartridge? A lot of "mono" cartridges are just bridged stereo. I was thinking of taking just one channel and splitting it into L and R for true mono but I figure one side of the groove will sound better (especially the inner tracks) so it will be hard to know if I am getting the best sound. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

LOL. I haven't heard too many Bluetooth speakers but the best sounding one I have was a Beats Pill. The bass was surprising. I usually listen to headphones anyway so I don't know too much or care too much for speaker quality. I heard of KLH I think.

Quick question for you about phase cancellation. Would that affect the sound of a stereo phono cartridge summed to mono or is it better to get a real mono cartridge? A lot of "mono" cartridges are just bridged stereo. I was thinking of taking just one channel and splitting it into L and R for true mono but I figure one side of the groove will sound better (especially the inner tracks) so it will be hard to know if I am getting the best sound. 

My friend's preference for speakers is the New England sound type of acoustic suspension speakers, which is why he had the KLHs, Dynacos, and a bunch of Acoustic Research speakers like the AR 2ax and AR 3s.  KLH was Henry Kloss's company and he bounced around a number of others designing acoustic suspension speaker system.  I was kind of surprised though to see a pair of B & Ws hooked up in the living room while I was over and the large stereo system that's always been there shifted into the family room at the back of the house.  He and his wife renovated last fall but I wasn't expecting the stereo system to be moved out over it.  I think there's some Wife Acceptance Factor involved with this one...

Phase cancellation with phono cartridges, that's an interesting question because the answer is going to depend on what you're trying to do and what kind of records you're playing.  Generally speaking, I'd be hesitant to buy a mono cartridge that's really a stereo cartridge where the coils have been strapped together internally to give a single mono output because electrically speaking, you can tie the two channels together and get the same results outside of the turntable when you're using a stereo cartridge.  If you use a stereo cart and do that, you can make it switchable and chose between stereo and mono sum whenever you want and avoid the expense of buying a niche market fake-mono cartridge which would cost more but leave you no choice about how you want to listen to your records.

The only time an actual, real mono cartridge would come out ahead is if you're playing mono records, typically cut laterally, that have dirt and debris in the bottom of the groove causing vertical hill-and-dale stylus movement that a mono cartridge would ignore to some degree.  You might get a slight noise reduction playing back mono records with a mono cartridge but it would be highly dependant on exactly where any groove damage or dirt is located over playing a mono record with a stereo or strereo-strapped-to-mono cart which would read off all dirt and damage no matter where it is, even if it isn't located where any signal's cut into the groove.

If you're playing stereo records, don't use a mono cartridge.  Stereo records are cut with one channel laterally and one hill and dale, all rotated 45 degrees (think left/right and up/down arrows all tilted to the side by 45 degrees) so even with extreme stereo separation, there's always some left to right movement to retain backward compatibility with actual mono cartridges, but it means there's always some up and down groove movement too and true mono carts can be very unforgiving of that and wear stereo records harder in the vertical component of the groove that way.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Wayside Observer said:

My friend's preference for speakers is the New England sound type of acoustic suspension speakers, which is why he had the KLHs, Dynacos, and a bunch of Acoustic Research speakers like the AR 2ax and AR 3s.  KLH was Henry Kloss's company and he bounced around a number of others designing acoustic suspension speaker system.  I was kind of surprised though to see a pair of B & Ws hooked up in the living room while I was over and the large stereo system that's always been there shifted into the family room at the back of the house.  He and his wife renovated last fall but I wasn't expecting the stereo system to be moved out over it.  I think there's some Wife Acceptance Factor involved with this one...

Phase cancellation with phono cartridges, that's an interesting question because the answer is going to depend on what you're trying to do and what kind of records you're playing.  Generally speaking, I'd be hesitant to buy a mono cartridge that's really a stereo cartridge where the coils have been strapped together internally to give a single mono output because electrically speaking, you can tie the two channels together and get the same results outside of the turntable when you're using a stereo cartridge.  If you use a stereo cart and do that, you can make it switchable and chose between stereo and mono sum whenever you want and avoid the expense of buying a niche market fake-mono cartridge which would cost more but leave you no choice about how you want to listen to your records.

The only time an actual, real mono cartridge would come out ahead is if you're playing mono records, typically cut laterally, that have dirt and debris in the bottom of the groove causing vertical hill-and-dale stylus movement that a mono cartridge would ignore to some degree.  You might get a slight noise reduction playing back mono records with a mono cartridge but it would be highly dependant on exactly where any groove damage or dirt is located over playing a mono record with a stereo or strereo-strapped-to-mono cart which would read off all dirt and damage no matter where it is, even if it isn't located where any signal's cut into the groove.

If you're playing stereo records, don't use a mono cartridge.  Stereo records are cut with one channel laterally and one hill and dale, all rotated 45 degrees (think left/right and up/down arrows all tilted to the side by 45 degrees) so even with extreme stereo separation, there's always some left to right movement to retain backward compatibility with actual mono cartridges, but it means there's always some up and down groove movement too and true mono carts can be very unforgiving of that and wear stereo records harder in the vertical component of the groove that way.

Acoustic Research. That's good stuff. Built extremely well. Their turntables are expensive on the vintage market but they follow that "do one thing and one thing well" philosophy. I think I'd rather an audiophile setup in a basement to be honest. Hope your buddy still gets to use his system.

Thanks for that info! I digitize vinyl and I have a lot of pre-Stereo mono stuff where the grooves are different so I wanted to know if that "phase cancellation", which I can sometimes hear on certain discs, was something I needed to worry about. I don't want to invest the $$$ on a true mono if there's a marginal difference. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

Acoustic Research. That's good stuff. Built extremely well. Their turntables are expensive on the vintage market but they follow that "do one thing and one thing well" philosophy. I think I'd rather an audiophile setup in a basement to be honest. Hope your buddy still gets to use his system.st

Oh not to worry, it's set up in his media room now rather than the living room.  The living room's got a Carver receiver powering those B & Ws which kind of surprised me since he's never been big on British speakers.  He's got two other systems set up, one in his office and another in the basement plus a bunch of miscellaneous equipment enough to probably put another two or three systems together.

2 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

Thanks for that info! I digitize vinyl and I have a lot of pre-Stereo mono stuff where the grooves are different so I wanted to know if that "phase cancellation", which I can sometimes hear on certain discs, was something I needed to worry about. I don't want to invest the $$$ on a true mono if there's a marginal difference. 

Your best bet is probably to get the best stereo cart you can afford and not worry about getting a mono one since you can play anything with that and make a single channel later.  If you're digitizing, record your mono records in stereo because that'll give you some options to work with.  Playing back a mono record with a stereo cartridge in mathematical theory should give you exactly the same thing on both stereo channels but the physical properties of everything involved in the real world means you get differences between the two sides and you can work that to your advantage:  When you play back the stereo file of a mono record, toggle between the two channels and try summing them to mono as well.  That'll give you three different mono sound tracks to pick from and chose the one that happens to sound the best for each side or each song you're digitizing.

Probably the bigger issue with the pre-stereo vinyl that you're going to want to watch out for is going to be the myriad of pre-RIAA EQ systems that went with a lot of them which the cartridge situation won't address.  That should be sort of easily dealt with in software though but there are a couple of important caveats with that.  FIrst, and this is relatively minor, it means your real-time monitoring of the record playback won't sound accurate until you postprocess the correct de-emphasis curve on the audio you've captured.  The second is that to do that accurately, you need to either get enough linear gain to digitize directly from the turntable without going through any RIAA de-emphasis in order to apply a non-RIAA curve if that's what a particular disc needs.  A lot of people forget this and pass their cartridge output through a regular phono preamp which applies the RIAA and then apply the correct de-emphasis on top of that without realizing that they're getting something totally wrong at the output end from applying multiple different de-emphasis curves with a cumulative result to a disc cut with a single pre-emphasis curve.  From a mathematics perspective, what you need to do with a signal chain with an RIAA phono preamp and a non-RIAA disc would be to apply RIAA pre-emphasis to cancel the preamp's RIAA playback EQ to restore flat, off-the-cart audio, then apply the correct playback EQ for the disc.

Back in the day, you'd use a record compensator and pick the right EQ for the disc you were going to listen to.  If you can get ahold of one of these and get the electronics restored so it's performing to spec, this solves the realtime monitoring problem and gives you a line level output to digitize from and avoids the whole mathematical computer filter morass of going through multiple pre-emphasis and de-emphasis EQs to recover the correct audio.  All the major manufacturers made record compensators in the 1950s.  What I've got for home is a Scott 130 preamp.  HH Scott, Fisher, McIntosh et. al. all made mono record compensators but there were very few stereo models made.  The Scott 130 from the late fifties hits both nails on the head nicely because it's a stereo preamp so no struggle to obtain two of the same thing and then fighting with two separate sets of controls whenever you want to change something with a dual-mono setup and it's got the whole slate of record EQs on the signal source knob!

That, feeding a pair of Dynaco MK IV's into a pair of bigass Kef Concertos is a nice sounding system!  I actually have two 130s, one of them's a nice unit, the other someone did a butcher job on.  The butcher victim's a nice test bed to work with though because I can design and test circuit modifications on that without touching the nice one that's in beautiful condition that's almost a museum piece that looks like it was sent by courier direct from 1959.  What I've been wanting to do is keep the record compensator but clean up the signal path for the line output stage and maybe clean up the tone control path as well.  They packed a lot of stuff in and strictly speaking, there's a fair amount that wasn't strictly necessary to accomplish what they were doing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just walked into work and noticed some moron who occupied four parking spots with their big, fat oversized Ram pick up truck. Are people this stupid to drive and park nowadays? 

Well if I had a pen and paper on me, I would've left note saying, your parking sucks, please never reproduce. I know this rude and insulting but this things in life piss me off the most. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On October 15, 2019 at 3:49 PM, Downsview 108 said:

I usually listen to headphones anyway so I don't know too much or care too much for speaker quality.

I'm just curious, if you don't mind me asking, why the preference for headphones over speakers?  I was giving phase cancellation some thought and I realized that headphones don't have the same cancellation effect that speakers can have when the bass is out of phase and it cancels out in the room where the out of phase air movement from the two woofers interacts.  This doesn't happen with headphones because theres no shared air space for this to take place in like there is with two speakers in the same room, so if most of your listening is with headphones, any recording with significant out of phase content would sound much different compared to the same thing played back through speakers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/15/2019 at 7:01 PM, Wayside Observer said:

Oh not to worry, it's set up in his media room now rather than the living room.  The living room's got a Carver receiver powering those B & Ws which kind of surprised me since he's never been big on British speakers.  He's got two other systems set up, one in his office and another in the basement plus a bunch of miscellaneous equipment enough to probably put another two or three systems together.

Your best bet is probably to get the best stereo cart you can afford and not worry about getting a mono one since you can play anything with that and make a single channel later.  If you're digitizing, record your mono records in stereo because that'll give you some options to work with.  Playing back a mono record with a stereo cartridge in mathematical theory should give you exactly the same thing on both stereo channels but the physical properties of everything involved in the real world means you get differences between the two sides and you can work that to your advantage:  When you play back the stereo file of a mono record, toggle between the two channels and try summing them to mono as well.  That'll give you three different mono sound tracks to pick from and chose the one that happens to sound the best for each side or each song you're digitizing.

Probably the bigger issue with the pre-stereo vinyl that you're going to want to watch out for is going to be the myriad of pre-RIAA EQ systems that went with a lot of them which the cartridge situation won't address.  That should be sort of easily dealt with in software though but there are a couple of important caveats with that.  FIrst, and this is relatively minor, it means your real-time monitoring of the record playback won't sound accurate until you postprocess the correct de-emphasis curve on the audio you've captured.  The second is that to do that accurately, you need to either get enough linear gain to digitize directly from the turntable without going through any RIAA de-emphasis in order to apply a non-RIAA curve if that's what a particular disc needs.  A lot of people forget this and pass their cartridge output through a regular phono preamp which applies the RIAA and then apply the correct de-emphasis on top of that without realizing that they're getting something totally wrong at the output end from applying multiple different de-emphasis curves with a cumulative result to a disc cut with a single pre-emphasis curve.  From a mathematics perspective, what you need to do with a signal chain with an RIAA phono preamp and a non-RIAA disc would be to apply RIAA pre-emphasis to cancel the preamp's RIAA playback EQ to restore flat, off-the-cart audio, then apply the correct playback EQ for the disc.

Back in the day, you'd use a record compensator and pick the right EQ for the disc you were going to listen to.  If you can get ahold of one of these and get the electronics restored so it's performing to spec, this solves the realtime monitoring problem and gives you a line level output to digitize from and avoids the whole mathematical computer filter morass of going through multiple pre-emphasis and de-emphasis EQs to recover the correct audio.  All the major manufacturers made record compensators in the 1950s.  What I've got for home is a Scott 130 preamp.  HH Scott, Fisher, McIntosh et. al. all made mono record compensators but there were very few stereo models made.  The Scott 130 from the late fifties hits both nails on the head nicely because it's a stereo preamp so no struggle to obtain two of the same thing and then fighting with two separate sets of controls whenever you want to change something with a dual-mono setup and it's got the whole slate of record EQs on the signal source knob!

That, feeding a pair of Dynaco MK IV's into a pair of bigass Kef Concertos is a nice sounding system!  I actually have two 130s, one of them's a nice unit, the other someone did a butcher job on.  The butcher victim's a nice test bed to work with though because I can design and test circuit modifications on that without touching the nice one that's in beautiful condition that's almost a museum piece that looks like it was sent by courier direct from 1959.  What I've been wanting to do is keep the record compensator but clean up the signal path for the line output stage and maybe clean up the tone control path as well.  They packed a lot of stuff in and strictly speaking, there's a fair amount that wasn't strictly necessary to accomplish what they were doing.

Good to hear. Some of that British stuff can be good. Even garrard and BSR made some good things.

Ah, good idea. I was thinking also in terms of casual listening as well as digitizing but ripping in stereo and then doubling up a channel could work. I just wanted to know if I was missing much not getting the best out of both sides of the groove.

The RIAA curves aren't that big a deal with me except when I am digitizing 78RPM because I have a ceramic cartridge for that and it is hard to find the right EQ to make those sound right. Each label had their own curve and it doesn't help matters that the ceramic cartridge doesn't subtract but adds to the sound without the aid of a preamp. I usually just plug my MM stuff into my cheap receiver's preamp and run lineout from there into my computer. Sound is pretty good.

There seemed to be a lot of cool gadgets back in the day for record playback accuracy and it doesn't surprise me that there'd be plenty from the 50s. It seems back then, they cared more about sound quality rather than mass production. Even 45s from back then have all the grooves packed around the outer edge even though at 45RPM on 7" inner groove distortion isn't that audible! They had nicer quality vinyl too. Some of the leading transcription tables from those days still command premium prices. Garrard makes one of them. I'll keep an eye out for that compensator but I imagine that would be pricey too. What do you mean when you cay you want to clean up the signal paths of the Scott 130?

My preference of headphones just has to do with my dwelling and habit. I find I can hear more details than through speakers. Nothing really to do with preference but rather trying not to annoy family and neighbours. I would need my own farm to blast the music I want to and at the volume I want to. LOL. I would agree that room acoustics play a big part in the sound as you explained but to be perfectly honest, unless the quirks affect my enjoyment of any music, I don't really notice. I really just buy records to listen to. I would like to digitize them just to reduce wear and for days when I am not lazy/nostalgic. Speaking of laziness, I saw a forum post once that said, as you get older as a post-vinyl vinyl junkie, 1) you appreciate the clicks and pops WAY less and 2) you lost patience playing 45s LOL Both things have happened to me. No wonder those were marketed to the teenyboppers and were eventually pressed on crap materials.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, Downsview 108 said:

Good to hear. Some of that British stuff can be good. Even garrard and BSR made some good things.

Garrard transcription turntables are fantastic.  The model 301 and 401 specific models to watch out for.  I almost got a 301 about 15 years ago.  The 401 is mechanically a bit better but it did not benefit from some dubious 1970s style decisions.

Quote

The RIAA curves aren't that big a deal with me except when I am digitizing 78RPM because I have a ceramic cartridge for that and it is hard to find the right EQ to make those sound right. Each label had their own curve and it doesn't help matters that the ceramic cartridge doesn't subtract but adds to the sound without the aid of a preamp. I usually just plug my MM stuff into my cheap receiver's preamp and run lineout from there into my computer. Sound is pretty good.

Ah, ceramic cartridges.  Those are physically unforgiving and chew vinyl records but for 78s, that's not a problem since the shellac is designed to handle totally abusive playback equipment in terms of acoustic gramophone tonearms that have tracking forces in the multiple ounces and depend on the mechanical playback of the groove to generate all the sound so even a ceramic cartridge doesn't compare to what a windup gramophone would do to them.  Electrically, you're right, the ceramic cartridge adds a lot.  In fact, I don't know if you knew this, ceramic cartridges are so nonlinear with respect to frequency that back in the day, many of the suitcase record player manufacturers that used ceramic carts didn't bother with an RIAA playback circuit because the ceramic cartridges took care of that well enough for that application by themselves.  So, double RIAAing a 78 RPM record that was never cut with it isn't going to help, that's for sure.

Quote

There seemed to be a lot of cool gadgets back in the day for record playback accuracy and it doesn't surprise me that there'd be plenty from the 50s. It seems back then, they cared more about sound quality rather than mass production. Even 45s from back then have all the grooves packed around the outer edge even though at 45RPM on 7" inner groove distortion isn't that audible! They had nicer quality vinyl too. Some of the leading transcription tables from those days still command premium prices. Garrard makes one of them. I'll keep an eye out for that compensator but I imagine that would be pricey too.

Calling it high fidelity was not a misnomer.  If you come across old paper copies or read scans online of old publications like Popular Electronics, the hi fi and stereo magazines, or better yet, Audio Engineering Society, people really were trying to record, distribute, and play back the absolutely best, most accurate audio within the budget they could afford.  This wasn't just taking place at the component level like getting the best turntable you could afford or the system level where the radio stations were trying to get the best sounding studio to transmitter links they could budget for, it was right down to the electronic components themselves.  The care and attention to the design and manufacture of transformers.  Low noise resistors. The works.  Everything.  It was a totally different market with a totally different aspiration they were striving for back then, before the black faced plastic cabinet quality slide in the mid-80s started.

Quote

What do you mean when you cay you want to clean up the signal paths of the Scott 130?

Some pictures are going to save me about a thousand words for real here.  You don't need to take a particularly close look at these diagrams, just a glance at them to see how much stuff there is in each of them:

H. H. Scott 130 preamp

H. H. Scott 130 preamp - alternate drawing

The alternate drawing lists off all the different EQs the phono stage provides, which is going to add some complexity to the phono in terms of different values of resistors and capacitors to build up the filter circuits plus additional wafer switch positions to switch between them.  Even accounting for that, compare against the H. H. Scott LC-21 stereo preamp in this diagram and look at how much smaller the tube count is and how much less stuff there is total which implies a shorter, more direct signal path:

H. H. Scott LC-21 preamp

There's a whole bunch of adjustment pots you can get rid of in the 130 right away plus a bit of buffering as well.  The LC-21 does the same thing but gets from input to output a lot more directly.

Quote

My preference of headphones just has to do with my dwelling and habit. I find I can hear more details than through speakers. Nothing really to do with preference but rather trying not to annoy family and neighbours. I would need my own farm to blast the music I want to and at the volume I want to. LOL. I would agree that room acoustics play a big part in the sound as you explained but to be perfectly honest, unless the quirks affect my enjoyment of any music, I don't really notice.

Same here, which is why, in my living room, there's one piece of furniture arrangement that I can't really avoid that's not good from an acoustic perspective.  Most of the time it doesn't bother me since I'm listening to music to enjoy the music, but every once in a while ends up driving me up the wall because of the way it can interact with the music depending on how it's been mixed. I definitely get being considerate of the family and the neighbours.  I'm on my own so family isn't a concern I need to worry about, at least for now anyways, and I don't usually blast music at a million decibels.  There's definitely a limit on how loud I like it, but still a farm or other rural property would be great to be able to do WTF I want without anybody getting bent out of shape about it.  Since neither of us have that, the surrounding people have to be respected.  However, one of my neighbours though, wow.  He hasn't done it in a while, but every so often, this guy living in a house diagonally across the street from me would blast the Elton John 60th birthday concert DVD at ear shattering levels.  The first time I was around when he did that, I heard this rumble inside my house and I wandered around wondering what was going on to cause that.  Eventually I realized it was coming from outside and I couldn't see any construction or anything else going on in the street that would account for it so I went outside and followed it across the road and down a couple of houses and couldn't believe how loud it was and this was standing on the sidewalk with the front yard plus the front wall and windows between me and the guy's living room.  The volume inside his living room had to be loud enough to cause hearing damage.

Do you remember Brack Electronics?  They had two stores, one was on Front St. maybe a block or two west of the St. Lawrence Market and the other location was up in Thornhill and the store was an old house on Yonge St.  They used to do these wine and cheese nights and they'd be demonstrating equipment and manufacturers would have their representatives there giving talks and doing demos as well.  I went to one of these back in fall 1993 and one of the most revealing, detailed listening experiences I ever had was at this evening listening to a pair of headphones.  It was an integrated system, this pair of electrostatic headphones and the tube amplifier that powered them, that couldn't be split up and separated.  I've never heard anything as detailed before or since but the whole thing cost $7,000 plus tax in 1993 dollars.  Headphones can be much more revealing than speakers just due to the physics involved with moving such small diaphragms quickly and accurately compared to large speaker cones which are relatively high mass and inertia by comparison.  The other memorable demo that night was a pair of gigantic monoblock Mark-Levinson power amplifiers.  The Mark-Levinson factory rep gave a neat presentation going over a lot of the design and build considerations that went into these amplifiers before they played them into a pair of humongous B & W speakers.  I don't know which model they were but those were huge speakers.  That was an impressive rig.  It was a great party and everyone had a good time that evening.  The drive up Yonge St. to and from after dark was a nice ride up and down a mostly empty street and you don't see an absence of traffic like that on Yonge St. anymore.

Quote

I really just buy records to listen to. I would like to digitize them just to reduce wear and for days when I am not lazy/nostalgic. Speaking of laziness, I saw a forum post once that said, as you get older as a post-vinyl vinyl junkie, 1) you appreciate the clicks and pops WAY less and 2) you lost patience playing 45s LOL Both things have happened to me. No wonder those were marketed to the teenyboppers and were eventually pressed on crap materials.

Yeah, it's funny how the record formats shook out.  The 12" LP was a CBS Peter Goldmark invention.  RCA competed with the 45 which they intended as a more compact, high fidelity direct replacement for 78s and I think Columbia came up and split the middle with the 10" EP.  Why buy 45s when you can get a whole album so as a distribution format, 45s became the inexpensive teenybopper format as you mentioned, and distribution for single songs to radio stations and jukeboxes.

You mentioned the crappy materials...I kind of had a reminder of that last November.  I met up with an electrician friend of mine for a late breakfast and the diner we planned to go to had already closed.  So much for keeping their website up to date with current hours.  We ended up going for a drive to find something and settled on the Memphis Fire BBQ Company on Highway 8 way down by the Stoney Creek / Grimsby border for what became a late lunch.  The only table available was right next to the jukebox.  I was thinking aw crud, if someone plays this thing, it's going to be blasting right next to us.

Turns out, the jukebox wasn't turned up loud at all and it was set to free play.  Whenever it stopped, one of the waitresses or the lady who co-owned the restaurant with her husband would stop by, hold down one of the letter keys with one hand and then punch a random bunch of numbers with the other to start it playing again and they had a nice selection of classic rock with some christmas songs mixed in that they loaded into the machine a few days earlier and we could watch the record selector moving up and down its track picking out the discs and spinning them, then putting them away again.  This was a nice Seeburg machine that could also handle 10" EPs but they only had 7" 45s.  My friend wanted to know how it worked so I was trying to explain the whole pin and cam disc selector to him and I pointed out the little feeler arm on the turntable assembly that tells the record changer if the disc being loaded is a 10" or 7" record.  The lady who co-owns the restaurant heard part of this conversation and she stopped by and told us that they were actually originally planning to buy a Wurlitzer jukebox except that when he listened to it, the records weren't playing at the right speed.  This prompted a whole other conversation about why on earth someone would try to sell a jukebox with the turntable speed so noticeably off and how Seeburgs seem to be a lot less maintenance heavy compared to Wurlitzers.  Incidentally, last year's trolley museum winterfest was at New York Museum of Transportation just outside of Rochester and my GPS took me through the east end of Buffalo past the Wurlitzer head office on my way home.  Anyways, you could see and hear the difference between the polystyrene 45s in the jukebox and Memphis Fire that were originally sold to pimply faced teenagers and the properly made 45s that were pressed into vinyl for radio stations and jukebox companies.

Edit:  I mentioned the trolley museum winterfest.  The bar at the hotel had a jukebox.  It was this plastic Rowe/AMI digital internet connected thing sitting in a corner that nobody was using.  What a pile of shit that was.  One of my friends there saw me looking at it and asked me what I thought.  My assessment was that this plastic heap of garbage LCD screen debit-card-operated internet downloaded MP3 player attempt at a jukebox was a waste of space.  Give me a Seeburg with the 100 disc selector any day of the week, thank you.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

Garrard transcription turntables are fantastic.  The model 301 and 401 specific models to watch out for.  I almost got a 301 about 15 years ago.  The 401 is mechanically a bit better but it did not benefit from some dubious 1970s style decisions.

Ah, ceramic cartridges.  Those are physically unforgiving and chew vinyl records but for 78s, that's not a problem since the shellac is designed to handle totally abusive playback equipment in terms of acoustic gramophone tonearms that have tracking forces in the multiple ounces and depend on the mechanical playback of the groove to generate all the sound so even a ceramic cartridge doesn't compare to what a windup gramophone would do to them.  Electrically, you're right, the ceramic cartridge adds a lot.  In fact, I don't know if you knew this, ceramic cartridges are so nonlinear with respect to frequency that back in the day, many of the suitcase record player manufacturers that used ceramic carts didn't bother with an RIAA playback circuit because the ceramic cartridges took care of that well enough for that application by themselves.  So, double RIAAing a 78 RPM record that was never cut with it isn't going to help, that's for sure.

Calling it high fidelity was not a misnomer.  If you come across old paper copies or read scans online of old publications like Popular Electronics, the hi fi and stereo magazines, or better yet, Audio Engineering Society, people really were trying to record, distribute, and play back the absolutely best, most accurate audio within the budget they could afford.  This wasn't just taking place at the component level like getting the best turntable you could afford or the system level where the radio stations were trying to get the best sounding studio to transmitter links they could budget for, it was right down to the electronic components themselves.  The care and attention to the design and manufacture of transformers.  Low noise resistors. The works.  Everything.  It was a totally different market with a totally different aspiration they were striving for back then, before the black faced plastic cabinet quality slide in the mid-80s started.

Some pictures are going to save me about a thousand words for real here.  You don't need to take a particularly close look at these diagrams, just a glance at them to see how much stuff there is in each of them:

H. H. Scott 130 preamp

H. H. Scott 130 preamp - alternate drawing

The alternate drawing lists off all the different EQs the phono stage provides, which is going to add some complexity to the phono in terms of different values of resistors and capacitors to build up the filter circuits plus additional wafer switch positions to switch between them.  Even accounting for that, compare against the H. H. Scott LC-21 stereo preamp in this diagram and look at how much smaller the tube count is and how much less stuff there is total which implies a shorter, more direct signal path:

H. H. Scott LC-21 preamp

There's a whole bunch of adjustment pots you can get rid of in the 130 right away plus a bit of buffering as well.  The LC-21 does the same thing but gets from input to output a lot more directly.

Same here, which is why, in my living room, there's one piece of furniture arrangement that I can't really avoid that's not good from an acoustic perspective.  Most of the time it doesn't bother me since I'm listening to music to enjoy the music, but every once in a while ends up driving me up the wall because of the way it can interact with the music depending on how it's been mixed. I definitely get being considerate of the family and the neighbours.  I'm on my own so family isn't a concern I need to worry about, at least for now anyways, and I don't usually blast music at a million decibels.  There's definitely a limit on how loud I like it, but still a farm or other rural property would be great to be able to do WTF I want without anybody getting bent out of shape about it.  Since neither of us have that, the surrounding people have to be respected.  However, one of my neighbours though, wow.  He hasn't done it in a while, but every so often, this guy living in a house diagonally across the street from me would blast the Elton John 60th birthday concert DVD at ear shattering levels.  The first time I was around when he did that, I heard this rumble inside my house and I wandered around wondering what was going on to cause that.  Eventually I realized it was coming from outside and I couldn't see any construction or anything else going on in the street that would account for it so I went outside and followed it across the road and down a couple of houses and couldn't believe how loud it was and this was standing on the sidewalk with the front yard plus the front wall and windows between me and the guy's living room.  The volume inside his living room had to be loud enough to cause hearing damage.

Do you remember Brack Electronics?  They had two stores, one was on Front St. maybe a block or two west of the St. Lawrence Market and the other location was up in Thornhill and the store was an old house on Yonge St.  They used to do these wine and cheese nights and they'd be demonstrating equipment and manufacturers would have their representatives there giving talks and doing demos as well.  I went to one of these back in fall 1993 and one of the most revealing, detailed listening experiences I ever had was at this evening listening to a pair of headphones.  It was an integrated system, this pair of electrostatic headphones and the tube amplifier that powered them, that couldn't be split up and separated.  I've never heard anything as detailed before or since but the whole thing cost $7,000 plus tax in 1993 dollars.  Headphones can be much more revealing than speakers just due to the physics involved with moving such small diaphragms quickly and accurately compared to large speaker cones which are relatively high mass and inertia by comparison.  The other memorable demo that night was a pair of gigantic monoblock Mark-Levinson power amplifiers.  The Mark-Levinson factory rep gave a neat presentation going over a lot of the design and build considerations that went into these amplifiers before they played them into a pair of humongous B & W speakers.  I don't know which model they were but those were huge speakers.  That was an impressive rig.  It was a great party and everyone had a good time that evening.  The drive up Yonge St. to and from after dark was a nice ride up and down a mostly empty street and you don't see an absence of traffic like that on Yonge St. anymore.

Yeah, it's funny how the record formats shook out.  The 12" LP was a CBS Peter Goldmark invention.  RCA competed with the 45 which they intended as a more compact, high fidelity direct replacement for 78s and I think Columbia came up and split the middle with the 10" EP.  Why buy 45s when you can get a whole album so as a distribution format, 45s became the inexpensive teenybopper format as you mentioned, and distribution for single songs to radio stations and jukeboxes.

You mentioned the crappy materials...I kind of had a reminder of that last November.  I met up with an electrician friend of mine for a late breakfast and the diner we planned to go to had already closed.  So much for keeping their website up to date with current hours.  We ended up going for a drive to find something and settled on the Memphis Fire BBQ Company on Highway 8 way down by the Stoney Creek / Grimsby border for what became a late lunch.  The only table available was right next to the jukebox.  I was thinking aw crud, if someone plays this thing, it's going to be blasting right next to us.

Turns out, the jukebox wasn't turned up loud at all and it was set to free play.  Whenever it stopped, one of the waitresses or the lady who co-owned the restaurant with her husband would stop by, hold down one of the letter keys with one hand and then punch a random bunch of numbers with the other to start it playing again and they had a nice selection of classic rock with some christmas songs mixed in that they loaded into the machine a few days earlier and we could watch the record selector moving up and down its track picking out the discs and spinning them, then putting them away again.  This was a nice Seeburg machine that could also handle 10" EPs but they only had 7" 45s.  My friend wanted to know how it worked so I was trying to explain the whole pin and cam disc selector to him and I pointed out the little feeler arm on the turntable assembly that tells the record changer if the disc being loaded is a 10" or 7" record.  The lady who co-owns the restaurant heard part of this conversation and she stopped by and told us that they were actually originally planning to buy a Wurlitzer jukebox except that when he listened to it, the records weren't playing at the right speed.  This prompted a whole other conversation about why on earth someone would try to sell a jukebox with the turntable speed so noticeably off and how Seeburgs seem to be a lot less maintenance heavy compared to Wurlitzers.  Incidentally, last year's trolley museum winterfest was at New York Museum of Transportation just outside of Rochester and my GPS took me through the east end of Buffalo past the Wurlitzer head office on my way home.  Anyways, you could see and hear the difference between the polystyrene 45s in the jukebox and Memphis Fire that were originally sold to pimply faced teenagers and the properly made 45s that were pressed into vinyl for radio stations and jukebox companies.

Edit:  I mentioned the trolley museum winterfest.  The bar at the hotel had a jukebox.  It was this plastic Rowe/AMI digital internet connected thing sitting in a corner that nobody was using.  What a pile of shit that was.  One of my friends there saw me looking at it and asked me what I thought.  My assessment was that this plastic heap of garbage LCD screen debit-card-operated internet downloaded MP3 player attempt at a jukebox was a waste of space.  Give me a Seeburg with the 100 disc selector any day of the week, thank you.

Yeah the 301. That's the one! I still don't understand what makes them supposedly of a higher-fidelity than some consumer tables. I think Garrard made a transcription table or really high-end consumer table that had a headshell that would dynamically change its angle when the arm progressed closer to the spindle. That's the only real advantage I can think of. It's like those $25,000 monstrosities with like a tonearm in each corner a million decks, platters that look like something out of the Flintstones (12+ inches thick) etc. I have no doubt those sound better than consumer turntables but is the difference worth something that literally looks like the centre console of the pre-6th Doctor TARDIS? ? I don't really like the way pre-1968 or so turntables look. With those sort of "art deco" tonearms and all the tackyness. I like the industrial look of those CEC made stuff. S-shaped arm, wood grain plinth, that "Eurostile" font, etc.

Yeah, some of those 78's were designed to take upwards of 21 grams of force on a Victrola. My dedicated garrard changer has a Sonotone 3509 tracking at 6.5 grams right now and it sounds...(I never played these things before a couple years ago so I dunno how good they're supposed to sound)...good to my ears at least. I don't want to use a MM cartridge for the reasons you described. It's pretty cool that the ceramics will color the sound according to each disc whereas the MM will apply the same RIAA curve to all records. I tried a mod that would convert the ceramic signal to one that I could plug into my receiver and I did not like the sound at all. It sounded a bit cleaner but the bass was very muddy and awful sounding. The ceramic gives me a very clean, albeit bass deficient, sound that I can fix in a program like Audacity and apply some widely available published RIAA curves for each type of 78. https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/78rpm_playback_curves

I think the main article for ripping 78s on that site is geared towards those who are playing these with a MM cartridge because it wants you to strip the RIAA curve applied by your preamp and then apply a custom one in Audacity. The only thing I don't like about the ceramics is the sheer output voltage. They're too loud. I read online that you can put either two 10,000 or 100,000k resistors (i forget) or 2 1pf (i think) ceramic caps to lower the output and increase the bass but that never worked for me either. Does that sound right to you?

I wish I had a stack of Popular Mechanics issues from the 50s. I once had a scan of one that had a diagram for how to build your own ALL TUBE tremolo box. I have been a HUGE fan of 50s tremolo sound in the guitars back then because it was a much fuller and deeper sound. It sounded more natural and seemed to have a very low noise floor. You've definitely opened my eyes some at the level of tech they actually did have back then. That preamp is no exception. "rumble" and "click" filters?!? I wonder how those worked. I would love to hear that in action because all I am used to is digital click removal which leaves you with that nasty robotic sound. And switches for mono and stereo records looks interesting. Impressive machine. I am sure tubes for that are easy to find as well. Good luck on the project. I can understand wanting as clean a sound as possible. Me, I want all the tube dirtiness. LOL

I never heard of anyone who blasts Elton John to those decibels. Not even killer songs like Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting LOL.? Maybe no one's done it since those songs were new. But I digress. I think I lost some hearing going to shows in my 20s and playing music. LOL. I still have decent ears and they are more picky now but my budget (or lack thereof) doesn't give me enough financial latitude to experiment. LOL. I am satisfied with my setup now because all of my tables are hooked into my computer so I can rip with a few pushes of a couple buttons. I need to replace my cables however and I need to buy a stereo preamp for one of my tables because the cable from that to one of my receivers is too long and I have slammed face first into another phenomenon I have to worry about with vinyl playback: loading. ? So now I have to worry about the resistance in the cables I get. Ain't it cheaper to not have any hobbies?

I don't remember that chain, no. That boutique stuff is always going to be magnitudes ahead of consumer one-sound-fits-all stuff. I saw these headphones that cost I think $30,000 and the cans don't actually make contact with your ears. They hover about 1/2 an inch from them. The "cans" actually looked like those old diamond shaped mikes from years ago. I would love to own a system like you described but again, with things like that I'd have to upgrade the entire chain to that level, from stylus to speaker. Then I'd probably have to buy an ultrasonic record cleaner that will make my collection worthy of being dragged under the high class needle. Best headphones I ever had were a pair of 1973 Hitachi 100 ohm headphones, that were literally completely flat. So flat I had to add my own foam and even with that they killed my ears. I got them off eBay for $10. Zero. Distortion. I also had AKG K141s once. Those were nice. Right now I use Shure SRH440s which is cheap but sounds acceptable. I do enjoy the physical aspect of listening to good speakers. You can't FEEL the bass with headphones.

The 45 situation is unfortunate because a lot of them are trashed by cheap record changers due to their being marketed as they were in the end. Polystyrene discs are the worst. They sound good when they are in good shape with low noise but you can't play them forever. Trashed polystyrene sounds like a trashed shellac record. Completely unlistenable. That sucks because the USA was the biggest manufacturer of those. They never injection moulded records in Canada. Only vinyl. So I have a stack of rare american funk that have limited plays. It sucks. Shellac blew me away actually with how good they sounded vs what I thought they sounded like. The later ones had different coatings that feel closer to vinyl. Columbias discs had the cardboard in the middle but the top layer felt like vinyl and those discs sound better than others as a result. The 78s from the end of that era (50s) all seem to have that feel too and sound good. I guess the faster speed and bigger grooves have to do with it. It's a shame they couldn't make those out of vinyl from the beginning though. They really are terrible for collecting because of how fragile they are.

First jukebox I ever saw was one of those small ones they put next to each table in one of those classic 50s diners which was the kind I saw it in. I didn't get to listen to it and have no idea how those worked. Do those use records as well being so small? I never seen a real jukebox in action.* Just those jackass CD ones or digital although I am glad I never had the misfortune to see one with a debit card scanner. LOL. It's a pretty complex mechanism. Built like a swiss watch. Those used Sonotone cartridges too. But I can always tell when I buy used 45s if they came from jukeboxes because usually the labels would be pristine but the grooves completely trashed and grey. Also if it's one of those 2 -sided number 1 "gold series" or "hit series" discs they started spewing out in the late 60s and 70s. All these cool gadgets and tech, they really were in the stone age back then, weren't they? NOT?

*The closest was the jukebox band on Shining Time Station?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A couple WTF/FML moments. 

I basically got no rest on my vacation as the guests / neighbours in my hotel as the people on my floor make a ruckus at night. I don't know what goes on in the halls of this hotel that I'm staying between 3 and 5AM but either there screaming in the hallway, talking loudly or even throwing up. I got here on Friday, the room next to me played the TV so loud that I reported it to security at around 10PM. Then at 3AM, he goes to the hallway to scream on his phone then bang on my door for ratting him out. I really didn't care too much. That's not to say that I'm staying at a shady hotel, I'm staying at a new Holiday Inn. There are signs posted every to keep quiet between 10PM and 8AM. I never had issues at any hotels except for this one. As much as I enjoyed myself here in Winnipeg, I'm just glad to go home and finally get some actual sleep. 

Another WTF moment. I accidentally brought a lighter with me to Winnipeg. What's weird about that? Somehow when going through airport security in Calgary, they didn't catch that. I went through in five minutes without any issues.  I'm not sure if I'm going to take my chances here.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On October 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

Yeah the 301. That's the one! I still don't understand what makes them supposedly of a higher-fidelity than some consumer tables. I think Garrard made a transcription table or really high-end consumer table that had a headshell that would dynamically change its angle when the arm progressed closer to the spindle. That's the only real advantage I can think of. It's like those $25,000 monstrosities with like a tonearm in each corner a million decks, platters that look like something out of the Flintstones (12+ inches thick) etc. I have no doubt those sound better than consumer turntables but is the difference worth something that literally looks like the centre console of the pre-6th Doctor TARDIS? ? I don't really like the way pre-1968 or so turntables look. With those sort of "art deco" tonearms and all the tackyness. I like the industrial look of those CEC made stuff. S-shaped arm, wood grain plinth, that "Eurostile" font, etc.

This was sometime in 2008 or maybe early 2009 so it'd probably be pretty easy to track down the issue of "The Absolute Sound" this was in.  There was a bizzare looking turntable on the cover and the tag line was, "Could this be the world's finest record player?"  The cover worked.  I was browsing the local Indigo store when I saw this and I picked it up and flipped through it and one of the letters to the editor in the front of the magazine was complaining that they never review affordable gear with a pretty strongly written rebuttal.  Now I was intrigued, since it's possible they might have reviewed a high performing expensive but still within reach of affordability turntable there on the cover.  The description was actually quite interesting to me.  The platter and arm both ran on air bearings and neither would move unless the machine was pumped up and it had an outboard air compressor you had to have installed somewhere far away from your listening room so you wouldn't hear it and the company that made this monster of a machine would install it on site for you.  Between the description of the pneumatic system and the servo system, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading the specs on an Ampex 2" VTR except you don't play records at 14,400 RPM (and that is a beautiful piece of machinery to see in action if you ever get the chance but the only one left in Toronto that I know of is a VR1200 at U of T that's complete except for the air compressor).  The list price, no cartridge, was $50,000.  So much for reviewing affordable equipment.

On October 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

I think the main article for ripping 78s on that site is geared towards those who are playing these with a MM cartridge because it wants you to strip the RIAA curve applied by your preamp and then apply a custom one in Audacity. The only thing I don't like about the ceramics is the sheer output voltage. They're too loud. I read online that you can put either two 10,000 or 100,000k resistors (i forget) or 2 1pf (i think) ceramic caps to lower the output and increase the bass but that never worked for me either. Does that sound right to you?

You can use two resistors to make a voltage divider network and pick off the signal in between them at a reduced level.  The capacitors would be used to form a filter network in conjunction with the resistors to shape the frequency response and pull down the treble a bit, giving a bit of a bass boost.  You could come up with a bunch of different sets of values for the components to get to the same end results but want to avoid excessive loading on the cartridge in doing so, so large values like in the high tens and hundreds of kohms sounds about right.

On October 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

I wish I had a stack of Popular Mechanics issues from the 50s. I once had a scan of one that had a diagram for how to build your own ALL TUBE tremolo box. I have been a HUGE fan of 50s tremolo sound in the guitars back then because it was a much fuller and deeper sound. It sounded more natural and seemed to have a very low noise floor. You've definitely opened my eyes some at the level of tech they actually did have back then. That preamp is no exception. "rumble" and "click" filters?!? I wonder how those worked. I would love to hear that in action because all I am used to is digital click removal which leaves you with that nasty robotic sound. And switches for mono and stereo records looks interesting. Impressive machine. I am sure tubes for that are easy to find as well. Good luck on the project. I can understand wanting as clean a sound as possible. Me, I want all the tube dirtiness. LOL

The rumble and click filters were actually pretty basic filters that would lop off the very bottom end of the bass to try and knock down turntable rumble.  That one isn't all that invasive except it does lower your bass a little bit.  The click filter, that one's pretty nasty.  It rolls off highs starting at about 8 kHz and that one has a nasty effect on music stripping out a lot of the highs pretty severely.  The trouble with applying filters to this sort of thing is that they knock down the energy content of the frequency ranges they cover indiscriminately with no regard to whether it's music content or noise.  So, the rumble will attenuate bearing noise or idler wheel noise no problem but it'll also knock down low organ notes or bass as well.  The scratch filter does take the edge off of scratches but it can't do much more than that but the whole time it's on, it's stripping out all the high frequency content in the music.

I just thought of something interesting, it would be fun to play a record through the 130 and feed one of the outputs into a spectrum analyzer clean, then play the same cut again with the rumble, go again with the scratch, then go a fourth time with both in place and grab a few snapshots and see what the energy vs. frequency distribution looks like.  Or, find a test record with a frequency sweep on it and get a more calibrated idea of what the filters are doing.

On October 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

I think I lost some hearing going to shows in my 20s and playing music. LOL. I still have decent ears and they are more picky now but my budget (or lack thereof) doesn't give me enough financial latitude to experiment. LOL. I am satisfied with my setup now because all of my tables are hooked into my computer so I can rip with a few pushes of a couple buttons. I need to replace my cables however and I need to buy a stereo preamp for one of my tables because the cable from that to one of my receivers is too long and I have slammed face first into another phenomenon I have to worry about with vinyl playback: loading. ? So now I have to worry about the resistance in the cables I get. Ain't it cheaper to not have any hobbies?

Hearing loss as you age is pretty much inevitable.  Mine isn't as good as it used to be but it's still pretty good.  I had to do some business for a couple of days at a small strip plaza on Islington last week and they had an ultrasonic rodent or teenager (they do sell such things!) repeller system installed along the front of the place that had me running to and from the car, to and from the coffee shop, to and from the stairs to go to the second floor, and my eyes watering the whole time I heard this thing so I guess my hearing's holding up ok.  Loading.  Oh yes, that's a fun ball of wax.  Actually, there's an application notes type publication the size of a small paperback book that Audio Precision put out back in the early 90s where there's a quote attributed to an engineer from CBS about the difference between transducer gain and "schoolboy gain".  That's loading in a nutshell, how do the source and load impedances interact to load down your transducer and change the system response.  If you start collecting quadraphonic records, you're going to have to worry a lot about cable capacitance as well as resistance!  That's the difference between the Dual 1229 and 1229Q if you ever encounter those turntables.  As a general rule of thumb, if you have a high output impedance source device like a phono cartridge or an electric guitar pickup, you want to get that into a high impedance buffer at a minimum ASAP if you can't get to the input stage of your downstream device without a long cable run.  Loading can also be a serious problem with interfacing a piece of tube gear with solid state.  If you look at the diagrams for those Scott preamps, the final stage right before the output is a voltage amplifier and that's a high output impedance stage.  Driving a solid state power amp with one of those can be dicey depending on what the input impedance on the amplifier looks like; solid state circuits, especially when bipolar junction transistors are used, can be very low impedance depending on the values of the resistors that got used in the signal path and pull down the output from the tube voltage amplifier.  To do that, you need a low impedance output circuit that can source some hefty current into a low impedance load and that would've meant a cathode follower stage at the end of the signal chain in the preamp.

On October 18, 2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

First jukebox I ever saw was one of those small ones they put next to each table in one of those classic 50s diners which was the kind I saw it in. I didn't get to listen to it and have no idea how those worked. Do those use records as well being so small? I never seen a real jukebox in action.* Just those jackass CD ones or digital although I am glad I never had the misfortune to see one with a debit card scanner. LOL. It's a pretty complex mechanism. Built like a swiss watch. Those used Sonotone cartridges too. But I can always tell when I buy used 45s if they came from jukeboxes because usually the labels would be pristine but the grooves completely trashed and grey. Also if it's one of those 2 -sided number 1 "gold series" or "hit series" discs they started spewing out in the late 60s and 70s. All these cool gadgets and tech, they really were in the stone age back then, weren't they? NOT?

*The closest was the jukebox band on Shining Time Station?

 

Ah, those things at the side of each table in a diner are wall boxes!  Really, what those are, are remote controls for a full blown jukebox elsehwere so there's nothing in there that stores or plays music.  Typically what you'd see is a jukebox somewhere in the restaurant plus wall boxes at the tables and you could drop a coin in and make your selections either way.  The selector mechanism in the jukeboxes that were compatible with a wallbox system would be solenoid actuated instead of directly mechanically controlled by the pushbuttons on the face of the machine so that it could be activated by any wallbox wired up to the system, and the jukebox would feed output on to a PA system style audio buss back to the speakers in each wallbox.  Actually, one diner near me still has wallboxes in one part of the restaurant as a display only and the jukebox itself is in the basement in a hallway near the washrooms but it's disconnected and they've got the speaker lines hooked up to a home theatre receiver.

16 hours ago, Greatcoinz said:

A couple WTF/FML moments. 

I basically got no rest on my vacation as the guests / neighbours in my hotel as the people on my floor make a ruckus at night. I don't know what goes on in the halls of this hotel that I'm staying between 3 and 5AM but either there screaming in the hallway, talking loudly or even throwing up. I got here on Friday, the room next to me played the TV so loud that I reported it to security at around 10PM. Then at 3AM, he goes to the hallway to scream on his phone then bang on my door for ratting him out. I really didn't care too much. That's not to say that I'm staying at a shady hotel, I'm staying at a new Holiday Inn. There are signs posted every to keep quiet between 10PM and 8AM. I never had issues at any hotels except for this one. As much as I enjoyed myself here in Winnipeg, I'm just glad to go home and finally get some actual sleep. 

Another WTF moment. I accidentally brought a lighter with me to Winnipeg. What's weird about that? Somehow when going through airport security in Calgary, they didn't catch that. I went through in five minutes without any issues.  I'm not sure if I'm going to take my chances here.   

Good grief.  Some people don't know how to behave in public.  Honestly, when I was a kid, my parents drilled it into me to be as quiet as possible when you're staying in a hotel.  I'm sorry you needed a vacation from your vacation.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

Good grief.  Some people don't know how to behave in public.  Honestly, when I was a kid, my parents drilled it into me to be as quiet as possible when you're staying in a hotel.  I'm sorry you needed a vacation from your vacation.

You tell me. I flew back home last and got up at 5AM for work. Despite only getting 5 or 6 Hours of sleep, its more than what I got in a night in Winnipeg. I was lucky to get 3 Hours at most of sleep before getting awoken up by some noise in the hallway. 

Also to update you regarding smuggling a lighter on a plane, I tossed it before arriving at the airport. I also brought a knife with me and declared it through Calgary and had no issue. But went through Winnipeg and got into trouble as the knife I brought was Illegal to bring on flights. Even being below 6cm, as it was box-cutter type of knife. They took down my Information, padded me down and took away my knife. Since I declared it, I won't face any consequences. Apparantly the only knives I can bring on is pocket knives that have irreplaceable blades. What the hell is the difference? A knife is a knife. Whether the blades are replaceable or not, they can do the exact damage either way. (Not saying I condone violence, I only brought it since I was traveling alone and wanted to protect myself) I personally find airport security a joke with some of the regulations, questions, random screenings and etc. And that was a George Carlin reference!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Greatcoinz said:

You tell me. I flew back home last and got up at 5AM for work. Despite only getting 5 or 6 Hours of sleep, its more than what I got in a night in Winnipeg. I was lucky to get 3 Hours at most of sleep before getting awoken up by some noise in the hallway. 

Also to update you regarding smuggling a lighter on a plane, I tossed it before arriving at the airport. I also brought a knife with me and declared it through Calgary and had no issue. But went through Winnipeg and got into trouble as the knife I brought was Illegal to bring on flights. Even being below 6cm, as it was box-cutter type of knife. They took down my Information, padded me down and took away my knife. Since I declared it, I won't face any consequences. Apparantly the only knives I can bring on is pocket knives that have irreplaceable blades. What the hell is the difference? A knife is a knife. Whether the blades are replaceable or not, they can do the exact damage either way. (Not saying I condone violence, I only brought it since I was traveling alone and wanted to protect myself) I personally find airport security a joke with some of the regulations, questions, random screenings and etc. And that was a George Carlin reference!

Cripes!  The other thing that my parents drilled into me when I was young was how to behave in a restaurant and that’s another one that appears to be sadly lacking these days.

 

On 10/18/2019 at 2:54 PM, Downsview 108 said:

I need to replace my cables however and I need to buy a stereo preamp for one of my tables because the cable from that to one of my receivers is too long and I have slammed face first into another phenomenon I have to worry about with vinyl playback: loading. ? So now I have to worry about the resistance in the cables I get. Ain't it cheaper to not have any hobbies?

Tell me about it.  Hobbies are great but they can get so expensive.  My memory’s going.  I flipped open that Audio Precision book and the quote about transducer gain and schoolboy gain was actually attributed to an ABC engineer.  I could’ve sworn it was someone from CBS but I was totally mistaken on that:

CDFC8163-3FAB-4256-9FEC-A066CFCE9666.thumb.jpeg.b885ca9780c999c3f790d5587abcdfb7.jpeg4A2D6B38-D990-4521-9748-95417C798B4E.thumb.jpeg.37cebf4a5fda08ff128b48c6e44a2777.jpeg

If you get into audio in a major, major way, the Audio Cyclopedia by Howard Tremaine is a great reference.  It’ll cure insomnia but if you need to look up something, it’s an excellent resource.  That one’s the second edition.  The only pitfall is that the second edition was where it ended because Howard Tremaine passed away so it covers absolutely everything through op-amps but stops there.  Nobody picked up the mantle to continue it so it doesn’t cover anything digital or switch mode amplifiers:

6C665303-F6AE-46E4-A92F-DCC4C3C00C61.thumb.jpeg.f1b4acf9748f933f7afd8b3ad42b8ae1.jpeg

The book on top is one that’ll give Steve Munro, the TTS, and HCRR all nightmares for WEEKS!

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/20/2019 at 11:55 PM, Wayside Observer said:

This was sometime in 2008 or maybe early 2009 so it'd probably be pretty easy to track down the issue of "The Absolute Sound" this was in.  There was a bizzare looking turntable on the cover and the tag line was, "Could this be the world's finest record player?"  The cover worked.  I was browsing the local Indigo store when I saw this and I picked it up and flipped through it and one of the letters to the editor in the front of the magazine was complaining that they never review affordable gear with a pretty strongly written rebuttal.  Now I was intrigued, since it's possible they might have reviewed a high performing expensive but still within reach of affordability turntable there on the cover.  The description was actually quite interesting to me.  The platter and arm both ran on air bearings and neither would move unless the machine was pumped up and it had an outboard air compressor you had to have installed somewhere far away from your listening room so you wouldn't hear it and the company that made this monster of a machine would install it on site for you.  Between the description of the pneumatic system and the servo system, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading the specs on an Ampex 2" VTR except you don't play records at 14,400 RPM (and that is a beautiful piece of machinery to see in action if you ever get the chance but the only one left in Toronto that I know of is a VR1200 at U of T that's complete except for the air compressor).  The list price, no cartridge, was $50,000.  So much for reviewing affordable equipment.

You can use two resistors to make a voltage divider network and pick off the signal in between them at a reduced level.  The capacitors would be used to form a filter network in conjunction with the resistors to shape the frequency response and pull down the treble a bit, giving a bit of a bass boost.  You could come up with a bunch of different sets of values for the components to get to the same end results but want to avoid excessive loading on the cartridge in doing so, so large values like in the high tens and hundreds of kohms sounds about right.

The rumble and click filters were actually pretty basic filters that would lop off the very bottom end of the bass to try and knock down turntable rumble.  That one isn't all that invasive except it does lower your bass a little bit.  The click filter, that one's pretty nasty.  It rolls off highs starting at about 8 kHz and that one has a nasty effect on music stripping out a lot of the highs pretty severely.  The trouble with applying filters to this sort of thing is that they knock down the energy content of the frequency ranges they cover indiscriminately with no regard to whether it's music content or noise.  So, the rumble will attenuate bearing noise or idler wheel noise no problem but it'll also knock down low organ notes or bass as well.  The scratch filter does take the edge off of scratches but it can't do much more than that but the whole time it's on, it's stripping out all the high frequency content in the music.

I just thought of something interesting, it would be fun to play a record through the 130 and feed one of the outputs into a spectrum analyzer clean, then play the same cut again with the rumble, go again with the scratch, then go a fourth time with both in place and grab a few snapshots and see what the energy vs. frequency distribution looks like.  Or, find a test record with a frequency sweep on it and get a more calibrated idea of what the filters are doing.

Hearing loss as you age is pretty much inevitable.  Mine isn't as good as it used to be but it's still pretty good.  I had to do some business for a couple of days at a small strip plaza on Islington last week and they had an ultrasonic rodent or teenager (they do sell such things!) repeller system installed along the front of the place that had me running to and from the car, to and from the coffee shop, to and from the stairs to go to the second floor, and my eyes watering the whole time I heard this thing so I guess my hearing's holding up ok.  Loading.  Oh yes, that's a fun ball of wax.  Actually, there's an application notes type publication the size of a small paperback book that Audio Precision put out back in the early 90s where there's a quote attributed to an engineer from CBS about the difference between transducer gain and "schoolboy gain".  That's loading in a nutshell, how do the source and load impedances interact to load down your transducer and change the system response.  If you start collecting quadraphonic records, you're going to have to worry a lot about cable capacitance as well as resistance!  That's the difference between the Dual 1229 and 1229Q if you ever encounter those turntables.  As a general rule of thumb, if you have a high output impedance source device like a phono cartridge or an electric guitar pickup, you want to get that into a high impedance buffer at a minimum ASAP if you can't get to the input stage of your downstream device without a long cable run.  Loading can also be a serious problem with interfacing a piece of tube gear with solid state.  If you look at the diagrams for those Scott preamps, the final stage right before the output is a voltage amplifier and that's a high output impedance stage.  Driving a solid state power amp with one of those can be dicey depending on what the input impedance on the amplifier looks like; solid state circuits, especially when bipolar junction transistors are used, can be very low impedance depending on the values of the resistors that got used in the signal path and pull down the output from the tube voltage amplifier.  To do that, you need a low impedance output circuit that can source some hefty current into a low impedance load and that would've meant a cathode follower stage at the end of the signal chain in the preamp.

Ah, those things at the side of each table in a diner are wall boxes!  Really, what those are, are remote controls for a full blown jukebox elsehwere so there's nothing in there that stores or plays music.  Typically what you'd see is a jukebox somewhere in the restaurant plus wall boxes at the tables and you could drop a coin in and make your selections either way.  The selector mechanism in the jukeboxes that were compatible with a wallbox system would be solenoid actuated instead of directly mechanically controlled by the pushbuttons on the face of the machine so that it could be activated by any wallbox wired up to the system, and the jukebox would feed output on to a PA system style audio buss back to the speakers in each wallbox.  Actually, one diner near me still has wallboxes in one part of the restaurant as a display only and the jukebox itself is in the basement in a hallway near the washrooms but it's disconnected and they've got the speaker lines hooked up to a home theatre receiver.

Good grief.  Some people don't know how to behave in public.  Honestly, when I was a kid, my parents drilled it into me to be as quiet as possible when you're staying in a hotel.  I'm sorry you needed a vacation from your vacation.

I didn't know Ampex made video equipment and knew even less it records at 14,000RPM? LMAO how many IPS is that? No wonder some of the video from those days rivals DV. I think I may have seen that turntable you're talking about. The thing is, whenever you get a reviewer reviewing consumer grade stuff, they always give the impression that "hey, this is a great (x)...for the price". So you never really know what you're getting until you try it yourself. It's even harder if it's being reviewed by someone with access to all the high end stuff. Personally, my current collection (mostly finds from record lots and thrift stores) does not warrant that I buy the best available. There's just too many variables to upgrade. I can understand if I were one of those crazy collectors who spend thousands on one record or I was someone who made my own comps. Ever since I busted a couple Shure needles (I have tremendously bad luck with Shure cartridges) I have been wary of spending a lot on my setup. Right now, used CEC or other Japanese made tables from the 70s coupled with Audio Technica cartridges is enough for me. And supplies are plentiful.

Thanks for that. I know I had something wrong because I was using either the resistors of the caps. Not at the same time. I will try your experiment again just to see if I can't eek out a bit more bass. If I can avoid getting another preamp I'd like to do that.

So those rumble and click filters are just low/high pass filters? Good to know. I wish there was an easier and better sounding way to remove large pops. I can pretty much do that with the knobs on my receiver anyway. Still impressive that they'd have that on the machine though. Just out of curiousity, How many phono inputs are on the 130? And what kind of outputs are there? I'm wondering if that unit can be used as a one size fits all solution to having multiple receivers.

Ultrasonic teenager repellant system? ? Beats the classical music they had on the subway I guess. I don't have any quadraphonic records (nor will I ever) so I guess I am safe. Does the 130 have a line level output I can plug into either a receiver's line in or a computer to copy? Does the same principle apply with those little tube preamps they sell on Amazon?

Wall boxes. Never heard that term ever. I didn't know they were sort of "remotes". So with that system, can one person play only one thing at a time?

 

 

On 10/21/2019 at 4:27 PM, Wayside Observer said:

Cripes!  The other thing that my parents drilled into me when I was young was how to behave in a restaurant and that’s another one that appears to be sadly lacking these days.

 

Tell me about it.  Hobbies are great but they can get so expensive.  My memory’s going.  I flipped open that Audio Precision book and the quote about transducer gain and schoolboy gain was actually attributed to an ABC engineer.  I could’ve sworn it was someone from CBS but I was totally mistaken on that:

CDFC8163-3FAB-4256-9FEC-A066CFCE9666.thumb.jpeg.b885ca9780c999c3f790d5587abcdfb7.jpeg4A2D6B38-D990-4521-9748-95417C798B4E.thumb.jpeg.37cebf4a5fda08ff128b48c6e44a2777.jpeg

If you get into audio in a major, major way, the Audio Cyclopedia by Howard Tremaine is a great reference.  It’ll cure insomnia but if you need to look up something, it’s an excellent resource.  That one’s the second edition.  The only pitfall is that the second edition was where it ended because Howard Tremaine passed away so it covers absolutely everything through op-amps but stops there.  Nobody picked up the mantle to continue it so it doesn’t cover anything digital or switch mode amplifiers:

6C665303-F6AE-46E4-A92F-DCC4C3C00C61.thumb.jpeg.f1b4acf9748f933f7afd8b3ad42b8ae1.jpeg

The book on top is one that’ll give Steve Munro, the TTS, and HCRR all nightmares for WEEKS!

LOL nice. I'll keep an eye out for that book. Looks right up my alley.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

I didn't know Ampex made video equipment and knew even less it records at 14,000RPM? LMAO how many IPS is that? No wonder some of the video from those days rivals DV.

It isn't widely known but Ampex invented practical video recording and built videotape recorders for decades.  How many IPS?  Tape speed was just like with audio recorders, 15 IPS was normal and 7.5 IPS was possible if you had a head drum with 5 mil (5 one thousandths of an inch) heads.  It was the video head drum that ran on an air bearing and spun at 14,400 RPM because each time a head passed across the tape, it only covered 14 lines of video information.  Getting from 14 lines plus the duplicated area where head switching takes place per head pass to a full video field approximately 1/59.94 of a second is where the 14,400 RPM headwheel speed comes from.  I only briefly worked on these machines and never encountered one set up for 7.5 IPS.  With a well tuned machine during recording and playback and a good signal path and good cameras, video quality could be fantastic but it could also very quickly deteriorate to meh if anything in the chain wasn't peaked up nicely and that high speed head drum does takes its toll on tapes so those can be iffy if they've been played a lot.  Plus, magnetic tape deteriorates with time too so all told from a 2019 perspective, getting good video off those tapes has to be a lot harder now even with a good working machine these days.

I hadn't thought much about this stuff in a long, long time until late summer until this happened.  One of the tricks I learned and forgot about until August a couple of days before the ALRV charter was when one of the lights in the control panel burns out, put a scratch tape on the machine and get the machine into a state that the light involved is normally off.  E.g. if the stop button light goes out, thread up a tape and hit play so the stop button isn't supposed to be lit up.  Then, you can change the bulb without the remains of the filament shifting and shorting out which blows up the driver transistor for that lamp.  I had a bunch of Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys guys over for a BBQ at my place and sure enough, after dark when I switched on the Christmas lights that light up my back yard, one of them went out and I went to change the bulb.  When I unscrewed it, the entire string went dark because it popped the fuse in the string's plug so there I am, changing that on top of the dead bulb...totally took me back...

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

I think I may have seen that turntable you're talking about. The thing is, whenever you get a reviewer reviewing consumer grade stuff, they always give the impression that "hey, this is a great (x)...for the price". So you never really know what you're getting until you try it yourself. It's even harder if it's being reviewed by someone with access to all the high end stuff. Personally, my current collection (mostly finds from record lots and thrift stores) does not warrant that I buy the best available. There's just too many variables to upgrade.

Same here.  I enjoy listening to my records and I enjoy browsing the couple of fleamarkets and used record stores near home and discovering new music but my record collection's nothing to write home about either and certainly doesn't merit any high dollar playback gear, not when there's other things that need to be improved with my living room setup especially with one piece of furniture that's really inconveniently size and shaped which affects its placement with respect to one of the speakers.

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

Thanks for that. I know I had something wrong because I was using either the resistors of the caps. Not at the same time. I will try your experiment again just to see if I can't eek out a bit more bass. If I can avoid getting another preamp I'd like to do that.

If you still have the parts, what are their values?  Knowing that would make it a lot easier to determine what goes where with respect to setting up a voltage divider network with the resistors and one or both capacitors to filter the frequency response a bit.

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

So those rumble and click filters are just low/high pass filters? Good to know. I wish there was an easier and better sounding way to remove large pops. I can pretty much do that with the knobs on my receiver anyway. Still impressive that they'd have that on the machine though. Just out of curiousity, How many phono inputs are on the 130? And what kind of outputs are there? I'm wondering if that unit can be used as a one size fits all solution to having multiple receivers.

Pretty much, which is why they're not the magic bullet everyone with noisy records hoped they'd be.  I never use them because I find the ruble and scratch filters to be more annoying than naturally occurring record noise.  All kinds of companies at various times have tried to make systems that try to detect the fast rise time on a click or pop and then use a delay line of some kind to substitute signal from a moment before the nasty on the disc to try and clean up the clicks and pops and scratches with minimal invasiveness, all to wildly varying degrees of success, but the unfortunate fact is once a record's damaged, it can't be undamaged.  I actually came up with maybe half a dozen ways to visually inspect the impact of the scratch and rumble filters while I was on the train earlier so I guess I have something to play around with just for kicks and giggles if I have spare time at some point.

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

Ultrasonic teenager repellant system? ? Beats the classical music they had on the subway I guess. I don't have any quadraphonic records (nor will I ever) so I guess I am safe. Does the 130 have a line level output I can plug into either a receiver's line in or a computer to copy? Does the same principle apply with those little tube preamps they sell on Amazon?

I don't know what it was intended to repel.  One of my friends had an ultrasonic mouse and rat repelling system in his shed and it did absolutely nothing to keep mice out over the winter.  Some companies make a variation on the theme that's closer to normal audio range that tries to split the age related hearing loss divide between teenagers (loud, high pitched, annoying sound) and adults (tone can't be heard because it's above the audible range for older people) to make it uncomfortable for them in the area this is set up in.

The 130 has a line out but it's high impedance so how well it'll drive a solid state receiver or computer line input comes down to how the input stage on your modern piece of gear is designed.  Worst case, a unity gain buffer between the 130 and your modern device's input would take care of that.  Anything being made these days hopefully has a cathode follower buffer right before the output jack to avoid driving modern solid state inputs but then again, with the way Amazon and eBay etc. sellers can be fly by night, all bets could be off.

6 minutes ago, Downsview 108 said:

Wall boxes. Never heard that term ever. I didn't know they were sort of "remotes". So with that system, can one person play only one thing at a time?

No, everyone can drop a quarter in and get their three choices.  It'll set the pins for each selection regardless of who selected it, where it was selected from, or when it was selected.  There are some catches though which arise from what's practical to do with electromechanical equipment.  If two or more people request the same song most jukeboxes will only play it once rather than however many times over it's been requested, and it won't be done on a first come, first serve basis or the order in which the selections were made, but as the changer mechanism works its way from one end of the machine to the other so it'll be in the order that the records happen to be loaded into slots in the jukebox.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/22/2019 at 7:21 PM, Downsview 108 said:

Wall boxes. Never heard that term ever. I didn't know they were sort of "remotes". So with that system, can one person play only one thing at a time?

I’m waiting for some breakfast right now so I thought I’d grab a few pictures.  Here’s a defunct wall box:

74F2EE01-9FB6-4D4C-BB52-3B6807E20FA5.thumb.jpeg.3377723337263b4df97453df528acb05.jpeg

Here’s the defunct jukebox that used to power the whole system plus about an inch of dust on it and the crappy home theatre receiver pumping one of the 905 Bell Media mush soft rock stations in, instead of the jukebox which lasted apparently long enough for Shania Twain records to be put in.

EB6EE141-78B6-4FF2-9DFE-5EF1BF83D063.thumb.jpeg.2f2f5942bb7acd5a315268fe61a5da36.jpeg

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/22/2019 at 8:34 PM, Wayside Observer said:

It isn't widely known but Ampex invented practical video recording and built videotape recorders for decades.  How many IPS?  Tape speed was just like with audio recorders, 15 IPS was normal and 7.5 IPS was possible if you had a head drum with 5 mil (5 one thousandths of an inch) heads.  It was the video head drum that ran on an air bearing and spun at 14,400 RPM because each time a head passed across the tape, it only covered 14 lines of video information.  Getting from 14 lines plus the duplicated area where head switching takes place per head pass to a full video field approximately 1/59.94 of a second is where the 14,400 RPM headwheel speed comes from.  I only briefly worked on these machines and never encountered one set up for 7.5 IPS.  With a well tuned machine during recording and playback and a good signal path and good cameras, video quality could be fantastic but it could also very quickly deteriorate to meh if anything in the chain wasn't peaked up nicely and that high speed head drum does takes its toll on tapes so those can be iffy if they've been played a lot.  Plus, magnetic tape deteriorates with time too so all told from a 2019 perspective, getting good video off those tapes has to be a lot harder now even with a good working machine these days.

I hadn't thought much about this stuff in a long, long time until late summer until this happened.  One of the tricks I learned and forgot about until August a couple of days before the ALRV charter was when one of the lights in the control panel burns out, put a scratch tape on the machine and get the machine into a state that the light involved is normally off.  E.g. if the stop button light goes out, thread up a tape and hit play so the stop button isn't supposed to be lit up.  Then, you can change the bulb without the remains of the filament shifting and shorting out which blows up the driver transistor for that lamp.  I had a bunch of Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys guys over for a BBQ at my place and sure enough, after dark when I switched on the Christmas lights that light up my back yard, one of them went out and I went to change the bulb.  When I unscrewed it, the entire string went dark because it popped the fuse in the string's plug so there I am, changing that on top of the dead bulb...totally took me back...

Same here.  I enjoy listening to my records and I enjoy browsing the couple of fleamarkets and used record stores near home and discovering new music but my record collection's nothing to write home about either and certainly doesn't merit any high dollar playback gear, not when there's other things that need to be improved with my living room setup especially with one piece of furniture that's really inconveniently size and shaped which affects its placement with respect to one of the speakers.

If you still have the parts, what are their values?  Knowing that would make it a lot easier to determine what goes where with respect to setting up a voltage divider network with the resistors and one or both capacitors to filter the frequency response a bit.

Pretty much, which is why they're not the magic bullet everyone with noisy records hoped they'd be.  I never use them because I find the ruble and scratch filters to be more annoying than naturally occurring record noise.  All kinds of companies at various times have tried to make systems that try to detect the fast rise time on a click or pop and then use a delay line of some kind to substitute signal from a moment before the nasty on the disc to try and clean up the clicks and pops and scratches with minimal invasiveness, all to wildly varying degrees of success, but the unfortunate fact is once a record's damaged, it can't be undamaged.  I actually came up with maybe half a dozen ways to visually inspect the impact of the scratch and rumble filters while I was on the train earlier so I guess I have something to play around with just for kicks and giggles if I have spare time at some point.

I don't know what it was intended to repel.  One of my friends had an ultrasonic mouse and rat repelling system in his shed and it did absolutely nothing to keep mice out over the winter.  Some companies make a variation on the theme that's closer to normal audio range that tries to split the age related hearing loss divide between teenagers (loud, high pitched, annoying sound) and adults (tone can't be heard because it's above the audible range for older people) to make it uncomfortable for them in the area this is set up in.

The 130 has a line out but it's high impedance so how well it'll drive a solid state receiver or computer line input comes down to how the input stage on your modern piece of gear is designed.  Worst case, a unity gain buffer between the 130 and your modern device's input would take care of that.  Anything being made these days hopefully has a cathode follower buffer right before the output jack to avoid driving modern solid state inputs but then again, with the way Amazon and eBay etc. sellers can be fly by night, all bets could be off.

No, everyone can drop a quarter in and get their three choices.  It'll set the pins for each selection regardless of who selected it, where it was selected from, or when it was selected.  There are some catches though which arise from what's practical to do with electromechanical equipment.  If two or more people request the same song most jukeboxes will only play it once rather than however many times over it's been requested, and it won't be done on a first come, first serve basis or the order in which the selections were made, but as the changer mechanism works its way from one end of the machine to the other so it'll be in the order that the records happen to be loaded into slots in the jukebox.

Cool. I mostly associate Ampex with those big tape machines recording studios used. 15IPS video probably looked great. Especially on a 2" tape. It's true it all depends on how tape is stored. And Ampex tape became known in later years (along with many other brands of tape) for the coating shedding off. I once had a reel-to-reel (it was quadraphonic too go figure) and bought something called "Ampex Audio Visual Tape" off ebay for a couple bucks. Saying it was the worst quality tape I ever used was an understatement. Granted it was a sealed, new-old-stock box from the 70s but I also had some sealed SONY tape I believe from the 60s and that stuff was good quality. My band at the time recorded some stuff onto it. Sounded great. I think about videotapes shows like Ed Sullivan who had insane quality video for the time and others and see the value in old school, pre-VHS/Beta analog video tape.  14,400 RPM though. Damn. I can see that burning right through the mylar.

"When I unscrewed it, the entire string went dark because it popped the fuse in the string's plug" huh? What kind of christmas lights? There's a fuse in the mini lights? LOL. I miss those noma lights. Those big beautiful, 100 degree burning, fire hazard lights. LOL

True. I would rather spend what would have been spent on boutique equipment on more records. I do rip vinyl though so I won't go with crappy gear like Crosley. 70s stuff is pretty "audiophile" on its own. One of my tables is the famous Pioneer PL12D. Bought new in 1973 by the previous owner and hadn't been spun since 1981 when I bought it two years ago. I put a new old stock AT450E (the old p mount version) on it that I got dirt cheap off ebay (it is a nude diamond 3x7 stylus. Those cost hundreds) for $35. Put on a couple records from the 80s because they're in pristine shape and I couldn't believe how CD like the sound was. Many time I forgot I was listening to a record and reached for my computer mouse to click onto the next track.

I don't have the parts anymore. I just quickly harvested them from some other junk equipment here just to quickly experiment. I believe I used 2 100k resistors either across the two positive inputs or in series with the positive inputs (i think). When that didn't seem to do anything but quiet the sound down I swapped them for 2 1pf ceramics and that didn't do anything either. I was just looking for a way to squeeze out more bass and found a post on a forum about this mod. I was basically feeling my way through the dark for a lightswitch with this.

True. Once a record is damaged it is permanent. I learned that the hard way when I ruined a couple records when I was a kid LOL thanks to an experiment I saw on Mr. Wizard's World. LOL! I can fix skips (as long as the record is not styrene). A simple toothpick is all you need. Salvaged a lot of records that way. When I was way younger I used to use a sewing needle, a magnifier and a lamp to try to fix skips. Not only did that result in extra gouging due to the needle but there is at least one instance of the lamp being a little too close to the vinyl and the disc transformed accordingly. Still have it. Still kicking myself for slow cooking it.

To be honest. I think a cat is the best thing for mice. Best traps are the classic Victor ones. Those electronic traps SUCK. I can't tell you how many times I would smear peanut butter on them as bait (as per the instructions) only to find the next day that every last drop of it was eaten clean off the device and no dead mouse to be found. I even saw that happen with the old school victor trap. It looked like I never put anything on it at all and the thing was set to be extra-sensitive. We got some radioactive, super freak mice nowadays. Probably GMO mice.

Thanks for that. Maybe I will stick to one of those little tube preamps. I learned long ago how barely interchangeable tube and solid state was when I was looking up how to get a headphone output on a tube amp. Really just a means to reduce long cables tbh.

Interesting. I always though each of those walboxes have their own stack of records inside but the machine looked way too small for that. pretty cool system. Sort of like a jukebox Simplex system. I wish the diner in question were still around. I can still taste the burgers. It was an authentic 50s diner. Complete with stainless steel ice cream dishes. If anyone remembers, it was inside Yorkdale mall and kinda looked like yorkdale station. I think they got rid of it in 1990. It was close to the Dominion on the left hand side as you enter the mall.

14 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

I’m waiting for some breakfast right now so I thought I’d grab a few pictures.  Here’s a defunct wall box:

74F2EE01-9FB6-4D4C-BB52-3B6807E20FA5.thumb.jpeg.3377723337263b4df97453df528acb05.jpeg

Here’s the defunct jukebox that used to power the whole system plus about an inch of dust on it and the crappy home theatre receiver pumping one of the 905 Bell Media mush soft rock stations in, instead of the jukebox which lasted apparently long enough for Shania Twain records to be put in.

EB6EE141-78B6-4FF2-9DFE-5EF1BF83D063.thumb.jpeg.2f2f5942bb7acd5a315268fe61a5da36.jpeg

NICE. That wall box looks older than the one I can remember. The one I remember looked more rounded and had those orange and red buttons. Judging by some of the tracks, looks like most of the content was from around 1985. Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis LMAO. One resort I worked at had a jukebox in storage that looked like the bottom pic and I think had even older selections. Such a waste for such magnificent machines to retire this way.

 

EDIT: I still have the tape LOL. I dunno how well you can see in the 3rd picture but you can clearly see the tape residue from shedding on the leader. Let it be known I only recorded and played back onto this tape ONCE!

20191024_164218.thumb.jpg.89ef12311d4f44d61b6a12cdd6cece89.jpg20191024_164226.thumb.jpg.753436c5f45e0ab6c8ffd9372ba47687.jpg20191024_164252.thumb.jpg.777f73796b25f6c46a364f87a91a9afd.jpg

Edit 2

One more question about those wall boxes. When I pick a song does the sound come out of my own machine, everybody's machine, or a common pa speaker system? If I pick a song and it comes out of my machine, does the next guy who picked a song after me have to wait his turn to hear it on his machine? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Had two WTF moments

First I was TTC 5245 had its door open (it was 4th car on the train) but no one was inside and the controls were not changed

At school had say to me in GEO class say he will stomp on me (I am 2X bigger than he was) then I stand up to show him I am bigger than him then he get a on a table in the middle of class and hits my neck. But I could have headbutt him in his man area.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Tom1122 said:

I don't know how it came to be, but I got a catalog from Samuel Windsor; a company that sells British Menswear addressed to me. I've never heard of the company let alone subscribed to it. 

Be that as it may, the timing is good though.  If you get your order in within the next week, you'll be able to attend the CLRV last run in style.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Wayside Observer said:

Be that as it may, the timing is good though.  If you get your order in within the next week, you'll be able to attend the CLRV last run in style.

No thanks. I'd rather not risk new clothes getting dirty and I'm not big on getting dressed up unless it's a special human occasion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Tom1122 said:

I don't know how it came to be, but I got a catalog from Samuel Windsor; a company that sells British Menswear addressed to me. I've never heard of the company let alone subscribed to it. 

Be glad it was only that. I once got a Scientology magazine in the mail.

  • Haha 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...