Radioeng2

I would assume that yours is based on the AudioKarma plans. Those were designed to be able to make the thing from just a single 4X8 sheet of ply or your choice. Those plans found here.... http://audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=337891 For a friend, I built one out of the Lowe's birch ply. I just let the edges show but finished a lot like yours. I did cheat and use a little extra for a base to cover wheels. It seemed to turn out ok. Pretty good record rack for a guy that has the room. And reasonable in price! Mark

When I have time, I need to read the whole thing! But, when they got to the part about the radio automation "shuffling" the play list, they couldn't be more wrong. No automation system I've ever been associated with ever had a "shuffle" mode! No professional station is turning their product over to shuffle of Windows Media Player! Actually, a live human being spends hours a day in most cases, carefully sweating over the details of what the "mix" of songs is going to be. They take into account the individual market research, that this article comes off so critical of, to flavor the mix to demands of the individual market and not just blanketly play the national sales leaders or national sales success story of the past for older formats. The programmers work very hard at every element played to try to make it fit the mold of that particular stations image. Whatever that is. These guys are very in touch with what their local callers ask for to! If you didn't have at least some stations play a "format" then you'd find yourself never liking a station for more than an occasional song. I'd never defend everything ever station has ever done programming wise. I'm only commenting on how I've seen it done for over 30 years. And I've happened to have been in the door of more stations than most other people that work daily in this business. I totally agree the "produced" music lacks something! That's why I listen to what I do at home! And it ain't that stuff! It's part of what makes live music and recordings of live music, so much more fun....the realness!! Mark PS...oh and the Google reference is out of date. They sold out of the business a while back. They were only involved for a couple of short years thinking they could somehow sell station time in combo with their internet ads.

Nikoli Tesla: Man Out Of Time by Margaret Cheney. The tales are so interesting...especially when you have an interest in electronics! I was so inspired from reading about his extreme inventiveness. And learned a whole new side to Edison and the beginning of electrical distribution and even the story behind the electric chair and why it was even invented! Mark

That is a problem to figure out! I just did some organizing and cut down some on the number of seperated CD's. I did have a seperate section for several different labels. I still have my Reference Recordings CD's seperate but several that were all Jazz, I just went ahead and put them in with the rest of the Jazz in alphabetical order by artist. But I still have Rock/Pop in a section, Country in a section and Jazz in a section. But I also added a segment to both LP's and CD's...Dead People! This is in 'honor' of one of the guys that says he only listens to dead people...meaning way older music like from the 40's and 50's. So I put the older stuff in a section and actually made a label for the LP shelf that said "Dead People". Here is what my music storage looks like. The shot cuts off one identical CD rack to the right of the right most one. 45's in the top rows above the LP's. Jazz in the shorter DIY CD rack. The right rack and the one not shown I picked up recently at Best Buy. Should have probably build a entire new set myself, but didn't want to take the time. Mark

Hi Frankie! Yup, I sure missed out not being able to make it and hated it something awful! I sure missed seeing all you guys! Events just transpired to prevent going. Sometimes life gets in the way of the fun stuff. We'd done a long anticipated Alaskan cruise (), had extra expenses this year and so on. Down to the last minute, I was still hoping to be able to slip over for a day...or two...but even that wasn't able to happen. Sounded like it was the usual good times! I've been playing audio plenty. I'm just about to complete the beauty stage of a full-range driver speaker project, a Western Electric based pre-amp project and gathering parts for another tube amplifier build. I hosted a Zu Audio show at my house just a couple of weeks ago too. That was a really good get together and heck of a lot of fun. Anytime you can get a bunch of audiophools together, we seem to manage to have fun in some kind of nerdy way!! And I will hope to be able to make it over to CF next year and catch up with you and all the guys! Those kind of deals are such fun and being able to make friends at those events is really neat! Thanks for the shout out!! Be good and watch out for those speeding Prius!! Mark

Actually, I'm not sure you'd call them LP's at all, but you get the idea! Have you ever heard the "playing the stacks of wax" thing? I've heard that a million times and never gave too much thought to it, though I knew it had to do with the process. These video's show a bunch of really interesting stuff about the manufacturing process they used at this point in time! Really interesting to a technology geek like me!! Part 1 -RCA Victor records manufacturing process 1942 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwe-Mt99Dw&feature=related Part 2 - RCA Victor records manufacturing process 1042 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxhiUgK5gzs&feature=related Hope somebody else enjoys this as much as I did! Mark

Why not jump off the digi format of the month club and the constant converting and worrying if it will convert. Just store it as the total real music. I wouldn't dream today of anything but Wave files. I want ALL the music!! Drive space is cheap. I can even load up my wifes Ipod with Waves. You can set here every night, going from forum to forum watching people wrangle around with the format issue and reburning, relabeling and so on...and on....and on.... Just jump off and do it right! I wantta listen to the music! Mark

I started to think I have maybe approaching a thousand LP's, but then I remember that last summer I ran into a huge record shop closeout while home on vacation in KC. I bought a hundred exactly at a $1 each and it's stack wasn't that big versus what's on the shelfs. So I must surely top a 1000 then. Several years ago, I burned most of my smooth jazz onto hard drive and that was right at 600 different CD's. I must have had another 100 I didn't do and I'm sure I've added a couple hundred more since. My wife always says, "don't 'cha have enough yet?" And I'd say I have as many more in other genre's and then a bunch of specific broadcast collection ones that have a individual singles instead of whole album releases. Might be approaching a 2000 total. And I've also got a pretty big batch of 45's. Mostly 80's pop. Maybe 500 or so. They sure are fun to once and a while go through! A prize I've hung onto for a long time is the original pressings for broadcast of the LP's sent to stations to air the King Biscuit Flower Hour. If you don't remember that show, it was a several hour live recorded show that usually aired on a weekend night on rock stations. Must have a couple dozen or so of which one of my favorites is Jethro Tull. Sometimes wonder what the wife will do with all this stuff some day!! Mark

It should also be pointed out how awful most of the typical vinyl was, especially for the last number of years. They took to recycling the vinyl with junk in it. It got thinner and thinner. You could take many records out of the rapper and just have all kinds of clicks and pops to it. Come to think of it, maybe those years were the 70's version of today's iPod crap!! However, if you ever hear the good stuff, well recorded older releases, a lot of it was excellent. Go back into the 60's and before, and it is noticably better quality on average if seems to me. Gosh, put on some of the stuff coming out by the time I was buying in the 70's and it wasn't just the record quality physically, but some of the audio was really thin and terrible too. I still have everything I ever got. One of the worst I have is a REO Speedwagon for being horrible. The pinkish cover with the hotel maid on the front. Good music, just terrible mastering or something! Listening to it'll cause you to have flash backs to friends cars with 6X9's setting on top of the back deck behind the back seat. Driven to ear bleed levels with Kraco power!! If your hung up on hearing clicks and pops and can't focus on the real music, then it can be a problem. But as Steve says, clean it, have a good stylus thats aligned properly on a good table, and when you spin good stuff you can just groove with the music. I've heard many a side when the only time you could hear a pop or click at all was in the pause between cuts. When your doing a get together and looking for fun music and tending to jump around, its usually a relief feeling when good vinyl goes on and some hard sounding CD gets done. I do listen to much more dits and dahs, but thats because of the amount of music I don't have available on those black discs!! Mark

Didn't know you liked 2 Live Crew Steve -- I'm thinking it's more likely that Steve is a closet Pussycat Dolls fan!!

Agreed. I prefer to go with the strengths regardless of age. I've also learned that being newer doesn't automatically make it better either.

Steve, I think that we have to be careful about assigning the masses views onto audio systems. Like that "tubes are about soft clipping and that's all we would listen to them for" kind of thing. Your comment about slow rise and fall times with analog sounds to me like that. Analog audio, when well done is very good and very accurate. While you can certainly say that vinyl is imperfect (all electronic pb could be said to be), it's still closer to real than digital and we hear it that way. Digital is digitally precise, just tough to get as naturally acceptable to the ear. When you take some very well recorded music and listen to it at a higher level and just let yourself be immersed in the sound. Then switch from CD to the same thing on vinyl. You can very quickly feel the ability to relax into the analog playback and tell how more naturally "right" it is. Wynton Marsalis, The Death of Jazz cut from his Majesty of the Blues release is a really good recording that we've used many a time and illustrates this, oh so well! (trivia note...the next cut is a sermon by none other than Obama's shame on America preacher!!) The Death of Jazz is one of the best recorded cuts and extremely musical at the same time I've ever heard. And you can find it on both formats and you don't need an extreme analog rig to hear how the quality thing plays out!

I agree with your comment about tt drive having effect on music in subtle ways. This discussion also makes me think about tape playback, how you can hear tape hiss, but quickly in you mind tune it out and instead focus on the music. Then you may not be even aware of it until the silence between cuts. Or in vinyl how the noise artifacts play on a different plane than the music and then how you can seperate it from the music. Have you noticed these things too?? Mark

I don't know if we have the resolution to see that deep too well, Steve. There are test procedures in the labs that can show things, but I'm not that capable or knowledgable. But even when you can see some level of difference, it's hard to assign whats more responsible to do altering enough to be audible. For instance, if you run a dual trace scope with one trace showing original audio and the other displaying FM broadcast modulated audio, you see an HUGE difference. Enough so, that it's hard to believe they sound as close to the same as they do. So that doesn't tell you as to what is to blame for the difference you can hear. In that case, bandwidth being limited to 15K is certainly part of the visual difference and noticably audible too. But as far as breaking it down to little fine differences instead of gross differences, it would be hard to say intermod products, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis error, L-R generator error...etc... I have a audio band spectrum analyzer. As to whether you can do a lapse time of display which would tell one form of things, I don't know. Haven't had time to play with it much. It will do some X-Y things, which you might be able to do some difference displays that would tell some things. Gross errors are easier to get a handle on. Little fine differences get so much tougher.