Your networking/cloud requirements are way beyond anything I would ever need and impressive to say the least. I wish I had even some of your advanced skills but I don’t. It’s great that you can take some of those skills and add to this forum.
Now to the egg frying… Very cool thermal image. I have been tempted to buying a Fluke thermal camera but just don’t have the need for one. I have a culinary background and have a Fluke IR meter that is mandatory in my kitchen. Great for making sure that oven temperatures are where I want them (think Pizzas) and more importantly surface temperatures where I want them (think frying).
That was just done with a Flir One Pro. The Fluke stuff is excellent, I use their IR thermometers myself (and not just for cooking).
If you’re into photography and cooking, particularly if you care about the science of cooking, you may already be aware of my last boss’s books … Modernist Cuisine, Modernist Bread and the upcoming Modernist Pizza. Though even just the “Photography of Modernist Cuisine” is a fun coffee table book (if you have a big and sturdy enough coffee table).
Nathan has quite the setup for that stuff, including custom-made one-off Nikon glass and a progression of the highest resolution and fastest cameras available. Which made the storage requirements for those projects absolutely huge.
Was a lot of fun, and quite the challenge, getting all the infrastructure to support that stuff setup, and having his test kitchen just down the road at the lab made for interesting excursions (they’d make pizza for lunch for the lab staff).
I went to the Culinary School in Chicago - a 50th birthday gift to myself a couple of decades ago. I already had a good foundation but it was a fun experience and there’s always something new to learn. I was the old man in the class of lots of young farts that thought they were going to get rich doing their stuff in the back of the house.
I am a serious bread baker (flour, water, salt, yeast - that’s it) and funneled those skills into the pizza crust. I have dedicated commercial equipment for pizza/bread baking and commercial mixers but my pizza quantities are so small that I can make the dough in a commercial Robot Coupe. It took a long time to master pizza and I could easily set up shop but that is way, way too much work.
I use a Fluke 568 IR meter for lots of surface temp readings. A purchase I have never regretted.
Food photography is a very specialized area and I have a lot of respect for those that have mastered it.
That’s cool, I almost bought that set as I enjoy the science behind cooking but then realized my wife is too narrow of palate for it to likely be of use. However, this reminded me to look in to it again as there is probably something of interest that I can apply to my meagre kitchen shenanigans. Its amazing how much “wisdom” in cooking really isn’t.
I wish that audiology check-ups were normalized, especially in the audio community. My last test showed the predictable (for 40) loss in high-end perception that I know I need to compensate for when I’m listening to gear or watching a review from someone that can’t drink in New York.
I don’t know that it will ever happen, but having reviewers know (or post) their results would an interesting point for comparison.
I came across a random written review where the gentlemen stated he had no hearing above 9kHz and used it as a disclaimer. Ive seen even more prominent reviewers claim to have a similar high frequency loss. Its really good info to know and I agree would be very helpful for context.
When I put the thing live, “reviewers” and any regular “user” will be able to incorporate their hearing response profile into a linkable “card”, that others can see.
If they don’t go through the hearing profiling step (which has explicit safeguards against being “gamed”) they cannot tag, annotate, submit nor comment on the “sound” of any gear in the system.
I have to say that, after several months of complete headphone-malaise, revisiting electrostatics has been the most fun I’ve had (in “this” hobby) since I first got the RAAL SR1a.
It is also, I think, the fastest ramp-up in my acquisition of gear I can recall since 2015 or so - when I first really got back “into” headphone-centric listening. My SR1a ramp-up was close, but not quite on this level … or at least not this fast.
From initial arrival of the first piece of the electrostatic puzzle on June 16th (an iFi Pro iESL), to today (exactly 10 weeks), the Stax SR-007MK2 and SR-009S, Mjolnir Audio KGSSHV Carbon and HeadAmp BHSE have all joined my stable, with the Audeze CRBN three and half weeks into my pre-order.
That’s quick … even for me.
And it’s been a LOT of fun … with, I expect, a lot more to come …
I don’t think the post is still online, but when Tyll retired from reviewing headphones he had said something to the effect that he was good to 11 kHz in one ear, but only 5 kHz in the other.
That was a part of his decision to stop reviewing this stuff.
I could be wrong on the numbers, but it was something like that.
Thanks for posting that review. I’ve done business with thetubestore but don’t check in on any regular basis.
I have matched quads of the Gold Lion KT77’s and Tung-Sol EL34B’s (which are currently running in my PrimaLune EVO400 with Gold Lion 12AU7’s.
The Tung-Sols in triode mode sound terrific thru my SR1a with interface.
I also have matched quads of the Gold Lion KT88’s and ElectroHarmonix 6550’s.
But I prefer the sound of EL-34’s to 6550’s. Takes me back to my preference for my kit-built Dyna Stereo 70 over my kit-built Dyna Mark III’s.
Just can’t stop hearing deterioration which comes with age. My golden ears are now level ‘Silver’. I can play tracks where I know there should be a delicate cymbal which now is still there but missing the ‘Air’ it used to have. None of that, though, stops me from the enjoyment I have listening to good headphone equipment which is my only way of listening to music.
I suppose my taking a shot at the Armadillo who was destroying my plant beds a few years ago didn’t help much but that’s another story.
I thought the article was interesting and I’m sure there may be some differences between tubes but good audio memory is required for any kind of comparison. I may invest in some lower cost tubes just to see if I can actually hear some type of difference. I’m certainly not going to take 1k out of my pocket to buy some XF2 EL34’s. That’s 10 nice bottles of wine which makes much more sense to me.
Yep, that’s steep. But there are some small signal nine-pin tubes that are priced like that.
Of course then there’s 300B’s. I have yet, over 50 years, to audition an amp using that tube.
300Bs are their own special combination of delight and torment.
They’re my favorite power tube.
They can be had for under $100 per tube (for new production) - but of course that’s not what most people want. And the price ratchets up very quickly from there, even if you do stick with new production tubes.
Genuine WE NOS tubes are well into four-figure sums now, and the most expensive I’ve seen was a matched pair of engraved black-plates from (I think) 1937 that was pushing $20K. Which makes the WE new-production stuff seem like an absolute bargain at $699 per or $1,499 for a matched pair (with a 5 year warranty).
find out how borked my hearing is ha!