Ok, you nearly hooked me! Hal Miller, you are an evil scoundrel.
1. First there was Popular Mechanics featuring Victor Borge describing disassembly/reassembly of his parents Grand Piano room to room (at night) in his childhood home (anyone else remember?-I was there)
2. Then Nigel Tufnel (the referenced Spinal Tap) in Guitar Player suggesting we need change from lettering-to-numbering strings, but numbering-to-lettering frets... (anyone remember?-I was there)
3. Now it's Hal Miller as the next Gene Wilder/Young Frankenstein suggesting a confabulation of (obviously mismatched) tubes can boost our DIGITAL SIGNAL output (way beyond the bandwidth of that can output transformer!!)!!! Let the record show, as a past assistant radio station chief engineer, son of a microwave engineer, stripper! (of salvage electronics-my first guitar amp was class B 6L6 tubes with 1100 V plate voltage) I smelled something (funny) and held my nose right to the final URL on page 65 (while laughing all the way, oh God, that means sleigh bells??) www.mrmag.com/aprilfoolhaha... Congrats Hal! We all needed that laugh after a long, snowy (!!!!) winta!!! Oh yeah, guess I was also there too!!
It is one of the better MR April Fool jokes.
Joe
I agree, I wasn't even slightly 'fooled' but it was a funny read.
Perhaps because I make great sport of the wacko 'audiphiles' who talk about 'warmth' or swear up and down their $10k piece of equipment sounds better than a $5k model when no measurable difference can be recorded by test equipment. Or the ones who buy the exotic wood knobs. Or my latyest favorite, the $10k DIRECTIONAL Ethernet cable that is supposed to improve the sound of your MP3s. No joke, Google it. As an engineer AND as a consumer, I can tell you the $3 HDMI cable I got from Monoprice works every bit as well as the $50 Monster brand one they try to sell you at Best Buy.
--Randy
PS - this is why you should use Digitrax DCC, since it has analog capability, I can dial in all the warmth I want at any time.
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Randy!
Keep in mind, you could be sued for using the word "Monster™®" in your post!
Remember when founder Noel Lee sued Disney, Monster.com, Monster Garage, Monster Energy Drink and anyone else using their trademarked Monster© moniker?
He must have been hanging around with Mike Wolf and got the idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28company%29
Ed
I looked at the article and then went immediately to the front cover to see what month it was. With two feet of snow still on the ground outside, it's hard to keep track sometimes.
Hey, the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier beneath my layout is tubes. Since I model the 1960s, that's perfectly era-appropriate.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Well, it IS only March....
rrinker I agree, I wasn't even slightly 'fooled' but it was a funny read. Perhaps because I make great sport of the wacko 'audiphiles' who talk about 'warmth' or swear up and down their $10k piece of equipment sounds better than a $5k model when no measurable difference can be recorded by test equipment. Or the ones who buy the exotic wood knobs. Or my latyest favorite, the $10k DIRECTIONAL Ethernet cable that is supposed to improve the sound of your MP3s. No joke, Google it. As an engineer AND as a consumer, I can tell you the $3 HDMI cable I got from Monoprice works every bit as well as the $50 Monster brand one they try to sell you at Best Buy. --Randy PS - this is why you should use Digitrax DCC, since it has analog capability, I can dial in all the warmth I want at any time.
There will always be consumers who believe that if it costs more it MUST be better.
My Casio watch keeps time just as accurately as your Rolex. I suspect that the appeal of the Rolex is that it is evidence of the wearer's wealth.
Dave
Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow
Wait, I have a Rolex? Where did I put the darn thing... because I'll sell it and buy more train stuff, since I don't even wear a watch.
Father of LION was a radio buff. Him made radios since him was a kid. Him lived in midtown Manhattan, and required a 2c part from radio row (the place where the World Trade Center once so proudly stood--so much for radio-row, eh). Well Papa LION was not about to spend two nickles to ride the subway to buy a 2c part, so he decied to walk. And he took his sister's little dog with him for the walk. He got the part, and the dog made the walk just fine, but then the dog slept for two days.
Anyway, Dad was a real wiz with thing with tubes. Him could make radios and fix TVs, but this LION never figured out what a tube did, besides get hot and alegedly amplify a signal. Lion also knew that it needed a higher voltage for one part of the tube and a lower voltage for the other part of the tube, and that the Electronics store had a tube testing machine. When transistors were invented, dad stopped working on radios and TVs, he never mastered the idea of a chip. LION never masterd chip or tube.
Some text in the article was a dead giveaway about this circuit where it claimed to "smooth out the signal". What is a DCC signal but what it is sharp and fast alterations in the signal. Smooth it out indeed! The only thing that needs to be smooth out here is the soft fur of the LION!.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
Ah, so the tube amplifier for DCC was the April Fool's joke. I just sort of skimmed it (the image and the first paragraph), said "Meh", and moved on to the cartoon & "The Operators" in back. Didn't register to me as a joke because I didn't it give much thought, in the same manner as I didn't give much thought to that "Tony Koester's switching scales" joke of a few years back (I rarely pay attention to the "Trains of Thought" column anyway).And why would tube amp booster feature in MR give anyone pause anyway on first glance? I've seen way too much Steampunk, Dieselpunk, Retro-Gaming, Modding (one that stands out as it wasn't just drilling holes and adding lights to a Desktop computer - some guy retrofitting an WWI era underwood typewriter as his computer keyboard, but with brass fittings for that extra Victorian touch. OK, maybe the aquarium in a working computer also piqued my curosity) and so on on-line for it to be completely absurb (as opposed to just rather silly - there's plenty of that in the real world). I didn't read the column, but tube amps can serve as boosters of digitial signals if designed correctly, if all you want to do is to boost and shape signal waveforms.
Apparently Model Railroading will soon require it's own equivalent of "Rule 34", if it doesn't already.Brother Elias, there were some electronics stores on Canal Street in Manhattan in the mid/late-1980s, but nothing like the images I've seen of Radio-Row in the early 1960s. They were more a cross between a (then contemporary) Crazy Eddie and Radio Shack/Lafayette - shelves of regular consumer electronics with some bins of components, cables, and chassis in the back. I guess all the Korean & Vietnam War surplus was sold out by then...
LION has been to Canal Street recently, but him was not impressed. He went wither elsewhere.
Because some "tube guys" in the audiophile world can get rather worked up yet incoherent, I read Hal's article with only mild interest and perhaps incomplete attention and thus did not grasp that it was this year's April Fool's Day joke until the very end. That is what made it one of the better ones although way back MR would do nothing to give it away, even at the end, and there would be the inevitable letters to the editor from guys who need a joke explained to them. That includes the famous pressurized basement article from decades ago.
When compact discs were new and some music lovers pointed out, correctly, that their convenience and clarity did not necessarily equal better sounding music, some "expert" declared that running a certain shade of green felt tip pen along the outer edge of a CD could improve the sound to audiophile quality. And learned articles ponderously debated the point .... The same journals published articles that purported to show that playing digitally recorded LPs could cause micro cracks in turntable bearings.
Dave Nelson
I remember those urban legend articles. Wouldn't have included our school stations Rec-o-cut 'cabinet' turntables- 16" platters with 1/3 horse motors. We used to ride them sitting Indian-style (much to my dads anger!) but not at 78 rpm!
(I rarely pay attention to the "Trains of Thought" column anyway).
Too bad. It's one of the best editorials in the mag! You must be one of those roundy roundy modellers.
Dean
30 years 1:1 Canadian Pacific.....now switching in HO
rrinkerI can tell you the $3 HDMI cable I got from Monoprice works every bit as well as the $50 Monster brand one they try to sell you at Best Buy.
Thank you Randy, I always suspected this was snake oil in cable form, now I feel better about by $3.00 purchase.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
http://gearedsteam.blogspot.com/