Recent content by Stu_cj

Read the link and was quite surprised that the house and van owner was overweight, had a shaved head, tattoos and was wearing an England shirt ;)

I found Dolby generally worked well provide the cassette was played back on the same deck it was recorded on. Dolby B was more forgiving and Dolby C a bit hit and miss even when using the same deck. The main problem with cassettes was different/poor head alignment on different decks giving poor...

Well I managed to get a chance to look at the board on Friday. Seems that the only problem was the LED resistors which had managed to cause tracking between them and hence a more of less short circuit so once the carbon was cleared off the board (I cut out the charred bit of board afterwards)...

The only damage I'd seen before turning it on without the cover was the overheated resistors which apparently is "normal" according to the poster above. I think the hole in the cap appeared only after this second switch on. I'm guessing as a minimum I'll be needing a new capacitor and new...

Turned on the amp with the cover off to do the DC checks and was met with a fireworks display :o:o:o Sparking followed by 1 inch flames from the previously scorched LED resistors!!!! I'm guessing something isn't right with this minicap board. Wondering what checks I can do without it...

I'll do some DC checks this weekend as I've only got a multimeter at home, maybe borrow a scope from work next week if necessary to check for ripple. There is a burnt smell inside but it's only from the LED resistor area and there is a very slight residue on the inside of the lid that would...

Had a problem with my S100 power amp yesterday after powering up after being away on holiday for two weeks. Got a couple of loud pops from inside the amp (like caps blowing?) about 10 secs after powering it on. Oddly I left it on and there was no obvious burning smell and it still sounded OK if...

And that's a big assumption - my experience is that Spotify premium sounds different from the same CD (when I'm pretty sure there is only one version of said album). I suspect they do so sort of pre-processing before doing their 320kbs rips. The Spotify sound is definitely less open and...

I bought an AVI Lab series integrated a few years back as an experiment, with a view to moving away from Naim - had NAC282 NAP200 at the time. I found it to be almost the polar opposite of the Naim sound. The AVI was very transparent and detailed compared to the Naim , but seemed to have a...

The PSU's for Naim digital products are for powering the analogue circuits, they most definitely make an audible difference/improvement. Whilst I've never measured them I suspect it's due to lower noise, better isolation from the digital section and lower transient impedance. Anyway to get...

Surely the answer here is simple... If you have a DAC with switchable filters and you can hear enough of a difference between them to have a favourite, then by definition all competent DACs do sound different as even the non-switchable ones will have a fixed filter that has been optimised (or...

My vote would go for AR Sound Lunar 4-pin snaic, a bit pricey but very balanced, neutral, detailed and excellent timing, makes the Naim black snaic sound woolly and coloured by comparison.

Nyquist defines the sample rate based on the analogue bandwidth and the bit depth is defined by SNR as stated above - simples :) So for FM radio at say 15kHz audio bandwidth and 60dB SNR, the sample rate would be 30kHz (2x analogue bandwidth) and 10bit depth (6dB per bit), so 300kbps per...

The Naim amp may "work" into 1.8ohm but an ideal power amplifier should double it's power between 8 and 4 ohms and double again down to 2ohms. So when you're running at high power close to the 8ohm limit a non-ideal amplifier will struggle to provide the transient power at the points on the...

He must be more deluded than I thought. Not only a half hearted apology for his cheating but he thinks he's actually young enough to still compete? I read his book a few years ago and whilst it was inspiring to read about him beating cancer (and it even makes you doubt that story now) he did...