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Doing stuff

[11/29: 3.2 miles; 12/1: 3 miles; 12/3: 7 miles; 12/6: 3.2 miles; 12/10: 8 miles]

My mind is just not into the blog thing these days. Can you tell?

Today I had a good run over in Starkville. And I had a good run last week. My next “race” is probably going to be New Year’s Eve down in Hattiesburg. That is a 12k.

I finished up the Fisher amp and I’ve enjoyed listening to it. I want to build a “buck” transformer box which will lower the line voltage from about 125 to something more like 118. That should help the tubes last longer. Right now I am using a variable transformer to do that but I could use it for other projects if I build this buck box.

My only audio source hooked up to it is the turntable. I have a tuner I should connect. I also have a tape deck which I probably won’t. I have a CD player which I should connect. (When was the last time you burned a CD huh?)

Today I dug out my other box of records and sorted the whole bunch into stacks by genre and made it somewhat organized.

The single most awful record I have is the sound track to 2001 A Space Odyssey. There are a bunch of tracks on there which sound like a swarm of bees. There is some of it in the movie too.

I have a bunch of Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz, some mostly not too good classical renditions, and basic rock and roll stuff.

I remember having some albums when I was a kid and some of them I have now and some I don’t. There were a few classical records I would like to find again or find replacements.

The next piece on the repair bench is an Eico HF-85 stereo tube-based pre-amp. A pre-amp is the thing that takes various inputs. It does some amplification and then sends output which you would run through a power amplifier (or a pair if they were mono amps) to run your speakers. I have a list of capacitors to be replaced. Need to test the tubes. And otherwise just general clean-up.


I’m thinking I would like to put up some kind of ham radio antennas if we get some better weather later this winter. December can be kind of rainy. I would like something for local VHF and something for HF.

I have a remotely connected HF receiver out in the radio station shed which I can use, but it doesn’t have any antenna to speak of. So the only station I can hear is the radio station itself.

One reply on “Doing stuff”

That long weird bee swarm track in 2001 may have been key to the movie but I found it annoying and it could have been condensed quite a bit. Kudos on putting the old fashioned stuff together! Neighbors and I both have hundreds of CDs that we keep but never play (or read the info printed with them) as the music is changed to a different format for home and car – kept in something the size of a thumbnail – and then stream stuff off a service or Youtube instead, anyway. I’ll watch a symphony on the TV or listen to music with fine art screensaver on. The concept of listening to a record while reading the back of the cover is of a bygone era. Like those photos from the 1930’s of families staring at the radio in the living room.

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