Saturday's get together was a nice small one, with just seven of us in attendance. I have found over the years that those can be some of the best meets. I followed through with my promise to talk about system tuneup, though it was a pretty brief one. I showed the process of chucking up a cut-in-half Q-tip in a Dremel and using it with some metal polish to clean up tube pins, followed by some DeOxit, which should also be used on every RCA and XLR connection. Tube sockets get brushed with some cool tiny brushes I found on ebay, and treated with DeOxit. All pots and switches should be exercised to clean any schmutz off the contact surfaces. And finally, a thin coating of dielectric grease goes on the prongs of all power cords.
We did quite a bit of listening to the new speakers, the high point of which was some really nice vinyl selections that Josh brought.
At one point PJ was talking through some ideas with Aaron about his next project, which will use some TL-404s.
At the end of the meet I asked the gang to listen to a mix I have been working on, a capture by Jim Laurel from the show that Jacqui Naylor and Art Khu gave in us December. I was surprised to find that the song that had been sounding pretty good using Reaper and my PC laptop sounded really harsh and bright on the Mac Mini music server. This led to some quick sampling of different music players on the Mac. Suffice it to say that there were some striking differences. That was just the first step and I will be doing a lot more listening to the latest generation of players. I was surprised to find that iTunes sounded pretty darned good.
Next month we will be attending the Port Townsend Record Show on March 4th, so that will be our official March meeting. Apparently past shows have been quite successful with a good crowd and lots of vendors. We will have a table there and be demoing a phono rig and headphone amps. Admission is free, and vendor tables are reasonably priced.
http://ptrecordshow.com/