Raffle win
Has anyone compared the brown and cream insulators aka cable lifters in a proper double blind critical listening session?
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Yes. And the answer is ‘no’.
(ex NR employee)
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But what did your partner opine from the kitchen?
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Nope. What you need is this:
A sustainably sourced artisanal cable support solution.
I might start manufacturing and selling these. 
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Is the paper made from 100 year bonsai pine trees, is the stick made from Himalayan bamboo, and is the band made out of Sri Lankan natural rubber. If so I maybe interested.
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FTFY
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Yes. Except the trees are 200 years old. Working on pricing at the moment. 
Don’t commit too soon. There may be large quantities of Canadian forest products coming onto the market at a very keen price soon (OK, maybe not rubber).
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Was digging through the utterly disorganised mess that is my CD collection, and found this:
It’s mostly not foo, actually some helpful advice, until you get to track 9…
Burn in? Ok, I’m not really convinced about that, but whatever.
Demagnetisation? How the fuck is a freebie cd off the front of a HiFi mag going to demagnetise anything? By what mechanism is it going to achieve this? Is it actually possible under the current understanding of the laws of physics?
Schumann waves 
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In the end this boils down to “What are we trying to demagnetise ?”. The only stuff which gets magnetised is, well, magnetic stuff - basically ferromagnets (various types of iron and alloys involving a few other transition metals and rare earths). If there aren’t any of these in your system then it isn’t going to need demagnetising. I can’t see a need for any of it in a CD transport.
Where the job does sometimes need doing is in tape heads or, if you want to do a quick ‘bulk wipe’ in tapes themselves. It’s conceivable that the cores in things like valve output transformers might become permanently magnetised and I sometimes wonder if that’s a worry in the real world. I once had a customer who had some SUTs which he felt improved with Burn-In and we wondered if the cores might somehow have got magnetised and needed de-magging.
Ferromagnetic materials are made up of tiny magnetic domains, each of which is like a little permanent magnet. If all these little magnets are pointing in random directions then overall their fields will cancel and we call this state ‘unmagnetised’. If we can arrange for all the little magnets to align then we end up with a permanent magnet. The process of demagnetising basically involves ‘shaking’ the domains pretty violently and then gradually reducing the shaking until they’re left randomly orientated. We can apply the shaking using an oscillating electromagnetic field - an electrical audio signal - where we either start out loud and then gradually reduce the volume or we start out at low frequency and then gradually sweep the frequency higher and higher until the domains can’t swing fast enough to follow the oscillation and end up in whatever orientation they happen to stick at.
I have that CD too, so I dug it out and played it. Track 9 starts out with what sounds like white noise with a few random clicks and plops added. Maybe that’s the Burn In ? Then half way through it changes to what sounds like sine waves, swept up and down in volume and also up and down in frequency. Maybe that’s the Demagnetisation ?
One final confusion is that the track is called ‘Burn In & Demagnetisation’ on the cardboard CD sleeve, but the live title displayed in Windows Media Player is ‘Burn-In and Demonstration’. I half expected students shouting “What do we want ? Domain randomisation ! When do we want it ? Now !”.
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@htm_1968’s album of the week.
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Protip: grab a chunk from the broken-up remnants of what we used to call “roads” - (there’s often one right outside your front door!) - and use that: it’s the same stuff and is exactly as effective… 
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It’s a well established fact Bitumen is the answer to most things, from running a man out on a rail to damping horns - *Top secret it is also a potent aphrodisiac
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Is that where the phrase ‘tar baby’ comes from ?
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The gentlemamans response to leaving a brothel?
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The fire and the glue