“chickens one after another, with their anuses well stretched”
Her Twitter trolling of the government has been brilliant.
That in 1989 Pepsi Co had the sixth largest navy fleet in the world.
The Russians sold them 17 submarines, a destroyer, cruiser and frigate as part of a business deal for their product😁
Someone been watching QI on Dave?
Nah, did the rounds at work, probably came from there though.
That there are machines which can tell whether your mechanical watch is running fast or slow by listening to the ticking and comparing the rate to a ‘standard’ rate. And that these go back far enough that there are valve-based ones with plug-in reference crystals for the timing frequency and a paper tape slow/fast recorder.
The Seiko Timegrapher P-61. Picture pinched from here https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/seiko-timegrapher-p-61.875514/.
Want that one
Was just reading something and realised that John Lennon has been dead longer than he was alive, Made me feel rather old.
System had been sounding a tad underwhelming recently, with an occasional-but-regular soft ‘pop’ appearing in the right channel, suggestive of a poorly valve somewhere. There’s only 5 valves now in the entire system - a 6112 miniature dual-triode in the DAC, and four ECC82s in the pre.
The 6112 has had upwards of 20 years use, but is soldered in place and impossible for me to test, so I checked the 82s first. These were NOS RCA 5814As which went in this time last year almost to the day. Testing revealed that three out of four were well-and-truly used up already, and all four were asymmetric: three massively - one side being near-perfect, the other down to less than 30% of acceptable value - not a fail mode I’ve met before.
A year seems a bit bollocks, but they have accrued at least 1,200 - 1,500 hours in that time, and they do differ from typical 12AU7 family in having an If of 0.175A versus 0.300A, so probably that. Why it’s asymmetric is puzzling.
Popped a set of fresh’n’lively ECC82s in there and everything’s back to doing its holographic surround-sound thing again. Thought I was going deaf…
I think the heater current thing may be a red herring - 5814-A’s run with 0.175A if they’re wired for 12.6V and 0.35A if they’re on 6.3V https://frank.pocnet.net/sheets/049/5/5814A.pdf. ECC82s are 0.15A and 0.3A respectively. So there is a difference, but it’s small, and the 5814-A’s run hotter.
Could the asymmetry be due to circuit asymmetry ? If one half of the valve is wired as a low-current high-gain stage whereas the other half is doing some heavy lifting, say in a high-current low-Z cathode follower, then I suppose the emission on the hard-working side could have been burnt away. But 1,200-1,500 hours is a disappointingly short life for a ‘small-signal’ valve. And ECC82s are the beefiest of the ECC8x range. I once built my brother a small practice amp for his guitars which uses an ECC82 as the push-pull power output stage https://ax84.com/archive/ax84.com/media/ax84_m276.gif
Thanks Graeme.
Beyond my own ignorance, the next brick-wall with this pre is the designer & manufacturer does not - and will not - communicate. So you are very likely right about the circuit asymmetry, but unless I pull the thing to bits and map-out the circuit - and then show it to a grownup - I’ll prolly never know. Which is irksome.
The valves came from Langrex, and I do find stuff from them is usually fairly priced but very often short-lived…
I’ll be interested to see how long the spare set last, and if they fail in the same mode. My tester is primitive, but the ones going in all test very well…
About time every country produced these.
CFO of Chevron has just been fired
I have no clue, I have read the article and I still have no clue
I am suprised that Rolex do not have a store in this world.
Selling virtual watches should be right up their street
Pics, or it didn’t happen.