Canopyflyer

WARNING: In this post I talk about working on HIGH POWER electrical circuits. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN TRAINED... PERIOD! The capacitor in the final photo is quite easily capable of KILLING YOU if you discharge it through yourself. The amp uses TWO of those in its power supply.

As a hobby, I pick up distressed amplifiers, receivers, and other audio equipment and attempt to bring them back to life. This has netted me some spectacularly great pieces for pennies on the dollar, to outright free.

This photo is a receiver I picked up locally for free. Both main channels were "out". It wasn't the internal amplifier that was the problem though, rather the input board had some dry solder joints. About 3 hours of soldering netted me a perfectly working receiver, which has been in my living room for the past two years working perfectly. If you want photos of when I took it apart, just let me know.

Below is an 8 channel McIntosh MC7108 that I bought off of eBay listed "for parts". While what I paid for it probably doesn't fit the definition for "budget", it was less than a quarter what the amp is worth... So maybe budgetish? It's works great, but I ended up not really fixing it. It actually worked for about a week after I bought it. I thought I had really scored, until it started up with a horrendous buzzing noise that came from inside the cabinet. The protection circuits also kicked in and the amplifier would not power up. Some investigation, again photos are available if you want to see them, revealed that buzzing came from a bad capacitor and relay in the on/off switch circuit. As I didn't care about the on/off switch, I simply bypassed it. Now, if the amp is plugged in, it turns on. I control it using a Zwave outlet (look at the power outlet and you'll see it) and that is what I use to turn on and off the entire stack you see.

Below the McIntosh is a Carver TFM-15B that needed the input pots cleaned and new meter lights. It's not a well built amp, but I've always loved Bob Carver's work and it sounds very warm. Bob was known for is ability to copy the sound of much more expensive amplifiers in his design, which he called "Transfer Function." In the case of the TFM-15B is copies the sound of a Classe amp, although I don't remember which one.

Below that is my wife's old Soundcraftsman amplifier that I put new power supply capacitors in. The caps in that thing are the size of coke cans.. Don't believe me? See the last photo...

At the very bottom is an old HTPC I built many years ago. It is retired as an HTPC and is currently serving as a low power server for my house.

Big honking Capacitor:

Channel 3000 Coverage

As of 1:50pm CST: 5 are dead, 5 more injured and the shooter is dead (not counted in the fatality count)

Absolutely unbelievable that this crap has come to Madison.

Sorry for the bad image quality.

The image is of the top of piston 4 and the cylinder wall in a Toyota 2AR-FE with 162,000 miles. All Toyota recommended maintenance was performed throughout the engine's life. I have the feeling those recommendations were written by marketing people and not the engineers.

Based on what the image shows, the engine needs a short block. Am I correct?

Probably a lot of these posts coming, but here's mine.

Just deleted and exported all of my Reddit comments/posts and exported them (hey, I'm old and can experience bouts of nostalgia.) If Reddit as a company cannot respect their users, then a user I will no longer be. Normally such things don't bother me. For profit companies are always behave as scumbags. We're their product and if the product doesn't behave, then it gets put into its place. That is what I have been seeing the past couple of months.

What finally did it for me, to jump ship, as the way the Admins started treating the Mods. People that actually grew and put in the effort to grow the various subreddits. You know, the people that actually did the work to produce the product Reddit, as a company, is trying to sell. It is not surprising that Reddit's management is so clueless. They want to make money, but the product they are trying to sell... Was built by someone else... FOR FREE. The Reddit execs think they have tons of content advertisers would love, when all they really have is a platform, which OTHER PEOPLE built content on. Advertisers don't care about the platform, there are tons of those out there. The advertisers are only interested in the content that will draw people to look at their ads.

My prediction is that the Reddit IPO will be successful, but as a company it will outlast the IPO about 3 years.

Sometimes things are not about money and it astounds me the number of people that just don't understand that fact.