I’ve been studying the design of Gibson’s classic P.A.F. humbucker guitar pickup designed by Seth Lover in 1954.
As the design evolved, conductive covers were specified in order to shield them from RFI. Nickel was selected for a very important reason.
What does this have to do with audio connectors, and why is nickel as poor of a choice for audio connectors as it is a good one for pickup covers?
As we all work through adapting to new social norms during this period, I got to thinking about how our expressions are masked by our … masks.
My thoughts shifted to how we pick up visual and aural cues in general, and specifically with respect to music and hi-fi.
One of my diversions involves building and rebuilding Fender style guitars.
This particular project has been ongoing for quite some time, and as I’ll explain, it’s been fraught with pitfalls, much like trying to dial in your hi-fi system.
So you might ask … other than this being a musical instrument, what this has to do with hi-fi.
I was viewing an instructional video on developing guitar soloing techniques, and was struck by the parallels to audio design.
In both pursuits, there’s a danger of trying to impress instead of focusing on fundamentals.
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We’ve all been there … a component upgrade and suddenly, your system sounds “off”.
Sometimes it’s a case of shooting the messenger (the “upgrade”), and this can leave you scratching your head, especially if you’re evaluating the changes through your analog rig.
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Steve Guttenberg interviewed one of my customers (Mark) who is a location sound engineer. My customers are some of the smartest and happiest people.
Mark discusses his job, how it relates to his audio hobby, his system (including his hybrid Galibier turntable), and his generally happy approach to both life and his hi-fi.
But I like it (with apologies to the Rolling Stones) …
We just returned from tuning a customer’s system – a visit which brought up the age-old discussion about the validity of dialing in your system with rock music.
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We sold a customer some late stage prototype, Wind River speaker cables. He loved them, and asked us about our design approach and how we arrived at our current production cables.
So here you go … 15 months’ development summarized in a few paragraphs.
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We’ve been advocates of rigid drive belts for over two decades.
As much as our early experiments are burned into my memory, I never cease to be amazed at how tunable a turntable drive system can be, merely as a result of drive belt selection.
With the release of our new drive system, it was time to return to first principles and review variations of this concept, and (why not?) throw a rubber belt into the mix for sake of comparison.
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In the second post in this series, I alluded to system issues that can fool you into thinking you have a setup problem with your turntable. I’ll cover a few of these situations in this post.
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