@hipsterjefe
Orthogonal means at right angles. So each sheet in the ply is laid with the grain going at right angles to the one below it (and above it). Just like ordinary plywood.
Extreme heat and pressure have profound effects on wood and carbon. Think how coal and diamond are created.
Living wood contains lots of water. As it dries, porous holes are left. Under heat, wood deforms plastically, retaining its heated shape when it cools. Add lots of pressure and the holes are squeezed up, making the material denser.
There is a plantation of pine trees near me that was burnt in 2003. The winds were so strong that every dead tree is bent in the same direction, frozen in time, with the upper trunk parallel to the ground.
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@mylogic
My early series 401 (with the flush mount strobe light) was mounted in the huge ‘SME Plinth System’. The plinth base and depth was so big to accomodate the widest and deepest decks. The cover was of similar height to the plinth and designed to take the tallest 9 and 12’’ arms
I am wondering if the SME plinth I was given with my Garrard 301 is an example of the huge SME Plinth System? At first glance, it has stepped sides, a floating deck and is essentially hollow with just a flimsy hardboard base.
The Garrard 301 does include six springs positioning its motor in space, and each spring is damped by a rubber tube around its middle. Garrard also intended that the 301 should be mounted on a deck which is spring mounted to a plinth. Garrard supplied the springs but not the deck, nor the plinth. My SME plinth has long corner-mounted threaded rods which sit in the springs and can be adjusted by twisting four attached knobs above the deck.
The deck is damped at each corner by soft foam blocks, so lowering the deck increases the damping. Nevertheless, the springing is nowhere near as soft or as "long travel" as an LP12
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@mylogic
Nailed it! You have very precisely described my SME plinth.
My grease-bearing Garrard 301 has the SME 3009 improved fixed head shell tone arm, and the Shure V15 Type III cartridge (hyper elliptical stylus). My dad gave it to me so it has sentimental value
I got given it when I was on a world business trip just after CDs came out, and just after my hifi was stolen. I bought Quad gear on that trip - pre-amp, amplifier and ESL-63 speakers - so hardly used the turn table.
The on-going debates on vinyl versus digital and the rising value of Garrard decks has piqued my curiosity. What is all the fuss about?
You mentioned start up speed - half a revolution - and they can stop just as quickly. I have replaced the main bearing with an oil bearing from the Classic Turntable Company.
I have kept the plinth as an outer shell and dustcover, but removed the flimsy base. It is now infilled with constrained layers of MDF on IsoAccoustics OREA Bordeau pucks sitting on 50-kg of Sydney sandstone. The deck springs are bypassed at the moment, but can be used for a comparison.
Thank you for the extra information!
UPDATE That makes sense. My dad originally housed the Garrard in a cabinet I designed and he built. The board in the SME plinth looks factory cut to me, from veneered chipboard! Could be my next upgrade. It is a pity SME cannot supply parts for these plinths!
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@mylogic
In May 2018, SME took over everything Garrard from IGB Gradiente S.A. of Brazil and seems to be manufacturing the Garrard 301 again, initially from New Old-Stock. They also took over Loricraft Audio. SME only supplies the new Garrard 301 with an SME M2-12R tonearm, or the V-12 magnesium tonearm. They won't supply spare parts like the rubber mat to folk like me. The price is quite incredible (over GBP 35,000) and they only seem able to produce one every two weeks, at best.
Do you know more?
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@mylogic
Wish I could remember but it is very likely the table that was stolen from me was a Lenco GL75. The apple does not fall far from the tree ...
The thief carefully took the record off and left it behind. Of course, the police dusted it thoroughly for fingerprints.
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@dogberry
I circumspectly circumnavigated this monstrosity which needs circumscribing, when I was last in the UK.
Ok, I am used to roundabouts - after all Canberra is the renowned capital of roundabouts in Australia. Try a 2-km circumference! One near me merges major roads into an interstate highway. Unfortunately it is not round, more oblong. About once a year a truck coming from the side would find the curve tightening, and fall over. So now there are 18 sets of traffic lights, on the one roundabout.
Anyone got a copy of the torture track that Plessey had as its logo?
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@dogberry
That's the one!
I had never seen the digital version until your post. No doubt, the analog one sounds better!
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On audible noise between tracks, my brand-new Decca recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto is very quiet on the long lead out tracks but has noticeable murmerings between the tracks, about in the middle of the quiet moments!
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@newton_john
Thanks - exactly what I was looking for. I will read "diamond hardened" to mean a "Diamond-Like Carbon Coating" which is likely to be plasma sputtered onto a substrate such as tool steel in a vacuum under tightly controlled conditions,
I admit I have trouble visualising the 'normal' crystal structure of diamond despite animations such as this: Diamond cubic - Wikipedia
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What exactly does 'diamond hardened' mean in this context? I am looking for a metallurgical explanation, please!
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@newton_john
Yes, and I studied crystallography for three years in the Cambridge lab set up by the Bragg father and son pair who invented X-ray diffraction crystallography. Well before computers and computer graphics, and before Crick and Watson deduced the structure of DNA! I can't even remember the names of the 2-D diagrams that showed the 3-D orientation of crystal planes ...
From another thread I've just discovered that Australia makes Dohmann turntables which also use Diamond-like coating for the main bearing.
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Since the focus of this thread seems to be the retail price of the new Linn plinth, I thought it might be worthwhile to post this extract from Pro-Ject's literature on their most expensive Signature turntable, which has a retail price of 12,000 Euros (my emphasis)
We‘re thrilled to offer these turntables at an extremely attractive price, as the development cost is not counted, as we anyway had to do the research to move forward with Pro-Ject technology in general
Obviously, all the development costs have been amortized in the revenue stream from their mass market products!
Every manufacturer has to cover their costs and make some profit, or they will go out of business. Most manufacturers have high set up costs which have to be funded before the first unit makes its way to market. After that, there are the direct costs associated with each extra unit produced. So in setting a retail price, the manufacturer has to guess how many units they will sell so that the line becomes profitable once it reaches the breakeven number sold. If the price is too high, the number sold may not even reach breakeven.
If the manufacturer only produces high-end expensive gear, they may need very deep pockets. Wilson Benesch have been very adept at getting university collaboration and research grants to offset some development cost, at the time-cost of dealing with government!
Extreme examples of very high set up costs and low production costs include books, semi-conductor chips and polycarbonate disks which all have a unit direct production cost of around a dollar or less.
The above assumes that pricing is set on a rational value-for-money basis, but those rules don't apply to luxury goods where the consumer seemingly forgets about value-for-money and chases status and ego-boosting items. I don't think the Bedrok is flashy enough to fall into the luxury category!
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@daveyf
Question is what price is it that elicits push back??
Answering that question is why marketing people get paid!
Or to put it another way, is the Pro-Ject Signature too inexpensive to be taken seriously by audiophiles? I am sure it is a tempting upgrade for owners of lesser Pro-Jects ...
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@dover
diamond hardening refers to a heating and cooling process used to harden the steel, it is not a coating. The Dohmann uses maraging steel - which is really an alloy, likely including elements of copper and nickel that results in a harder steel than ferrous metals, more stable
I just looked at Dohmann Audio's website and for the Helix One Mk3 they claim:
- Diamond Like Coating Amorphous Material Bearing Friction Modifier (DLC)
To me this looks like the real thing, especially the low friction effect. Of course, the coating may be applied to a hard steel shaft. Many claim to use 'tool steel' but maraging steels are also hard. They are characterised by very low carbon contents but typically are around 15% nickel.
Once upon a time I was a metallurgist, and I do apologise for the naming confusions we promulgate. All steels are actually alloys (mixtures), but the term 'alloy steel' is used where carbon is not the main alloying element. Ferrous metals are alloys where the main element is iron, which is true of all steels.
Hardness in these contexts is measured by pressing a diamond into the metal, and measuring the size of the indentation. Rockwell C uses a conical diamond, whereas the Vickers hardness test uses a pyramid shape. Diamond is harder than any metal, hence my inquiry into what 'diamond hardened' really means.
Just as an aside, I worked at a Vickers subsidiary which was at that time the most modern alloy steel plant in Europe. We made hundreds of grades, and the final test was using an angle grinder to throw off sparks which could be compared against hundreds of samples. The length, shape and colour of the fireworks reflected the underlying composition of the alloy.
Talking of sparks, after working close to three-phase, 110-ton electric arc furnaces with 2-foot diameter electrodes shorting onto cold scrap, I amazed I can still hear. 120-dbA. Mind you, the furnaces were drowned out when rail cars, two at a time, full of scrap, were tippled so the scrap fell down a huge chute into an even bigger bucket. Lots of uncontrolled resonances!
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@newton_john
I also had a great uncle who’d been some sort of technician/instrument maker at Cambridge and had worked with some of the great men who’d done much of the Physics that I was learning about
Those laboratory technicians were vastly underrated in my opinion. They had to somehow make, from glass, wood and whatever else came to hand, the vacuum systems and apparatus that led to the discovery of subatomic particles, starting with the electron. Without them JJ Thompson would never has got his Nobel prize.
Their successors staff the large hadron collider at CERN, which cost about $5 billion to build and roughly that much a year to operate. Without CERN, we would not have the world-wide web or proof of the Higgs boson.
At least one US science commentator dates the decline of US science to the cancellation of funding for an equivalent at Fermilab.
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@newton_john
It is striking how little progress has been made in fundamental physics since I was at university fifty years ago, despite the huge expenditure incurred. So far, string theory hasn’t produced a single experimentally testable finding. The only tangible result we have is the confirmation of the Higgs Boson which was postulated in the sixties.
I think it depends on how narrowly you define fundamental physics! The great breakthroughs are best confirmed if seemingly unlikely predictions are discovered later to be true. It took about 100 years before experimenters discovered the gravity waves predicted by Einstein. The Standard Model of particle physics was good theory until the predicted Higgs boson was discovered decades later. Nobody knows if string theory is just a theory, or maybe m-branes fit better?
The Big Bang theory was a nice theory until the predicted cosmic background microwave radiation was accidentally ’discovered’ by researchers who weren’t looking for it, and did not know what it was when they found it! Did not stop them getting a Nobel prize.
To me the most profound recent development comes from detailed analysis of the fine structure of the cosmic background microwave radiation, which is absolutely uniform to within 1 part in 50,000. Cosmology has only recently become a hard science, and the fine structure is believed to come from quantum effects in the very early universe, for the first time linking the very large to the very small. We now have a pretty good handle on the detailed evolution of our universe, and possible multi-verses
We also have another new window into our own evolution, through the mapping of RNA and DNA changes from very early organisms.
I for one am happy with some by-products of pure research, like the www and WiFi. All thanks in some measure to technicians like your great uncle
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@newton_john
Maybe like at the start of the twentieth century
A lot of physicists at that time thought there was nothing new to discover - all that was left was measuring things more accurately. Mind you, they had no idea what powered the sun. Then in the greatest failed experiment of all time, Michelson and Morley failed to measure the drift of the presumed aether enabling light waves. The speed of light was the same, no matter how fast you were moving towards or from the thing you were looking at. Then radioactivity raised its ugly head ...
... maybe there's not much fundamental physics left to discover - apart from what consciousness is, and dark matter, and dark energy. Our picture of the world is dramatically different from 100 years ago, and today we can see back about 14-billion years though we cannot see past our event horizon.
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@newton_john
between our respective counties
Hope that was a typo, though the good folk in the state of Canada will be watching closely. Australia buys much more from the US than it exports to the US at the moment, but no reprieve for us!
There are reports that Canada is about to purchase our Jindalee over-the-horizon radar (it bounces radar off the ionosphere to pick up unwanted visitors in very remote regions). Not sure which direction they will be pointing it in!
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Only the market will determine if the Bedrok is under-priced, over-priced or right-priced. The market will always be changing, and the more uncertain people feel, the less they will spend on discretionary items.
Get pricing wrong in general, and your company is headed for failure, or at least towards the arms of a corporate raider or new profit-oriented CEO. They know the simplest way to increase profits is to slash Research and Development and we know the simplest way to destroy a tech company is to stop R&D.
The Germans revere their engineers and give them titles the way we identify medical doctors. Not surprisingly, they have a culture which builds companies for the long haul. They also seem to take an opposite path to audio nirvana, using disks where the US favours streaming. Munich Show anyone?
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