Turntable advice / opinion on setup / sound.

@richardbrand 

Thanks for the info, especially straightening me out about my assumption Rega’s cartridge mounting. (I had only glanced and seen a centerline of three holes, as I was in search of null point answers).

When I was in college, freshman year, studying Interior Design at Pratt Institute there was a lounge with many design magazines. Classmates used to go thru them, actively, sometimes desperately. I decided I wanted to find out what I would do, my solutions to the assignment, and did not want to be influenced in any way by looking at those magazines. Likewise, I did not read books about famous artists, architects, designers.

It’s become an automatic reflex. I do enjoy reading history, forgetting it as I turn the page, but I’m waiting for 3 used books I orderd (too late). Every day it’s ’Where’s My Books’

IOW, if someone gave me a book by .... I might not read it.

Sadly, waiting for these books, 1st time in 10 years, I actually read the front section of the NYTimes. I used to love reading my Sunday NYT, but had to stop in 2016. I don't watch the news, or weather.

My brother in law knows to call me if a hurricane is coming my way. When Superstorm Sandy was coming, he called me and said 'Do you know a category -- hurricane is coming. No. I'm out here in Pennsylvania trying to find a generator. I said "my credit card number is___". he found an old store that had been bypassed by a new highway, they had 2 Honda gererators, Whew, we were out of power for 8 days, luckily while he was bringing them back, I was out buying and filling 5 gal cans. Red ones sold out, I bought blue ones, made for Kerosene. 

The gas stations would not fill them, against the law, so I parked around the corner, filled my 2-1/2 gal red can, dumped it in the blue, back with the red. After we got whacked, gas stations had no power, and stupidly, they didn't have generators to run the pumps.

I couldn't get out of our neighborhood anyway, walking around my 4 blocks, 26 trees were across the roads, not to mention the others that fell in other directions.

//////////////////////////////////////

rx100, Neighborhood before and after Superstorm Sandy
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3368031
 

I try very hard not to let THE GOVERNMENT piss me off, but your story about not being allowed to fill your gas cans because they were the wrong color just sent me into a dark place.  In the teeth of a major storm no less.  Deliver me from people with that kind of mentality.

@faustuss 

Since this discussion is about turntables, could I suggest you familiarise yourself with the white paper on Wilson Benesch's Graviton tonearm.

As for knowing Roy did not have access to computer modelling from his get go, the date was around 1968.  Rega was not NASA.  I was working with state-if-the-art computing in the UK and it was very early days.  Arguably the world's first PC, the Olivetti Programma 101, had a memory capacity of 64 words.

My understanding was that Terry Bateman concentrated on electronics at Rega

In 1973, KEF became the first loudspeaker manufacturer in the world to implement the use of computers in loudspeaker design and measurement

@richardbrand 

"As for knowing Roy did not have access to computer modelling from his get go, the date was around 1968.  Rega was not NASA.  I was working with state-if-the-art computing in the UK and it was very early days.  Arguably the world's first PC, the Olivetti Programma 101, had a memory capacity of 64 words.

My understanding was that Terry Bateman concentrated on electronics at Rega"

Hm, did I say from the get-go? When I hit the ground in the early eighties, I performed a quality control function that supported a staff of MIT educated engineers and a manufacturing floor that produced 80 mega bit (which was extremely fast at the time) local area network cards for the likes of Cray, Sun Microsystems, Data General, Digital Equipment Corp the US Government etc.. These extremely complex boards might have a hundred chips of various types in addition to passive components and were modeled on the PCs of the day using "computer modelling and finite element analysis" to design their extremely critical circuits. Nothing like the 2-bit variety you were using but still not the most sophisticated standalone platforms of the time and you think Terry Bateman wouldn't have had access to them to design his circuits? Seems a bit short sighted for an engineer. Did you work for British Leyland or something? Killed by a lack of forward thinking and among other things.

@faustuss 

Hm, did I say from the get-go?

No, I did

They (Wilson Benesch) have an advantage over Rega - they could use computer modelling and finite element analysis from the get-go

Unfortunately (for me) you started in the '80s a couple of decades after me.  The "2-bit variety" I cut my teeth on actually had 6-bit addressing - hence 64 memory locations.

Finite element analysis has nothing to do with electronics or circuit design. It is mainly used in structural analysis, for example to predict the crash performance of a car body, or the propagation of vibrations in a tonearm.  To do this, the overall mechanical structure is modelled as a mesh, and forces for each link in the mesh are modelled as differential equations which very powerful computers can solve.  The finer the mesh, the more accurate the results, but the more compute power you need.

When Australia had a car industry, the boffins at Holden used finite element analysis to design and crash test a ground-up design, the Commodore, and go to full production, without creating any physical prototypes.

In my opinion, the memory address restrictions in computers were suddenly blown away by the release in 1978 of the 32-bit Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) by Digital Equipment Corporation. It could directly address 4-gigabytes of virtual memory.  Back then real memory was still extremely expensive - I agonised whether the two VAX-11/780s I needed should have one megabyte of real memory, or one and a quarter.  Each computer needed several full-size cabinets.  Most Australian universities at that time could afford to acquire one VAX typically supporting 100 time-sharing users.

By 1985 almost the same performance and exactly the same architecture could be had from the MicroVAX II, with a single-chip cpu, a cabinet you could carry and a price tag smallish companies could afford.  You could hook dozens of them up with your Ethernet cards and make a passable supercomputer.  But this was well after Rega was founded.

Did you work for British Leyland or something? Killed by a lack of forward thinking and among other things

I don't think British Leyland was killed by lack of forward-thinking engineers.  You only have to think of the Mini, which set the design parameters for almost every small car produced today - front-wheel drive, east-west engine, wheels at the corners. Then its bigger brothers, with Citroen-like suspension but without the expensive pumps, the 1100 and 1800.

In my opinion, it was killed by the difficulty of successfully managing mergers and acquisitions.  The heads of Morris and Austin had been fierce rivals, then were supposed to cooperate.  Add rivals Triumph and innovative Rover to the mix.  And try to make it work in a class-riddled country plagued with industrial disputes.