The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

Some explanation here, and in the rest of that page: Computer Audio Players

 

Gotcha.

 

Some more @baldr on MQA and galvanic isolation:

And yet some more, after a fair interjection by @Clemmaster:

 

I was familiar with Limey bikes (Nortons, BSAs, Triumphs) in the 60s – early 70s which shifted backwards and upside down back in the day. They also threw more oil on your jeans than on the surfaces which were supposed to be lubed. But damn, they handled. That was my attitude about British stuff. Were it not for the fact that I lost three good friends in bike accidents that weren't their fault, I might still be riding today.

Back in that day, I genuflected at the Stanton cartridge altar. Then I met Lew Brown who worked as a rep for several British lines. When I met him, he had a Decca 4RC cartridge in his pocket. It was the biggest, squarest, ugliest cart I had ever seen. It seemed like it weighed a pound or so.

The oddest thing was that it had no cantilever! On the bottom the monolith had a donut shaped bobbin mounted flush with the bottom of the cart. A very small vertical shaft, capped with a diamond stylus, came out of the donut hole, with a tiny nylon string anchored toward the back of the cart, keeping the moving record from dragging the stylus/shaft out of vertical alignment. Yup, only the Brits could design something like this. "With this design, your stylus motion is not transformed down the length of a long pole to the other end where the motion gets scanned - it is direct." Lew intoned. I looked at the distance the stylus came out of the cart bottom – it was a tenth of an inch or so. I mentioned that it was hard to see under the cartridge for cueing. Lew proudly pointed to a huge inverted triangle on the front center of the cart. "The low clearance makes proper cartridge parallel to record setup critical" – he smiled smugly as he said it.

I asked all about the stylus tip. "Conical!" What did he say? Buggy whip type, obsolete, really old? What I got was a speech on the shape of record cutting heads and all about why elliptical and modern tip shapes are wrong for proper frequency domain cart performance. My last question was stylus pressure – how much. After a brief lecture on the merits of "playing weight" over the inappropriate "stylus pressure" he answered 4 grams. Huh? I asked him if I needed a tracking blower to remove all of the vinyl chips from the playing record. This time I received another lecture about lower stylus pres... er playing weights causing even more more damage when the cart goes out of compliance. The problem is too low rather than too high stylu..... uh playing weight.

"Would you like to borrow my rep sample?" he asked. I was fumbling for an answer while he reboxed and handed me the cart. So I took it home, (stopping on the way to buy another copy of Cat Steven's "Tea for the Tillerman" in case the 4 grams tore up my first copy) wondering if I really would have the balls to try it out.

To save space, after never having seen my Rabco arm's counterweight go so far back to accommodate that heavy pig, I got it mounted, Parallel to the record, and setup at 4 grams. I had to go borrow a different stylus pres........ ah, playing weight gauge to read that high.

What resulted was one of those audio moments I can never forget. When the needle dropped, the sound of the stylus hitting and falling in the groove was so different it was startling. Then the music started exposing midrange, presence, in my face, kinda stuff I had never remotely felt (not heard – felt) before. And the bass – this is where the Moffat bass came from. Not being an audio reviewer, I lack words. But wow, just wow. Bucket list item for any LP audiophile is to hear a Decca cart. Yup.

............And I hadn't even yet heard his speakers. If I only knew.

 

I enjoyed the story!

 

Uncle @baldr, can you tell us a story about when the next Bifrost upgrade will be released? Can you base it on a true story, readers love those?!

 

And now for some Manhattan goodiness:

And what I can only assume is the poster girl, Dr. Ivana herself:

 

Better off just putting her on a raised platform and wave to the social mouthbreathers in the crowd.

 

http://mat.ucsb.edu/~ivana

Interesting software background.

 

The ones who go to comic con so they can pose for dozens of pics with their arm around a real girl.

 

Unfortunately, this one isn't cosplaying.

 

I've been on the organizing committee for anime cons and gaming conventions before. If you watch the room, you can actually see the awkward bubble of neckbeards hovering close-but-not-too-close around all the ladies. It's very cringy.

 

This person actually has a PhD in machine learning, no Norse cosplay here

 

What?

 

"media arts and technology" is the program, doesn't mean much for PhD. Her dissertation is on recommender systems for mood-based music, recommender systems use machine learning as backbone. Im getting my info from your link Btw.

Wonder what role she had in the Manhattan project, if Schiit is indeed employing machine learning, should be interesting. I've seen research prototypes that work quite well, never a commercial product.

 

Her prior work has been in the visualization space, which seems to be more than likely her role in the project and the 2 guys from the CS dept the recommendation model (which seems to first do a basic nearest neighbour model then their new time variant decaying history model). The short paper is here: http://dparra.sitios.ing.uc.cl/pdfs/Moodplay_UMAP_2016.pdf

Edit: Not to say that she can't do machine learning or DSP, but based off her prior work I'm still pretty curious what Schiit is getting at here. Her resume is mainly visualization and backend management (and visualization) work.

 

Schiit is employing Dr. Ivana for the Manhattan Project. That is qualification enough for me.

 

Not so much about the qualification but more of what can we guess the Manhattan to be before it's out. Entertainment as usual, same with the (missing?) Cthulhu.

 

I see that I misunderstood the discussion.

My feeling all along has been that the Manhattan Project has something to do with dynamics/transients. I'm speculating (of course) and don't really have any faith in that.

 

Cthulhu is out.

http://schiit.com/products/floor-wart