Re: [linux-audio-user] Re: Companies Refusing to Release/Permit Linux Drivers

On Sunday 19 March 2006 01:03, Chris Bannister wrote: AFAIK, any old dish soap that comes out of a bottle today will be fine. Dishwasher soap OTOH, is pretty darned caustic, which probably won't do the label (or the velvet & your skin for that matter) any good at all. Use the velvet going with the grooves, and rinse with lots of warm water at kitchen faucet spray pressures before the final rinse with distilled. Its clean when you can see rainbows in the grooves as it dries. Note however that I'm referring to vinyl records, not old shellac 78's which will absorb an amazing amount of water. Those I've never used more than a velvet pad and just dampened it, rinseing it out when it shows dirt. Back velvet, not showing the dirt all that well shouldn't be used. If you can find it, a light colored mohair frizay(spelling checker please) would be even better as its fibers will stand higher and straighter, reaching into the grooves even better, but be gentle with it too. Removing as much grit from the grooves as you can, before its pounded into the vinyl by the passing of the diamond needle, is a very desirable thing. Once embedded in the groove walls, its essentially there forever. A well produced LP of yesteryear, on a good turntable & good arm & needle, can easily do 55+ db of snr, with some approaching 70 db, but they were rare indeed. That takes either a weathers turntable, or an old fairchild battleship but I doubt any of them survive today. Today, Techniqs is the best but its 20 db noisier than those were and has arm resonances you can actually see. Its a lost art I'm afraid. Another record I recall from the late 50's was a Mercury mono recording of the Overture 1812, using the canons at Harvard, and the bells from the Harkness Tower on the Yale campus. Those canons were recorded with an Altec M-21 condensor mic about a yard from the muzzle, and the bells were so discordant that with any cartridge but a weathers, they were like fingernails on a blackboard by the 4th play. The Altec M-21 was said to have recorded, without any flat-toping of the waveforms, a Ruger Super Redhawk in 44 magnum from 2" below the muzzle. It was also fairly high output, haveing 150 volts on the plate of the 6AT6 in the base of it, this being LONG before electret condensors & FET preamps that could run on a watch battery, and which cannot do sounds over 115db, ever. I took one of them once to go record the SUI Scottish Hilanders bagpipe band, but it was raining so we all retired into a 20x40 quonset hut. With the sound of about 15 bagpipes all focused at the center of that thing by the rounded roof, I plugged that mic into the line input on a pretty good tandberg tape recorder that could do 15 ips, and had to leave the line gain control down at about 1.5 on a 0-10 scale. I think my tinnitus & carhart notches started then. But I also got some quite usable recordings they used as promo's for quite a while. Yeah, I've been to a few places, and done a few things in my 71 years. Thats just one story. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.