It's been about 10 years since I met Paul - Pictures

The board houses weren’t used to an individual just “walking in” with a monster board design. But they support prototypes for businesses all of the time. It was more like three of a kind since I always wanted to have a backup or two if something went wrong.

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I have second hand knowledge of redesigned speaker XO boards and the cost was too prohibitive for just a few. Fabricator’s had minimum production commitments or else big bucks. Took a group buy and long-term goal to support it. I, too, have a very supportive wife when it comes to my audio musings. You, and I, are lucky men.

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I have always been involved with women who are equally obsessed with their passions. You support each other.

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I had a bug on the big red board that needed a via drilled out because I had misconnected a net. The local board house drilled it out for free, but when they were doing it the NC machine operator kept shuffling things around. He finally said “I can’t figure out what grid you used.” He was surprised when I said I didn’t use grids when routing :slight_smile: After drilling it they X-Rayed the board to make sure there were no spurs of copper left. Pretty good service for free.

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Great pictures and insight and some serious setups!

So you put on the blue shirt especially for the TSS discussion :wink:

The amount of equipment that was used for just stuffing my three boards was amazing:


They gave us a complete tour showing us all of their equipment. A very enjoyable board stuffing and soldering.

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Many thanks for sharing all this Ted!
And please, keep all that healthy insanity. :joy:

In case you missed it here’s what we did in our new house for my sound room:

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I was an aviation analyst in the USAF and had amazing opportunities to tour and see all facets of weapon’s systems; from production to application. My last tour was the F-35 facility and the first 35 coming off the production line…a Navy jump jet variant, Buzz Aldrin had autographed under the nose cone, a few days before. But, I digress.

They allowed us to test out the VR simulator, goggles on head, walk under a CGI aircraft and into the weapon’s bay. They’d done the same w/actual weapon’s loaders and found design flaws before even one aircraft was built. Don’t quote me but they saved something like $30M in pre-production redesigns. You should look into VR and “walk” through your board designs. Become one with the board. :upside_down_face:

The whole point to the story above is to say I appreciate the geek factor in sharing/enjoying what you do. I certainly did w/my job and sincerely relate.

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That sounds cool!

I definitely use simulators. I spent more than three months simulating the big red board. I sure didn’t want to spend that kind of money and have something fundamentally wrong. I also suck at soldering so I didn’t want to fix anything except software :slight_smile:

Here’s an almost good enough analog output filter frequency response simulation:

And similarly an early simulation of an fft of a 1k sine wave:

An early simulation of the clock power supply start up:

Similarly I did (and do) a bunch of FPGA simulations, but more often you can just hear if there’s something wrong and make a pretty good guess at what it is.

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I’ve been bouncing between this thread and watching Galen G’s “Do Audio Cables Matter” interview on The Intellectual People. I’ll bet you 2 are a hoot when you’re together.

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At Axpona a few years back we were snowed in in Chicago. While waiting the next day we ran into Galen and a friend of his. The four of us talked for hours (actually Galen and I talked most of the time, my wife and his friend were spectators.)

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That’s great. I can relate. He’s talking phase, amplitude, linearity right now. I won’t pretend to understand at the levels you do. But I can spectate!

Ted do you lay out and route traces for the circuit boards also, or have a board layout specialist do it after you design the circuits?

How many layer boards are we talking? (If not confidential info of course). I have no idea what is conventional in audio, thanks

Yep I do everything, schematics, part selection, layout… I like the quote from John Atkinson when he was measuring the DS for the first time: “The DirectStream’s circuit-board layout must have been done with a careful eye on grounding issues.”

I was a software weenie at an electrical CAD/CAM company and among other things I wrote the “grid generator for the gridless router”. I know pretty well how a computer can do good routing and I take a lot of care with each trace, no autorouting here.

I like six layer boards, four layers doesn’t give very good power and ground planes (sometimes you are forced to do a little routing on them with four layers) and more layers cost even more.

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I had the distinct pleasure meeting both you an Galen at Axpona. Though much of the tech talk sidelined me early in the conversation, it was still grounded in how a good design can reveal more music. A magnificent obsession with great results.
Thanks for you dedication.

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I guess this genius even painted the boards…

Do you know the turntable brand at this friends house?
Seems to be a direct drive on a serious separate isolation platform…and then the DartZeel amps…you know some serious phono setups.

On a different forum, I’ve read a lot about your friends room from the picture. His latest digital setup is very impressive. Have you’ve heard his SGM Extreme and MSB system? I imagine it’s amazing.

I expect that he has better turntables now :slight_smile: His arms were designed by a local fellow - I don’t know if they are available on the open market.