[X] My Assistant

Whats the best solder for audio equipment?

A lot of people are recommending a lead solder. I prefer the ease of lead. is there another quality solder?

5 pin 'locking din' or 'aviation connectors' as chinese vendors call them. Only needed 4 pins, but 5 keeps it from being interchanged with a microphone cable.
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/0kSsT8bV/20211219-170427.jpg)
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/yVtKpJYJ/20211219-170406.jpg)
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/3KwZtBtB/SGC-Smartuner-circuit.png)
This is bascially it, but I added a power switch with led and 560r, and a decoupling cap to the 'white' line.

Now that I think about, the power to one of 5 pin jacks should go through the switch as well- just switching the little regulator and pull up won't do much. Oops. Easy enough fix, just 2 labels and a jumper wire.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Dec 20 2021, 14:23

Whats the best solder for audio equipment?

A lot of people are recommending a lead solder. I prefer the ease of lead. is there another quality solder?

Leaded also makes better joints. IMO for rework and small runs of through hole stuff (that is, not producing 100s of them) there's no need to use lead free.
Kester 44 in 0.031" is my favorite solder.

Whats the best solder for audio equipment?

A lot of people are recommending a lead solder. I prefer the ease of lead. is there another quality solder?

Leaded solder. With rosin flux core. Though it's still a good idea to use external flux in case of difficulties.

Lead-free sucks, requires higher temperatures and has more issues when solidifying.

(I solder a lot, and used to work at a place that repaired amps and speakers)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 20 2021, 16:53

Whats the best solder for audio equipment?

A lot of people are recommending a lead solder. I prefer the ease of lead. is there another quality solder?

unless legally obligated to do so (might want to when shipping internationally),
never use anything but leaded solder. best joints, easiest to work with

5 pin 'locking din' or 'aviation connectors' as chinese vendors call them. Only needed 4 pins, but 5 keeps it from being interchanged with a microphone cable.

very aesthetic lights there


This post has been edited by cate_chan: Dec 20 2021, 20:40

I mentioned on IRC that while I am aware of the benefits of SSD's and have one in a spare laptop (so I know how they perform) I wasn't planning on putting one in my main laptop or desktop anytime soon for reasons of pure capacity and price.

Everyone proceeds to start lecturing me on how much faster windows boots on their SSD's. It doesn't matter that I don't run windows, or that my use case for my computers isn't random I/O, or that I don't play games, or that I only boot around once a month on average, or that I can use ramdisks when speed really is important.

And then when I tell them all of that, they just don't stop lecturing me about how "it's only $(non zero sum), lol" or "just boot off a USB3 flash drive then" (when I have no USB3 ports).

I don't get why these people are so eager to make me spend money on something I don't need.

If I were to get an SSD of equal or greater size compared to my current HDD's for a good price, maybe I'd think about it. But that's not happening.

Also shelf life (data retention rate) of SSD's sucks, maybe worse than HDD's - even when considering how many hdd's die from not being spun up.

Apparently it's just wrong that I'm okay with waiting a couple seconds for a program to start sometimes.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 21 2021, 02:35

Swung a wire over, removed a small jumper, added a new wire, and labeled which jack is which now that it matters.

I like clean, functional front panels. The led bezels are a bit cheap, but seem to work well enough.

Leaded also makes better joints. IMO for rework and small runs of through hole stuff (that is, not producing 100s of them) there's no need to use lead free.
Kester 44 in 0.031" is my favorite solder.

Used to like Kester but the store I used to go to (two decades ago) only stocks Duratech now. Otherwise imported leaded solder is expensive.

Leaded solder. With rosin flux core. Though it's still a good idea to use external flux in case of difficulties.

Lead-free sucks, requires higher temperatures and has more issues when solidifying.

(I solder a lot, and used to work at a place that repaired amps and speakers)

Yeah I struggled last time I tried to use lead free. It was so shit. I used to solder a lot of electronics decades ago.

unless legally obligated to do so (might want to when shipping internationally),
never use anything but leaded solder. best joints, easiest to work with

Lead it is then.

I mentioned on IRC that while I am aware of the benefits of SSD's and have one in a spare laptop (so I know how they perform) I wasn't planning on putting one in my main laptop or desktop anytime soon for reasons of pure capacity and price.

Everyone proceeds to start lecturing me on how much faster windows boots on their SSD's. It doesn't matter that I don't run windows, or that my use case for my computers isn't random I/O, or that I don't play games, or that I only boot around once a month on average, or that I can use ramdisks when speed really is important.

And then when I tell them all of that, they just don't stop lecturing me about how "it's only $(non zero sum), lol" or "just boot off a USB3 flash drive then" (when I have no USB3 ports).

I don't get why these people are so eager to make me spend money on something I don't need.

If I were to get an SSD of equal or greater size compared to my current HDD's for a good price, maybe I'd think about it. But that's not happening.

Also shelf life (data retention rate) of SSD's sucks, maybe worse than HDD's - even when considering how many hdd's die from not being spun up.

Apparently it's just wrong that I'm okay with waiting a couple seconds for a program to start sometimes.

I've had similar experiences with using anything but 4k monitors or an within last 10 years made gpu. people seem to feel this need to gonsume the latest thing constantly.
that said though I quite enjoy the ssd experience in laptops to make them a bit more abusable.
but I also get the 'just use an ssd' or 'just use a faster system' answers when I bring up things like terminals starting faster in daemon mode as a feature I like.
something that came to mind instantly:

The led bezels are a bit cheap, but seem to work well enough.

maybe they are, but I still quite like the look. enough to have ordered some already after seeing your first post with them and being reminded those exist

I don't get why these people are so eager to make me spend money on something I don't need.

If I were to get an SSD of equal or greater size compared to my current HDD's for a good price, maybe I'd think about it. But that's not happening.

Also shelf life (data retention rate) of SSD's sucks, maybe worse than HDD's - even when considering how many hdd's die from not being spun up.

SSDs make older computers feel faster. The reason people usually update is because they feel slow. An SSD is probably the cheapest upgrade for most people, if they have an older computer.

Apart from when they have firmware problems, the tier one brands are probably more reliable than traditional hard drives but it depends. SSDs aren't perfect, some cheaper SSD have been terribad.

You can just have a OS SSD Drive and a traditional storage hard drive. I built tons like that.

SSDs make older computers feel faster. The reason people usually update is because they feel slow. An SSD is probably the cheapest upgrade for most people, if they have an older computer.

Apart from when they have firmware problems, the tier one brands are probably more reliable than traditional hard drives but it depends. SSDs aren't perfect, some cheaper SSD have been terribad.

I have had two hard disks fail in my entire life. One was in an ipod classic, so it was banged around a ton, and the other was already trashed when I was given it.
Maybe I'm really that atypical in how I treat my stuff, but I don't really think so because I dropped my laptop hard enough that I had to replace the lid's casing a few months ago (June or so). I think people watch too much youtube and feel like they'll be validated if they have more gear like whatever <rich gamer youtube personality> uses. Also, of all eight of my HDD's in my desktop and two in my laptop right now, I bought three of them new and the rest were secondhand.

Alternative theory: people are getting either 1) terrible quality hard disks (i.e., SMR drives or just flat out faulty ones) or 2) actually failing hard disks that just haven't thrown SMART codes yet, and then get an SSD. So since their HDD wasn't even functioning correctly to begin with, it feels like an even bigger boost than it normally does.

SMR drives have done as much to ruin HDD's reputation among average consumers (since manufacturers try to avoid talking about SMR) as anything else has in recent years.

Could also be that modern windows thrashes HDD's a lot more; I wouldn't know.

You can just have a OS SSD Drive and a traditional storage hard drive. I built tons like that.

I have no free connectors for more storage right now, and my largest SSD is smaller than my smallest currently installed HDD so I'd have to start hot-swapping whenever I want data off of the drive I oust.
So for now, no plans to do that.

I'm still booting off that Seagate Barracuda HDD from 2007 by the way.

I do have an SSD in a spare laptop, and yeah, it does boot nice and fast. I just don't really mind given how rarely I boot.

I've had similar experiences with using anything but 4k monitors or an within last 10 years made gpu. people seem to feel this need to gonsume the latest thing constantly.
that said though I quite enjoy the ssd experience in laptops to make them a bit more abusable.
but I also get the 'just use an ssd' or 'just use a faster system' answers when I bring up things like terminals starting faster in daemon mode as a feature I like.
something that came to mind instantly:


maybe they are, but I still quite like the look. enough to have ordered some already after seeing your first post with them and being reminded those exist

The thing is, this was on a channel supposedly full of archivists. You'd think they'd care more about capacity than gaming, or at least be smart enough to figure out that different people have differing use cases.
On that same channel someone tried to tell me I needed to buy a xeon and "commercial grade" hw if I'm running it 24/7, as if I hadn't just run this consumer machine 24/7 for the last eight years with consumer HDD's and a consumer PSU.

If I need speed, I'd use a RAMdisk anyway. But someone legitimately tried to tell me SSD's are faster or have less overhead than a DRAM ramdisk - despite the contents of SSD's having to go into DRAM before running anyway and both having filesystems to negotiate.

Also, that image gave me AIDS.
Can't stand people that just see computers as another platform for passive consumption.

I haven't heard of "tuneup utilities" or "uxtheme patchers" since around 2011. And I think the last time I used a uxtheme patcher was on XP when I was trying to make my own theme in around 2007.
What's "speccy" in this context?
Guesing KMS Pico is some windows key management system crack.
I am proud to say I was never stupid enough to use CCleaner.

Sometimes I sort of miss /g/, but then I remember that everyone on there with very few exceptions was just another consumer looking for shit to buy.

I installed an old Hauppauge analogue video capture PCI card in my PC today. My USB capture card was dropping the color subcarrier on my PSX, so I'm wondering if this card with a different chipset will do any better.

Also I spent about five hours today programming in FLTK in C.

I told myself I was just going to make one small change to the UI for an image categorizing helper program I made… but it never ends up being just a few minutes.

Still, pretty confident I'm not leaking memory, and now my categorizer can remember the last five categories I put things in, so I don't have to browse for commonly used directories every time I move to a new category. It shuffles them around and discards the least recently used entry first when a new one gets slapped on. By changing a variable I could make it practically any number of recent categories instead of just five. But I think five's a good balance.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 22 2021, 09:19

@cate_chan
I was going to use the amber snap in lenses I typically use for neons, but opted for more traditional ones instead. The snap in lenses really need the light siliconed in anyways. The leds are all going at just shy of 20mA- still fine for non-phosphor LEDs with 'older' deep colors, but they are a bit agressive if you look straight at em. Might tame them down a bit, but I don't see it being an issue.

Finally making some headway on getting most of compents and small projects into little drawers, but it keeps growing. Currently at 4 sets that are almost full after moving all my carbon film resistors in. I'll leave the small electrolytic capacitor and metal film resistor kits in their boxes, as those are quite orderly. It'll likely take some time to use up all my carbon film 1/4 and 1/8w stuff, but been gradually moving to metal film.

It is nice finally getting to the point where I have stock of common parts and can actually find them quickly.

So, either one of my fonts was causing OpenOffice to crash at startup, or having too many fonts installed was causing OpenOffice to crash at startup. And I'm not sure which.

But what I am sure of is while the bug has been reported, they didn't realize that it was because of their installed fonts despite fontconfig enumeration being obvious in the backtrace.

So basically I'm the only one who seems to know what causes the issue, despite seeing tons of reports scattered all over the web - everyone just suggests removing libreoffice if it's also installed (and it isn't), and then the thread stalls out with no solution.

And reporting bugs would require making an account on their bugzilla or writing an email, and I don't really love Apache, so I don't think I will.

Edit:
Also, only about two weeks until I am officially free of the burden of my nord subscription (when I bought it all I was thinking about was getting around campus firewall to use IRC, so I didn't do my homework).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 22 2021, 23:31

I have had two hard disks fail in my entire life. One was in an ipod classic, so it was banged around a ton, and the other was already trashed when I was given it.

I've seen tons fail but depends what the use case fail. The period when manufacturers first moved production overseas and increased storage size was the worst when fail rates were hitting 10-20%, which is around when SSDs first hit the market.

The main failure modes were heat and physical shock. For a while >40oC would kill some drives exponentially fast which was dumb.

The OCZ SSD drives were pure cancer, their failure rate was like 40%.

I'm still booting off that Seagate Barracuda HDD from 2007 by the way.

I still have one 500gb Seagate in operation, but all of its larger capacity brothers died.

Could also be that modern windows thrashes HDD's a lot more; I wouldn't know.I have no free connectors for more storage right now, and my largest SSD is smaller than my smallest currently installed HDD so I'd have to start hot-swapping whenever I want data off of the drive I oust.
So for now, no plans to do that.

Modern Windows it is less... but for a while XP to Vista, it got pretty bad especially as when people had less ram and were updating to newer windows. It caused Windows to thrash the disk.

The thing is, this was on a channel supposedly full of archivists. You'd think they'd care more about capacity than gaming, or at least be smart enough to figure out that different people have differing use cases.
On that same channel someone tried to tell me I needed to buy a xeon and "commercial grade" hw if I'm running it 24/7, as if I hadn't just run this consumer machine 24/7 for the last eight years with consumer HDD's and a consumer PSU.

Interesting, most archivists I know are more hardcore into the quality / $$$ per tb proposition. Most of them are usually arguing which line of hard drives is best for raid arrays or NAS drives.

Even my NAS storage is all traditional drives. Its only 20TB but that was heaps ten years ago. I was thinking about making a SDD NAS but the use case and cost did not make it worthwhile.

Occasionally I would do work where it was worthwhile but rarely. Maybe for people editing ultra high resolution video and can afford to pay a gigafortune.

SMR drives have done as much to ruin HDD's reputation among average consumers (since manufacturers try to avoid talking about SMR) as anything else has in recent years.

Yeah that triggers people, when manufacturers changed the spec without warning.

I've seen tons fail but depends what the use case fail. The period when manufacturers first moved production overseas and increased storage size was the worst when fail rates were hitting 10-20%, which is around when SSDs first hit the market.

Yeah, I think mine might just predate that move.

The main failure modes were heat and physical shock. For a while >40oC would kill some drives exponentially fast which was dumb.

The OCZ SSD drives were pure cancer, their failure rate was like 40%.
I still have one 500gb Seagate in operation, but all of its larger capacity brothers died.

Yeah mine's a 500GB ST3500630AS.
I know someone else with an identical drive at double the hours mine has, so his has been running nearly 24/7 since it was new.

Interesting, most archivists I know are more hardcore into the quality / $$$ per tb proposition. Most of them are usually arguing which line of hard drives is best for raid arrays or NAS drives.

I think these could have been reddit gamers LARPing as archivists to get info on storage devices.

Occasionally I would do work where it was worthwhile but rarely. Maybe for people editing ultra high resolution video and can afford to pay a gigafortune.

I had to explain to them that random disk I/O isn't normally a good model of how people use their computers.

And if you have that sort of money, it'd make more sense to just get 128GB of RAM (or something crazier) and get even more speed with ramdisks. With the benefit of failing less frequently than SSD's.
The Raptor Talos II can support up to 2TB of DDR4 ECC RAM (16 slots). I'm sure some x86 machines are similar if not even larger.

That'd actually be great for sandboxing and virtualization experiments, now that I think of it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 23 2021, 05:48

Chinese media outlets have reported that Alibaba Cloud is facing backlash from government regulators after they reported the Log4J vulnerability to Apache before the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

Source: [www.zdnet.com] https://www.zdnet.com/article/log4j-chinese...-vulnerability/

Cue me rolling on the floor laughing my ass off...

Source: [www.zdnet.com] https://www.zdnet.com/article/log4j-chinese...-vulnerability/

Cue me rolling on the floor laughing my ass off...

Oof. Bet they would have liked to know that before it could get fixed.

You may know the "how to get a ball into a glass, while only touching the glass", putting the glass above the ball, then moving it so that the ball spin around in it, going up, then flipping the glass and tadaaa.
Well, I'm running into a similar mind trick: "how to get a solid into a bottle of mineral water, with the solid being too big to go through the opening, and without of course destroying or damaging the bottle".

Spoiler text - Highlight to read...

If the bottle is put in the fridge, it may create a piece of ice too big to be taken out.

Though my real issue is: how to get it out without making the water unhealthy.

Spoiler text - Highlight to read...

I'm afraid putting the bottle under hot water until it melt is unhealthy...but maybe it's a misplaced concern?

Will the cold war keep GPU prices hot in the foreseeable future?

You may know the "how to get a ball into a glass, while only touching the glass", putting the glass above the ball, then moving it so that the ball spin around in it, going up, then flipping the glass and tadaaa.
Well, I'm running into a similar mind trick: "how to get a solid into a bottle of mineral water, with the solid being too big to go through the opening, and without of course destroying or damaging the bottle".

1) plant an apple tree.

2) wherever an apple starts growing, strap a bottle onto the tree over that spot.

3) wait.

[upload.wikimedia.org] (IMG:[upload.wikimedia.org] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Williams_Christ_Obstbrand.JPG/274px-Williams_Christ_Obstbrand.JPG)
Yeah, that's a pear. Same principle though.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 24 2021, 06:33