A few notes on building with the 845
Andre Jute
sweetest tubes ever made. Its only downsides are the kilovolt plate
requirement and a tough drive requirement.
As a student I took one of those 99 dollar (it is said every time I
mention this that those tickets always were 199 dollars -- my memory of
99 bucks in the middle 1960s is firm) go anywhere one way for six
months Greyhound bus tours through the highways and byways of America.
My love of America and Americans stem from that as much as from the
many great Americans I met in later years. I started and ended in
Durham because I had connections among the people studying the
paranormal at Duke, so I spent a lot of that bus tour in the South and
generally on or near the East Coast, with just a couple of big sweeps
through the mid-West and the West Coast. My abiding memory is the
smokey sounds of the radio stations my radio picked up. Later, when I
came into tube audio almost thirty years later, I discovered many of
those stations still used 845 tubes. A guy I knew at the Pentagon,
something of an amateur historian, also told me the 845 and 211 had an
honorable history of forces broadcasting. I don't like the 211 much,
among other reasons because it must be operated in A2 to get any decent
power. The 845 delivers all of its considerable power, like a
Rolls-Royce always more than adequate, in Class A1.
I built several 845 a few years ago, and one proto was in use for years
to try out things. I switched to the very pleasing SV-572-xx for their
versality when Svetlana developed them; it is a pity that tube is no
longer in production. It is the only tube, short of perhaps the even
more frightening (and I'm not referring to its cost!) 212 in its
various guises, which can do what an 845 does so well. The SV572-xx
have the advantage of working well into a lower impedance, and fitting
common UX4 sockets whereas the 845 requires jumbo sockets.
This is a brief list of what I learned about the 845 from those
experiences and from correspondence with people who built even bigger
or more impressive 845 amps than I did. Mine were all SE amps.
It is not worth building low voltage 845. There was a Japanese craze
for 500V 845 a decade or so again. I tried it. It sounded no better
than a 300B amp of not quite the first rank. With cheap iron (which was
the reason for the craze, that proper 845 iron is expensive), it
sounded like shit. There is no point in building an inferior 300B amp
with 845; you may as well build a proper 300B amp.
Nor is there any point in hogging the 845 out to the full megalomaniac
1250V. The power gained is offset by a decline in sound quality, i.e.
more noise. The definite sweet spot in the 845 is somewhere between
960V and 1040V on the plate (i.e. after the drop over the primary, not
the B+). If you aim for the round grand, you can't go wrong. This, and
other matters below, can easily be seen by putting a ruler across the
845 Eb-Ia-Eg curves for those of you who have no intention of
committing the madness of kilovolt amps but want to follow the
discussion. Patrick, in a few months, will come tell us the same thing
-- as if he just discovered it! <G>
The 845 likes high current. Around 80mA is a good operating point; the
Chinese 845 are pretty sturdy and anyway cheap (33 US dollars each the
last time I bought any). The lowest-current 845 I ever built that
sounded like an 845 should was 72mA. Among other reasons the
low-voltage craze 845 sounded like shit was that it had low current on
the plate. I also built one that had only 65mA; the sound was very
definitely inferior to what a higher-current 845 is capable of.
In fact, the 845 requires high current everywhere to operate well. I
fall off my chair laughing when I see idiots waste their money on
driving 845 with 12AX7. It is absolutely essential for overcoming
Miller capacitance, as well as to have a decently "fast"-sounding amp
(a matter of bandwidth, if you want to be technical) that the driver of
the 845 has a *minimum* of 20mA on the plate. The RDH is almost silent
on this matter. The easiest handle on calculating this is the slew rate
formulae I have published on RAT before this. The formulatae and logic
may also be on my netsite in The KISS Amp 300B materials.
Between them, these considerations fix the negative bias required and
the necessity of driving the 845 with lots of clean power.
With these operating conditions (1040V plate, 80mA) you need 300V of
ptp signal swing for full power. Best of all is a 300B driver which can
deliver 150V peak without breaking sweat. Trioded pentodes are also
good.
A good input/voltage gain tube (with a 300B driver) is my favourite
417A but anything that will take 8mA plus on the plate and is very,
very linear will do; a 6SN7, and even better in SRPP, provides a
cooler, more balanced sound but I don't imagine anyone builds an
expensive 845 amp because he has an arid outlook on life...The quality
improves beyond ecstatic when you load the driver with a CCS; a good
choice is the EL84 (I actually use Svet's SV83) in Alan Kimmel's mu
stage, details from the net or your Glass Audio archive. A choke load
on the 300B driver plate is also a thing of beauty but probably an
unnecessary expense.
Fixed bias gives better bass but unbalances the sound. Fixed bias
stinks on 845.
It is essential for silence to load the 845 plate with a 10K primary
impedance on a beefy OPT, capable of handling all the current and then
some. Your average tranny available off the shelf just dies the death.
This is one reason why more people don't build 845, that custom iron
costs plenty. (A good 211 tranny has even more rigorous requirements,
believe it or not. The only reason the Ongaku works at all, never mind
so well, is because Kondo is a brilliant transformer designer. And, at
that, Peter Qvortrup told me that Kondo himself prefers a PP all
transformer coupled version of his 211...)
Beyond SE, which is good for almost 20W of very clean hedonism under
the conditions described, 845 make wonderful PP amps for the
cognoscenti and the rich who fancy they need more than enough power,
just to have it because they can afford to pay for it. I'm not knocking
Patrick's customer; perhaps I play my panels at a lower level than he
uses whatever speakers he prefers. It is however noticeable from the
net and private correspondence that many who start with SE 845
eventually end up with PP 845. For myself, 19W SE 845 drove my Quad
ESL-63 superbly.
My speculation is that PP 845 is so desirable to this finicky crowd
because it has the same right sound as the Class A1 ZNFB SE 845 -- but
even more so. You see, you can build PP 845 to deliver very substantial
power in Class A with zero, nil, nada negative feedback. All you need
is the experience and insight to specify it and a connection to a
willing winder, which Patrick's bloke already has.
Now that I've lifted a small corner of the veil over how the fortunate
few play their music, here is a tip for the rest of us: A broken or
worn 845 in which the filament still works makes a super bedside table
lamp.
HTH.
Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
"wonderfully well written and reasoned information
for the tube audio constructor"
John Broskie TubeCAD & GlassWare
"an unbelievably comprehensive web site
containing vital gems of wisdom"
Stuart Perry Hi-Fi News & Record Review
Jon Yaeger
at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/28/05 7:20 PM:
>
>
> As a student I took one of those 99 dollar (it is said every time I
> mention this that those tickets always were 199 dollars -- my memory of
> 99 bucks in the middle 1960s is firm) go anywhere one way for six
> months Greyhound bus tours through the highways and byways of America.
> My love of America and Americans stem from that as much as from the
> many great Americans I met in later years. I started and ended in
> Durham because I had connections among the people studying the
> paranormal at Duke, so I spent a lot of that bus tour in the South and
> generally on or near the East Coast, with just a couple of big sweeps
> through the mid-West and the West Coast.
Apologies for focusing on the non-tube section of your post.
I don't know if the Rhine Center is still extant. I used to communicate
with J.B.'s daughter; they offered workshops at Duke from time to time.
Haven't received an e-mail in quite some time. Most of my immediate family
has settled in Durham so I get up there regularly.
My interest in the psi field arose from having experienced many OOBEs and
other phenomenon. I built a very stable hemisync generator in the early 80s
using a crystal-controlled PLL oscillator, variable in 1 Hz. steps. It
still works. Loaned it to a retired SF buddy who is experimenting with it
of late. His current interest is in using SF Army techniques to maximize
potential and performance in the private sector.
Most folks poo-poo these things but experience is better than theory. With
audio & tubes as well!
Jon
Karl
Andre Jute wrote:
> The 845 likes high current. Around 80mA is a good operating point;
And:
> It is essential for silence to load the 845 plate with a 10K primary
> impedance on a beefy OPT, capable of handling all the current and then
> some. Your average tranny available off the shelf just dies the death.
I'm not familiar with a lot of transformers, but I looked at Hammond's
site and saw this page:
http://www.hammondmfg.com/1627.htm
The last three OPT's on the list are suggested for the 845. Based on
the given specs would you choose the last one, then? Is the 90ma peak
listed too close to the 80ma operating point? What about the specs for
the other two?
Andre Jute
> in article 1135815650....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, Andre Jute
> at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/28/05 7:20 PM:
> >
> > As a student I took one of those 99 dollar (it is said every time I
> > mention this that those tickets always were 199 dollars -- my memory of
> > 99 bucks in the middle 1960s is firm) go anywhere one way for six
> > months Greyhound bus tours through the highways and byways of America.
> > My love of America and Americans stem from that as much as from the
> > many great Americans I met in later years. I started and ended in
> > Durham because I had connections among the people studying the
> > paranormal at Duke, so I spent a lot of that bus tour in the South and
> > generally on or near the East Coast, with just a couple of big sweeps
> > through the mid-West and the West Coast.
>
> Apologies for focusing on the non-tube section of your post.
Nah, this is the right place to discuss where you go if you're careless
with kilovolt tubes, even with more standard tube voltages.
I'm afraid my interest in the paranormal was always small and personal;
my connection was not my own interest but that of a favourite teacher
who hoped I would join him when I graduated but I was already spoken
for by the head of the department, and anyway I had been told by
newspaper editors and ad agencies with their eye on me to study
motivational psychology rather than esoterica. The personal interest
arose because our house, St John Palace (not quite what you think, no
crennellations, more an extended italianate villa), was famously
haunted by star crossed lovers who had their heads blown off with a
shotgun by the jealous husband in the 1890s, who then kept the bodies
under the windowseats in what was later my mother's sewingroom. My
brothers and I used to put string across the passages for the ghosts to
trip over and glasses of water for them to knock over.
> I don't know if the Rhine Center is still extant.
It opened maybe a year or two before I went there but it was called
something much more pompous than the straighforward "Rhine Center";
before that it was a department of the psych faculty at Duke since
before the war.
>I used to communicate
> with J.B.'s daughter; they offered workshops at Duke from time to time.
I met the old man but not the daughter. We didn't discuss his studies
except that he wanted to know what I studied and how our servants
reacted to the ghost in my parents' house; he was amused by my
apprenticeship to a Zulu witchdoctor. We talked about fundraising in
industry, something I already knew about (my family isn't only
scholarly, they are in business and politics as well) and he clearly
didn't know the first thing about. His was a magnetic personalty. What
I remember best from over forty years ago is that he talked some about
the correct attitude to the negativity of professional statisticians
which later, when I made a spectacular living out of statistical trades
(much of what one does in a large marketing organization, including the
better big ad agencies, depends on an understanding of statistical
data), came in handy.
> Haven't received an e-mail in quite some time. Most of my immediate family
> has settled in Durham so I get up there regularly.
One of the most civilized cities in America to live. (And without the
miserable weather of the college towns further north.) You can shove NY
and LA, in both of which I lived on and off for a few years, and I hear
SF is no longer as agreeable as I found it; most of my American friends
have now moved to Seattle or even all the way to Canada.
> My interest in the psi field arose from having experienced many OOBEs and
> other phenomenon. I built a very stable hemisync generator in the early 80s
> using a crystal-controlled PLL oscillator, variable in 1 Hz. steps. It
> still works. Loaned it to a retired SF buddy who is experimenting with it
> of late. His current interest is in using SF Army techniques to maximize
> potential and performance in the private sector.
My interest never went as far as electronic devices. But in my motor
and powerboat racing days I did have a few out of body experiences on
various stretchers and operating tables. But they were all of the
trivial floating above table looking down on myself kind; no action, no
result, no exterior influence, just a memory. Two, of marginally more
interest, happened on the Iditarod trail in Alaska. While I was
scouting it prior to the run my pilot had to put the plane down on a
large shard of ice floating in a river and I got so cold (the only
heating was the pan of oil we burned under the engine to be able to
take off again after he fixed whatever was wrong) that I clocked out. I
saw a Muslim's paradise peopled by women I had long since forgotten
(not a guilt reflex as I pride myself on being kindly remembered by
women). My editor later cut that from my book Iditarod as too fanciful.
A mate of mine who also was frozen unconscious when he fell off my ship
in the Southern Ocean in the Cape Town to Rio race, and we took some
time sailing Rowlandson figures of eight to find him (I didn't dare not
bring his body home; his mother knew my mother and I'd never hear the
end of it), didn't see anything, though we hoped to hear something
interesting as he was a notorious womanizer. On the other occasion I
had an out of body experience, some guys who were supposed to be
training me, for a practical joke sent me to fetch the post only 75
miles away but "forgot" to pack food for the huskies and "lost" my
compass. Fucking huskies wanted to eat me, fucking elk wanted to stomp
me and got really nasty after I failed to kill it with my first shot
(you've never met a shot as bad as me; I've been in guerilla wars where
the commander refused to let me carry firearms), finally, with a wolf's
fangs only inches from my throat, and me wondering if anyone would
believe a prayer from me, I saw myself on the snow with my family,
including a favourite but dead grandmother, standing around me. With
the last of my strength I reached my knife and ripped out that wolf's
stomach ("for not using a stronger mouthwash" I said later) and rolled
against the sled before the rest of the pack could get on me; I still
have a toothmark on my wrist but not from a wolf, from a goddamn
huskie. I didn't think this was funny. When I finally got back to the
training camp, in a sorry state and very pissed off, as you can
imagine, I sat on the berm and shot out all the windows, and their
radio through a window, then shot at those clowns whenever they tried
to go take shit. When the lady administrator of Alaska -- they don't or
at least didn't then have a governor, or if they did I never heard it
mentioned; the lady seemed to be in charge of everything -- came to see
how I was going, these jokers were kneedeep in shit and frozen piss (I
put a few bullets into their heating boiler as well) and I was living
comfortably in a tent with a cook and a valet and a huge fire and all
their food ("I ate their lunch!") because the Eskimo servants took one
look at how badly I shot and decided not to become collateral damage
for so little pay; even the huskies (except those who survived our
brush with the wolves, who preferred Wendigo the evil forest spirit to
me) decided to come live with me. The gratuities I gave the Eskimo
before I was hauled to Juneau to be dressed down for shooting up
mushers temporarily on the government payroll amounted to a year's
salary for each of them; the government was exploiting them. I used
that to escape punishment, glancing often at my newly-arrived camera
team in their van outside the window and smiling gently while I hinted
that the charming publicist could as easily grow a social conscience
and expose them as exploiters of indigenous peoples as promote their
major tourist attraction.
> Most folks poo-poo these things but experience is better than theory. With
> audio & tubes as well!
I live in wonder and I don't judge until some idiot puts himself in my
face. But I think ESP was proven to exist, both by Dr Rhine (who
famously refused to admit "belief" in ESP, equating it with faith in
religion) and by some Russian experiments that seemed at time, and
still, to me to be kosher; whether ESP skills are predictable and
controllable or common enough to be of practical use even to the
military, who don't count cost, is an entirely different matter. The
problem is that ESP was discredited by premature publicity, so that
largescale studies are now nowhere conducted that I know of. I don't
take the same benevolent view of out of body experiences; I don't think
that, as is often claimed, they prove an afterlife; they could just be
tricks of a mind halfconscious and under severe stress, some kind of an
ur-instinct or even a chemical hallucination generated by an extra shot
of serotonin or kerotonin in the brain, in the same way the mind is
chemically protected against the intolerable nightmare by a shot of
reality so that you half know it is only nightmare. (This, as can be
seen, is given under the qualification that I don't know much about
these things and haven't kept up with the literature, in fact didn't
read much of it in the first instance.)
> Jon
While we're getting back up to speed on tube matters, tell us about
your out of body experiences.
Andre Jute
Andre Jute
I don't have any Hammonds right now but they build a good transformer
for the price; in effect guitar players have paid for the development
work and the skill and experience of their designers so that hi-fi folk
get a bargain from Hammond.
I would have no problem with the 90mA rating of the 1638SEA for 80mA
845. What I meant by "and then some" is not to use a less than beefy
tranny; some manufacturers have wishful ratings on lightweight trx but
an 11 pound tranny rated at 90mA seems reasonable enough. (For
comparison I have a Menno van der Veen cost no object custom 5K 193mA
peak toroid which weighs around 20 pounds) It is silly to buy a 200mA
rating tranny if you're only going to put 80mA quiescent through it.
"It'll never get past the knee of the BH curve" -- but I'll leave
someone else to explain that horridly complicated little detail to you.
The key is to buy only as much output transformer as you really need;
too much is almost as bad as too little. The 1638SEA seems to me the
one designed specifically for 845.
About the other two:
-- The 1642SE is the same thing intended for parallel 845 or even three
abreast but for three abreast it would go better with the 211 tube
which doesn't have quite the same sound but likes a plate impedance of
15K or so; it's primary use, considering the 300mA rated capability,
seems to me to be the higher current 572.
-- The 1629SEA at 6K5 is not a prime choice for 845, not to me anyway;
I suspect it is in the Hammond list primarily for use with the
pentodes.
Patrick Turner
Andre Jute wrote:
> Jon Yaeger wrote:
> > in article 1135815650....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, Andre Jute
> > at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/28/05 7:20 PM:
snip a vast amount of entertaining stuff about after death experiences...
Australia's richest man, Kerry Packer, died a few days ago,
for at least the second time, maybe he died 3 times, but
when he "died" first time the medics brought him back to life.
He was able to say quite plainly "there is nothing out there,
I know, I went there", so when your'e supposed to be dead, you are un-dead,
and for at least one dude, there was no "beautiful religious experience"
which fills in between being relatively slightly un-alive and so dead you are
unable to be naturally revived and the brain has begun to decompose.
So it seems deadness is an in-between state, and starvation
of oxygen and lack of real world consciousness simply
manufactures a weird experience which is clearly remembered
when one is brought around by HV applied to the chest region to restart a heart.
If only we could remember our dreams.
We'd have much more to be happy or frightened about if we did.
Certainly, while dreaming, we meet the best sort of ppl,
and the worst.
> While we're getting back up to speed on tube matters, tell us about
> your out of body experiences.
I guess as a single man I have currently run out of out of body experiences,
since Nicole and Kylie only visit in cooler climes, being
cool dames.....
But my lawns will need another mow in autumn,
and despite the bickering of those two dames over whose turn it is to
mow the front yard so the local bloke passerbies can give em a whistle
from the car windows, I am looking forward to in-body experiences
after summer's drought quite soon.
And regarding travel at 100mph between Darwin and Adelaide,
allow me to say I never had the urge to do that.
One young bull says to another, "lets run down and fuck
those two nice cows down there."
The older bull says, "why?, let's just walk down and fuck all the cows."
I may have said once that a wise old sage will recommend
walking around a mountain to get to the top, rather than straight
up one side in haste, and down so fast you fall over and remove bark
off the shins.
The walking around will allow one to better experience the mountain,
the views, weather, and wild flowers, and perhaps bonk
a stray mountain maid inclined, but running up and over to
usually see if one is faster than another man is only exciting,
brief, and vain.
A modern 99 ft long yacht with canting keel just broke the record for
the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
These tycoons spend vast millions to get a sail boat to
go 630 miles in 1day and 18 hrs.
What speed!, but even a yacht can have one realize how
small Australia is.
They have an engine running all the time to work the hydraulic winches,
and cant the keel.
Big deal. Why not allow motorized oars to be used?
Of course winning the race on handicap is much more difficult,
and a much bigger achievement, especially if you set out in a
20ft yacht.
Hiring the Cutty Sark for the race would be somewhat
more stylish than all that carbon fibre without
a comfortable toilet and a decent bar.
845 usage?
Alas we may wait long for serious contributions,
but carelessness around 845 circuits can lead to serious deadness,
and probably without any in or out of body experiences.
If one is electrocuted to death with 1,450V including
Ea and the cathode bias, then it might be unusual to recover....
Somehow I reckon the stray currents right through the brain
during fierce sustained current flow from arm to arm would
definately interfere with brain patterns which create the
out of body experiences that ppl have, when the brain
says to itself, "mate, we is stuffed, so let's put on one last show
for this guy before I decompose."
I am not dying to find outabout such shows.
The last guy I saw die did it while he played chess.
He just just slumped, and croaked, and then he pissed himself,
no pain, no struggle, drama, or even a smile to indicate
it was nice experience.
Unfortunately, the board got knocked over, and the
killer move was never recorded.
Patrick Turner.
Jon Yaeger
at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/29/05 1:31 AM:
*** Were you able to trip them up? There was a haunted house near Emory U.
that belonged to the Emory Women's Club. Our fraternity was housed there
after a fire destroyed the frat, ironically caused by the fire alarm itself.
Sometimes the bro's would see one door open and another close with no one
seen passing through. My best friend at the time stayed there on breaks and
was visited by the "ghost" on three occasions. He said the ghost yelled at
him . . .
A couple of years later the fraternity left and it became a
bed-and-breakfast. Jimmy Carter used to stay there often before the Carter
Center was built. I had the pleasure of dating the caretaker, who lived in
an attic apartment. On time all of the doors starting opening and shutting.
Not being the sort to confront an intruder unarmed, I called the county and
college police. They were there within a minute and searched from top to
bottom and found nothing. 10 minutes after they left, the racket started
again. Sometimes I was sure that I could feel the spectral presence. It
was cold and distinctly malevolent or unhappy. Maybe he was upset about the
upstairs banging and did his best to reciprocate.
Unfortunately, the young lady haunted me more than the ghost ever could.
>
>> I don't know if the Rhine Center is still extant.
>
> It opened maybe a year or two before I went there but it was called
> something much more pompous than the straighforward "Rhine Center";
> before that it was a department of the psych faculty at Duke since
> before the war.
>
>> I used to communicate
>> with J.B.'s daughter; they offered workshops at Duke from time to time.
>
> I met the old man but not the daughter. We didn't discuss his studies
> except that he wanted to know what I studied and how our servants
> reacted to the ghost in my parents' house; he was amused by my
> apprenticeship to a Zulu witchdoctor.
*** That's interesting. How about tit for tat?
We talked about fundraising in
> industry, something I already knew about (my family isn't only
> scholarly, they are in business and politics as well) and he clearly
> didn't know the first thing about. His was a magnetic personalty. What
> I remember best from over forty years ago is that he talked some about
> the correct attitude to the negativity of professional statisticians
> which later, when I made a spectacular living out of statistical trades
> (much of what one does in a large marketing organization, including the
> better big ad agencies, depends on an understanding of statistical
> data), came in handy.
>
>> Haven't received an e-mail in quite some time. Most of my immediate family
>> has settled in Durham so I get up there regularly.
>
> One of the most civilized cities in America to live. (And without the
> miserable weather of the college towns further north.) You can shove NY
> and LA, in both of which I lived on and off for a few years, and I hear
> SF is no longer as agreeable as I found it; most of my American friends
> have now moved to Seattle or even all the way to Canada.
*** It's still a bit "rustic" in a Southern way for me. My sister works
at Duke and keeps her brain cells firing.
*** Are you familiar with the Army's PKULTRA program? Or remote viewing
research? Taxpayers unknowingly spent a lot on these projects.
>
>> Jon
>
> While we're getting back up to speed on tube matters, tell us about
> your out of body experiences.
*** I remember my first one well. I was at the American Farm School in
Thessaloniki, Greece, building a road in a small village as a goodwill
project during the summer of 1973. I was taking an afternoon nap, and
having an unusually lucid dream. I was floating just above the heads of
people at a Greek movie theatre, watching a Greek movie. The stage was
green and there were red fire extinguishers on either side of the stage. I
then said to myself, "I don't want to have a bad trip back" I had the
sensation of flying through the air and merging with my body. I couldn't
move or wake up until the vibrations stopped.
I've had countless experiences since then, but one or two stand out. I was
visiting a girlfriend in college; we had an identical "dream." Then her
roommate woke up and asked her to ask me to leave the room.
Another time I visited another girlfriends home (that I had never visited)
and later described her older sister, the layout of the living room and the
various pictures on the wall. These were confirmed by her and then by me in
person.
I'm not trying to convince anyone else that these experiences are real, but
they are darn sure real to me! Ever read the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book
of the Dead? Very interesting perspective on this OOBE stuff.
>
> Andre Jute
>
Andre Jute
> in article 1135837893....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, Andre Jute
> at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/29/05 1:31 AM:
>
> > Jon Yaeger wrote:
>> Andre Jute
> >> at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/28/05 7:20 PM:
> > arose because our house, St John Palace (not quite what you think, no
> > crennellations, more an extended italianate villa), was famously
> > haunted by star crossed lovers who had their heads blown off with a
> > shotgun by the jealous husband in the 1890s, who then kept the bodies
> > under the windowseats in what was later my mother's sewingroom. My
> > brothers and I used to put string across the passages for the ghosts to
> > trip over and glasses of water for them to knock over.
>
> *** Were you able to trip them up?
No. Nor did they knock over the glasses of water. We heard them walk
down a long passageway and heard their voices indistinctly. There was
no wind. My hometown lay in a desert (you wouldn't recognize it as such
because it is irrigated and under tobacco and fruit trees, but it is a
desert nonetheless) in a valley between high mountains: no wind.
Anyway, the stableblocks at the back would have blocked any wind. Nor
was it a creaky old house in the American tradition of haunted houses.
There was nothing to creak. The walls were bricks and fitted stone four
feet thick to keep the heat out and the floors were mosaics laid by
Italian craftsmen, i.e. solid ceramic on concrete, not wood. Many
visitors heard the sounds. Nobody ever saw anything. Nobody in the
family or guests ever feared these ghosts.
>There was a haunted house near Emory U.
> that belonged to the Emory Women's Club. Our fraternity was housed there
I was housed in the woman's residence anyway. I merely had a postal
address at my own for the faculty and the administration and the police
not to find me at when they wanted me to answer for something I hadn't
done, of course. What was wrong with you guys that you had to wait for
a fire to move you over?
> after a fire destroyed the frat, ironically caused by the fire alarm itself.
You see what I mean about living in wonder? It's the bizarre details
that make life worth a giggle!
> Sometimes the bro's would see one door open and another close with no one
> seen passing through. My best friend at the time stayed there on breaks and
> was visited by the "ghost" on three occasions. He said the ghost yelled at
> him . . .
I had an old reel-to-reel recorder, nothing professional, possibly a
Tandberg (suitable for recording a church choir?), but it failed to
record the sounds we heard clearly.
> A couple of years later the fraternity left and it became a
> bed-and-breakfast. Jimmy Carter used to stay there often before the Carter
> Center was built. I had the pleasure of dating the caretaker, who lived in
> an attic apartment. On time all of the doors starting opening and shutting.
> Not being the sort to confront an intruder unarmed, I called the county and
> college police. They were there within a minute and searched from top to
> bottom and found nothing. 10 minutes after they left, the racket started
> again. Sometimes I was sure that I could feel the spectral presence. It
> was cold and distinctly malevolent or unhappy. Maybe he was upset about the
> upstairs banging and did his best to reciprocate.
A jealous ghost? You know, of course, that the investigators of
domestic flying objects uniquely associated with disturbed teens have
often speculated that the cause is malicious envy, jealousy and related
sub-Freudian causes. They can always easily prove in the reported cases
that the child is disturbed, even if they have no luck photographing
the poltergeist in the act or fixing the link experimentally.
> >> I used to communicate
> >> with J.B.'s daughter; they offered workshops at Duke from time to time.
> >
> > I met the old man but not the daughter. We didn't discuss his studies
> > except that he wanted to know what I studied and how our servants
> > reacted to the ghost in my parents' house; he was amused by my
> > apprenticeship to a Zulu witchdoctor.
>
> *** That's interesting. How about tit for tat?
I had connections to the Zulu, for instance I had gone through their
manhood rites. I'm a blood brother of several of their current leaders.
So, when some British eejit (South Africans were never insular; my
university, the birthplace of apartheid, had an official policy of
hiring teachers from around the world) suggested we should study native
medicine, some other ignoramuses confused it with homeopathy. I knew
better. I suggested, with a barely straight face, that I should
apprentice to a Zulu witchdoctor. While those who'd been in-country
longest laughed with hands in front of their mouths at my joke, the
well-meaning ignorant applauded loudly. So, fortified by a fat
scholarship (I bought an Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III *and* made an entire
feature film called Visitante out of it!), I went off to play polo in
Zululand. The witchdoctor, who got his orders from the royal hut, gave
me a bye for umpteen credits but a supervisor turned up with an
interpreter for the passing-out tests. Behind my back the witchdoctor
told this guy that he taught me to cast a mean spell (this was a lie --
I learned from his father many years before) and the supervisor wanted
a demonstration, so I gave him a painful and irritating rash in a
private place. He was pissed off, not because of the rash, but because,
"Jesus Christ, Andre, how the fuck can I stand up in front of the
Senate and tell them we should cum you because you gave me pimples on
my balls? They'll laugh both of us out of the room, not least for the
pun." I chuckled dutifully at his joke, shrugged, and went off
ice-skating in Durban a couple of hundred miles away with a girl I met
casting for my little movie; I knew he would find a way to ensure my
laudes. What he and the doped-up witchdoctor concocted in my absence
was truly horrifying; he because he was ignorant, the witchdoctor
because he inhaled so much marijuana (with which I paid him for my
apprenticeship) that he was careless of the consequences of fucking
with me. I could do small-scale, personal "witchcraft"; any
accomplished psychologist can give an impressionable a twitch. But what
these two cooked up as final test nearly killed me by thirst and
starvation. They parked me in front of a derelict hut miles from
anywhere people knew me as a friend of the main men, in the sun. All I
had to do was use my mind to persuade women, working in fields so
distant that I could barely make them out, to bring me food and water.
I didn't succeed until the third day... I was in hospital for another
three with sunburn. I wrecked the witchdoctor's career for his
stupidity but let the other guy run; he was just ignorant.
I hate to disappoint you but a witchdoctor doesn't do anything a
psychologist doesn't. He just has some mumbo jumbo for sleight of hand.
And he uses herbs instead of artificially made chemicals. (The rash on
the balls of the supervisor was caused by some carefully planted hints
about his sexual habits and an infusion in his beer; he did it with his
own mind, helped by "homeopathy"!) And, because he doesn't have a
professional body muttering about behaving professionally, a
witchdoctor gets away with shit which could get a professional
disbarred, like forecasting the future (invariably accurately because
he does it to impressionables who then move heaven and earth to make
his prediction come true). The difference between a witchdoctor and a
good psychologist is not magic but showmanship.
>>I think ESP was proven to exist, both by Dr Rhine (who
> > famously refused to admit "belief" in ESP, equating it with faith in
> > religion) and by some Russian experiments that seemed at time, and
> > still, to me to be kosher; whether ESP skills are predictable and
> > controllable or common enough to be of practical use even to the
> > military, who don't count cost, is an entirely different matter. The
> > problem is that ESP was discredited by premature publicity, so that
> > largescale studies are now nowhere conducted that I know of. I don't
> > take the same benevolent view of out of body experiences; I don't think
> > that, as is often claimed, they prove an afterlife; they could just be
> > tricks of a mind halfconscious and under severe stress, some kind of an
> > ur-instinct or even a chemical hallucination generated by an extra shot
> > of serotonin or kerotonin in the brain, in the same way the mind is
> > chemically protected against the intolerable nightmare by a shot of
> > reality so that you half know it is only nightmare. (This, as can be
> > seen, is given under the qualification that I don't know much about
> > these things and haven't kept up with the literature, in fact didn't
> > read much of it in the first instance.)
>
> *** Are you familiar with the Army's PKULTRA program? Or remote viewing
> research? Taxpayers unknowingly spent a lot on these projects.
PKULTRA rings a very vague bell. I didn't know it was ongoing. I know
something -- gossip, really -- about the remote viewing progamme's
results; basically they tried to duplicate Russian studies and were
disappointed though one presumes they tried to put spin on the failure.
When I worked in advertising we owned a psych consulting firm in Boston
which I had bought (unknowingly, actually) as part of an agency group
we took over. It did a lot of work for the Navy in which I took a
interest whenever I had time, which wasn't often, but that was mainly
studies in safety ergonomics, down-to-earth stuff like the colour of
the high visibility stripe across the back of a carrier; we saved a lot
of trainee pilot lives. I loved the guys at the Pentagon: anything in
the world you wanted an expert on, there was a major in the Pentagon
who burned to tell you all about it; modest, hardworking, scholarly,
very, very intelligent patriots (and, generally, I instantly distrust a
patriot of any stripe as a danger to peace).
> > While we're getting back up to speed on tube matters, tell us about
> > your out of body experiences.
>
> *** I remember my first one well. I was at the American Farm School in
> Thessaloniki, Greece, building a road in a small village as a goodwill
> project during the summer of 1973. I was taking an afternoon nap, and
> having an unusually lucid dream. I was floating just above the heads of
> people at a Greek movie theatre, watching a Greek movie. The stage was
> green and there were red fire extinguishers on either side of the stage. I
> then said to myself, "I don't want to have a bad trip back" I had the
> sensation of flying through the air and merging with my body. I couldn't
> move or wake up until the vibrations stopped.
Did you see the theatre before? If not, did you check the vivid
particulars. like the fire extinguishers? Were you in an earth tremor
region?
> I've had countless experiences since then, but one or two stand out. I was
> visiting a girlfriend in college; we had an identical "dream." Then her
> roommate woke up and asked her to ask me to leave the room.
Out of body, as in expelled (in both senses!), sure. But OOBE? You're
stretching a point.
> Another time I visited another girlfriends home (that I had never visited)
> and later described her older sister, the layout of the living room and the
> various pictures on the wall. These were confirmed by her and then by me in
> person.
>
> I'm not trying to convince anyone else that these experiences are real, but
> they are darn sure real to me!
The problem of the researchers isn't the reality for the subject but
replication and observation. We take a lot of speculation in
astrophysics on faith. I don't see why we cannot cut the ESP guys the
same slack. After all, the greenies have instituted wishful thinking as
a form of "science". The ESP guys have a far more scientific claim on
our tolerance than the greenies, and are cheaper too.
> Ever read the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book
> of the Dead? Very interesting perspective on this OOBE stuff.
Nah, I'm not that keen; when I was of an age to be credulous I was very
busy and now I am of an age where I wonder if I would really rather not
know. My speed is anyway more hard-edged material like A N Wilson's
"Jesus", which I found on the shelf outside my bathroom door; the
publisher must have sent it to me when it was published. My reading is
almost entirely thrillers, farce when I can get it (not often now that
Tom Sharpe is retired), technical materials, biography, history, and
the harder-edged philosophical stuff when it is well-written enough to
qualify as literature. If I want speculation I can supply it myself or
ask someone to give me the executive summary; if I don't know the
fellow who wrote the book, a single phone call usually gets me an
introduction.
Andre Jute
Jon Yaeger
at fiu...@yahoo.com wrote on 12/29/05 7:38 PM:
*** One of my Rotarian friends, a lawyer and judge, had an old house he
just sold to the Historical Society. He claimed that he would see the Bible
suspend in mid-air and drop to the floor, among other phenomenon.
*** Some people saw the ghost in the Houston Mill House; it was allegedly
the original builder and inhabitant. He appeared more frequently to
children.
>> There was a haunted house near Emory U.
>> that belonged to the Emory Women's Club. Our fraternity was housed there
>
> I was housed in the woman's residence anyway. I merely had a postal
> address at my own for the faculty and the administration and the police
> not to find me at when they wanted me to answer for something I hadn't
> done, of course. What was wrong with you guys that you had to wait for
> a fire to move you over?
*** We were never very socially adept, which should be apparent from my
posts . . .
>
>> after a fire destroyed the frat, ironically caused by the fire alarm itself.
>
> You see what I mean about living in wonder? It's the bizarre details
> that make life worth a giggle!
*** Wonderful irony. However, the fire alarm company wasn't amused when
the insurance company subrogated and sued them for more than 1 million.
>
>> Sometimes the bro's would see one door open and another close with no one
>> seen passing through. My best friend at the time stayed there on breaks and
>> was visited by the "ghost" on three occasions. He said the ghost yelled at
>> him . . .
>
> I had an old reel-to-reel recorder, nothing professional, possibly a
> Tandberg (suitable for recording a church choir?), but it failed to
> record the sounds we heard clearly.
>
>> A couple of years later the fraternity left and it became a
>> bed-and-breakfast. Jimmy Carter used to stay there often before the Carter
>> Center was built. I had the pleasure of dating the caretaker, who lived in
>> an attic apartment. On time all of the doors starting opening and shutting.
>> Not being the sort to confront an intruder unarmed, I called the county and
>> college police. They were there within a minute and searched from top to
>> bottom and found nothing. 10 minutes after they left, the racket started
>> again. Sometimes I was sure that I could feel the spectral presence. It
>> was cold and distinctly malevolent or unhappy. Maybe he was upset about the
>> upstairs banging and did his best to reciprocate.
>
> A jealous ghost? You know, of course, that the investigators of
> domestic flying objects uniquely associated with disturbed teens have
> often speculated that the cause is malicious envy, jealousy and related
> sub-Freudian causes. They can always easily prove in the reported cases
> that the child is disturbed, even if they have no luck photographing
> the poltergeist in the act or fixing the link experimentally.
*** Tangentially, a vet I know swears that neurotic pets simply reflect
dysfunction in the family that they live in; that there is a one-to-one
correspondence.
*** You are lucky that you didn't apprentice with the Kalahari. I remember
that they split open the penises of the novices with a knife and then made
the boys squat over a fire. (Colin Turnbull)
*** I did see a movie in Athens, but I couldn't tell if it was the same.
If not, did you check the vivid
> particulars. like the fire extinguishers?
*** No
Were you in an earth tremor
> region?
*** No, lots of people with OOBEs report the same kinds of vibration.
Seems to be part and parcel of the experience for most.
>
>> I've had countless experiences since then, but one or two stand out. I was
>> visiting a girlfriend in college; we had an identical "dream." Then her
>> roommate woke up and asked her to ask me to leave the room.
>
> Out of body, as in expelled (in both senses!), sure. But OOBE? You're
> stretching a point.
*** Well, I didn't provide a blow-by-blow description. I thought it would
be more discreet to leave gaping holes in the tale. Suffice it to say that
she/we did things we didn't do in "real life"; her dream experience was
identical and she told me that she woke up aroused. I followed her to the
bathroom (and waited outside) and when she came back to the room she said
she felt my presence like static on a sweater. Freaked me out later,
actually.
>
>> Another time I visited another girlfriends home (that I had never visited)
>> and later described her older sister, the layout of the living room and the
>> various pictures on the wall. These were confirmed by her and then by me in
>> person.
>>
>> I'm not trying to convince anyone else that these experiences are real, but
>> they are darn sure real to me!
>
> The problem of the researchers isn't the reality for the subject but
> replication and observation. We take a lot of speculation in
> astrophysics on faith. I don't see why we cannot cut the ESP guys the
> same slack. After all, the greenies have instituted wishful thinking as
> a form of "science". The ESP guys have a far more scientific claim on
> our tolerance than the greenies, and are cheaper too.
*** I was never good enough to get repeatability in my experiments, either.
Often I'd end up somewhere totally strange.
>
>> Ever read the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book
>> of the Dead? Very interesting perspective on this OOBE stuff.
>
> Nah, I'm not that keen; when I was of an age to be credulous I was very
> busy and now I am of an age where I wonder if I would really rather not
> know. My speed is anyway more hard-edged material like A N Wilson's
> "Jesus", which I found on the shelf outside my bathroom door; the
> publisher must have sent it to me when it was published. My reading is
> almost entirely thrillers, farce when I can get it (not often now that
> Tom Sharpe is retired), technical materials, biography, history, and
> the harder-edged philosophical stuff when it is well-written enough to
> qualify as literature. If I want speculation I can supply it myself or
> ask someone to give me the executive summary; if I don't know the
> fellow who wrote the book, a single phone call usually gets me an
> introduction.
*** I'm stuck on non-fiction. I'll enjoy an occasional novel such as "The
Second Coming". Perhaps I had my fill as an English major.
>
> Andre Jute
>
tomb...@jhu.edu
hear things that don't exist for normal people, they also see things
that don't exist for normal people.
Pooh Bear
tomb...@jhu.edu wrote:
Heck, if it doesn't exist, Andrew Joot will surely make it up to special
order !
Graham
Andre Jute
If an out of body experience (OOBE) is all you are punished with for
mishandling c1500V, count yourself luckier than breaking the roulette
wheel at Las Vegas. The likelihood is you will enter a permanent state
of death (not my pun -- the writer John Gardner, an ex-clergyman, first
made it). At the very least your back will be broken and you will have
very nasty burns; your central nervous system will very severely
damaged and you have every likelihood of ending up a drooling
vegetable. Death may be preferable.
Tubes are not a hobby for the squeamish. Or for the accident-prone.
Andre Jute
If you plant hairy footsteps, apply here
Patrick Turner
Andre Jute wrote:
I been takin risks all my days.
Those I took on a push bike were by far the biggest,
mixin it with semi trailers doin 100k right past me only inches away
when i trained, for years, dressed in skin tight lycra.
That was worse than my "tempry 'Strayan" risk
I took on a succession of motor cycles and some with side cars;
my how brave the girls were in '69.
Boxes full of hundreds of volts don't frighten me as much
as the power saws, angle grinders, routers and planers I used when I was a
builder.
But fear breeds respect.
But yeah, one definately needs the right sort of respect for things
that'll kill ya.
Patrick Turner.
Jon Yaeger
tomb...@jhu.edu at tomb...@jhu.edu wrote on 12/30/05 1:36 AM:
> So the lesson of this thread is that audio geeks are not only able to
> hear things that don't exist for normal people, they also see things
> that don't exist for normal people.
>
Tom,
It would be erroneous to conclude that a part speaks for the whole. Don't
they teach you better than that at Johns Hopkins?
Jon
Stewart Pinkerton
>tomb...@jhu.edu wrote:
>> So the lesson of this thread is that audio geeks are not only able to
>> hear things that don't exist for normal people, they also see things
>> that don't exist for normal people.
>
>If an out of body experience (OOBE) is all you are punished with for
>mishandling c1500V, count yourself luckier than breaking the roulette
>wheel at Las Vegas. The likelihood is you will enter a permanent state
>of death (not my pun -- the writer John Gardner, an ex-clergyman, first
>made it). At the very least your back will be broken and you will have
>very nasty burns; your central nervous system will very severely
>damaged and you have every likelihood of ending up a drooling
>vegetable. Death may be preferable.
Aaaaah, so *that's* what happened...................
--
Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering
tomb...@jhu.edu
> in article 1135924588....@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com,
> tomb...@jhu.edu at tomb...@jhu.edu wrote on 12/30/05 1:36 AM:
>
> > So the lesson of this thread is that audio geeks are not only able to
> > hear things that don't exist for normal people, they also see things
> > that don't exist for normal people.
>
> they teach you better than that at Johns Hopkins?
It was just a little gentle kidding. No offense intended.
FWIW, I have no affiliation with jhu, other than using their forwarding
service and spam filter for my usenet carousing.
Jon Yaeger
tomb...@jhu.edu at tomb...@jhu.edu wrote on 12/30/05 5:05 PM:
I know. I was just giving you a hard time . . . .