exchemist

Thanks it was a Sonos product that the Richer Sounds guy suggested. But What Hi Fi gave it a bum review on sound quality, suggesting instead a Bluesound Node. What I still can't understand about these boxes is: a) whether they are transmitters to the house wi-fi, or receivers from the wi-fi that can power speakers. The comment about sound quality suggests they may amplify and they have socket outputs for things like sub woofers as well as inputs, both of which suggest they are receivers, which then leaves open the question of what you use to transmit a wi-fi signal from your stereo system, b) if they are indeed transmitters to the wi-fi, can they accept an analogue input from the tape monitor output of my amp?. The descriptions wax lyrical about digital inputs but that does not help. The write-ups assume a level of familiarity with the technology I don't have, and the manufacturers' website are worse. I'm reminded of Flanders and Swann's "Song of Reproduction". "I see you've got your negative feedback coupled in with your push-pull input-output. Take that across to your head-head pickup, to your tweeter, and you'll get wow on your top. You try to bring that down through your pre-amp rumble filter to your woofer and what'll you get? Flutter on your bottom!" That was 60s techie-speak. I'm experiencing 2020s techie-speak now. But this discussion has given me more clarity about the issues so thanks to you and @toucana for all the help. I think next I'll have to get on my bike to the Lower King's Road and beard the Richer Sounds chap in his den, now that I have at least a better idea about what it is I don't understand.

OK.

Oo-er, the needle on my nutcase detector has moved off its end stop now. What do you mean?

That’s odd. I thought you worked at Chatham. Or did you drive the crane for fun at weekends?

Heh heh. So you too bear the scars.

My experience was that IT systems in businesses evolved from custom-built versions in the 70s and 80s that were often disastrously expensive, due to trying to do too much and accommodate everyone, towards semi-standardised systems (for instance ERP systems like SAP) with a lot of knobs on that could be twiddled to fit, more or less, the needs of particular businesses but within a fixed overall scheme, to which the business had to adapt if it was not already following it. Quite a lot of businesses think they are unique, but a lot of that is balls. It's just that they have never properly analysed out how they work and compared themselves to others. But yes, the experience as a user (of SAP in my case) was we were effectively forced to use a new language for business processes and do things a certain way, demanded by the system. But it was, I have to admit, logical once you got your head round it.

Yes that's what I mean. While there are some reputable members whose profile has it disabled, every single person who I have suspected of being a spammer, troll or sockpuppet has also had it disabled. So for me it is a bit of warning indication.

I found this paper: https://webstatic.niwa.co.nz/library/rs365(1856)p1889.pdf which suggests that life could actually have been able to colonise both the land and the oceans in the presence of the UVC flux that would have reached the surface before there was a screening ozone layer. Iron once again features as one of several potential screening agents. Though it seems to be Fe(III) rather than Fe(II) they considered this time.

What has this to do with my post? I either know nor care what country the forum is "from". The members seems to be an international bunch. Some of the mods appear to be from N. America, but so what? I am British by the way. And you are - what? - a Russian troll? 😆

Thanks but I think I probably need wi-fi rather than bluetooth. The distance is ~12m (I have a 30ft knocked-through sitting/dining room) and of course it's the other side of a brick wall.

The phone business is another matter but yes indeed. The scammers are about the only people who come through on my landline these days so I answer, not by giving my name, but giving an olde worlde style phone number answer, using an imaginary phone exchange I invented called Nightingale. So I answer the landline with "Nightingale 7624" [number not my real one]. That foxes 'em. So then they have to ask me who I am, at which point I counter by demanding to know first who they are. So I have them returning my serve, rather than the other way round. The conversation spirals into the ground fairly quickly after that, as it is either some bogus organisation or else they claim to be a utility, e.g. BT or a bank, at which point I demand they confirm my account number to make sure they are speaking to the right account holder, which of course they don't have. But it give us oldies a reflex suspicion of strangers, which is a pity.

Yes those are the tape output sockets that @studiot was referring to. So yeah, I have a solution for the wi-fi transmitting end, by the look of it. Thanks.

Yes I could understand that but, seeing as we all have handles to anonymise us, I'm not sure why a record of anonymous people visiting your profile, where you are also anonymous, would constitute any kind of privacy concern. I see some well-respected members have selected this opt-out, so it's not just the problem people. Though I have yet to come across a problem person who has not selected this opt-out. Perhaps one of said well-respected members will see this thread and comment.

You've done this before, haven't you? And last time round you didn't engage in any discussion of the subject. Just like your behaviour on another forum I belong to.

Yeah it's a Rotel tuner/amp from the early 1980s. Model RX 403. Again, works fine so why replace? Connections are phono analogue, so I suppose that means RCA. And you are quite right: we have drifted way off-topic for this thread, thought it is an interesting subject in its own right. P.S. I see Rotel is still going today, though now Chinese owned.

Hang on, are you saying the tape output from my amp is signal level, not speaker power level? That could be the answer, then. I do in fact still have a tape player but never use it, so repurposing the tape output would be no loss. I could wire a wi-fi transmitter to the tape output, which would carry the signal from whatever device the amp was currently switched to. So then I just need a wi-fi receiver in the kitchen with an amp to generate a power level output for the speakers, or I buy a pair of active speakers that use a wi-fi signal - those are readily available, it seems. (If I did that I'd still keep the Dentons, for sentimental reasons - they have followed me faithfully throughout my adult life and still sound pretty decent. I'll just carry on using them in the living room, where they are now. And the spare set of speakers will then be the ones from my wife, currently wired up in the piano room upstairs, though very rarely used.)

I'm curious to understand why it is that some members seem to have this section on their profile disabled? I have observed what seems to be a loose correlation between those that have this disabled and those that turn out to be, shall we say, less than reliable participants: sockpuppets of previously banned members, people with trollish tendencies, cranks, spammers and so forth. Why is this feature optional and what reasons might there be for a member to want to have it disabled?

This cocky, aggressive tone of yours is something of a red flag. Serious scientists don't speak like that when their ideas are subjected to scrutiny. Trying to push a scientific theory like a foot-in-the-door vacuum cleaner salesman doesn't work. Neither the principle of Ockham's Razor, nor standard modern physics, are due to me personally. So let's cut out this crap about you cleaning up my mess. If your theory is not just an uncashable cheque, let's see the cash, i.e. what predictions does it make that distinguish it from standard physics? So far, all I see is a lot of angry noise - and nothing.

Oh that's interesting, I'll look into that. Indeed, it would need to be a powered receiver generating an output for driving passive speakers. The other issue I should perhaps have explained, and which I don't think the guy has grasped, is that I want the wifi transmitter to take as input the output from my amp. That's because my amp includes a radio receiver and has inputs from a CD player and an LP turntable, so that's 3 sources, one of which is internal to the amp. I want to be able to play all 3. So a wi-fi transmitter that takes mW level inputs from the original devices, is no good to me. I need one that can take as input the amp output intended to drive a pair of passive speakers, i.e. in the 15-20W range. That's the bit I doubt exists. But maybe one of the links you have provided will tell me otherwise. It looks as though the function of these is closer to what I am trying to do...

Since at any given time , except the very start, there were millions of life forms, I imagine you want some selected forms characteristic of the period, don’t you? How about this from the British Natural History museum?: https://www.nhmimages.com I found a hallucigenia fossil and some ichthyosaur pics just now when trying it out.

Yes, that would be a start but I don't think it's enough just to replicate known physics with this scheme. For the theory to be properly testable, there needs to be a prediction it makes of an observation that would not be expected from standard physics. Otherwise all you have is something like Bohmian mechanics, which does no more than replicate QM (at best) but with an added hypothesis, and thus gets knocked on the head by Ockham's Razor. One might expect an aether theory like this to have some observable distinguishing features.

I'm getting that feeling myself, having just tried to explain to a guy at Richer Sounds that I want to find a way of getting a wireless connection between my amp and a pair of remote speakers that I want to put in my kitchen. I don't think he has grasped that these speakers are the Wharfedale Denton 2s that I bought just before going up to uni in 1972, and so I want not just a wi-fi signal, but something with enough power to drive a pair of passive speakers. I actually don't think it's possible - I'll just have to run some thick wires. Cooking with Floyd, or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, with the garden door open should annoy the neighbours!

As I understand the paper, here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2024.0137. from which the Science Daily bulletin is taken, the UV screening pigment syctonemin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytonemin. is also found in desert cyanobacteria. It seems to be hypothesised that it may have evolved very early in the Archaean, before the Great Oxygenation Event, when there would have been a reducing atmosphere with no free oxygen - and presumably therefore no protective ozone layer. However I notice the paper also says that at that time reduced iron (I suppose they mean Fe²⁺ as opposed to Fe³⁺) would have been present at quite high concentrations in seawater, i.e. before it oxidised and precipitated out into the rusty red rocks generated when free oxygen appeared. The paper suggests this dissolved iron may have played a role in absorbing UVC and helped screen organisms from it. Which rather seems to militate against the need for a sunscreen pigment like syctonemin against UVC. But then they say when the Great OxygenationEvent took place the shielding iron would have gone, leading to an advantage in having a UV screening pigment to hand - and also an antioxidant since avoiding oxidation then became a further challenge for organisms. I suspect the answer may be that syctonemin gives broad spectrum protection from UV, not just against UVC. It may be protection from UVB and A that was the issue when its synthesis evolved. In other words it is just a matter of luck, as it were, that it happens to protect against UVC as well - which is what these exobiologists were interested in, as they were looking at life outside the Earth in harsher environments. But I may have misconstrued this so would welcome other commentary.

To some extent this must be a natural progression. I'm old enough to have ground the valves in the cylinder head and tuned the carburettors of an MGB, but you can't do that kind of thing on a modern car because of all the computer connections and emission-related adjustments. So I'm not surprised about all the TCP/IP stuff. But I admit one might expect people to know the difference between a broadband connection and a mobile. After all, they are commonly supplied by different providers on different contracts.

What? We have the data on infant mortality today and we have estimates from the c.19th and from the Medieval period. That's what we need, so we have it. The rest of your post doesn't make much sense. I have no idea what you mean by "joining" religion with evolution. Evolution is natural science. Religion isn't. The only attempt to join them I'm aware of was so-called "Intelligent Design", which is pseudoscience. And it makes no sense to connect evolution in its biological sense with the development of medicine, as the latter is due to increasing human knowledge, which is not determined by evolutionary processes. As for this ape business, which for some weird reason seems to consume you, that's not for discussion here.