A recording of the song ‘Layla’ is on the audio player. It was taken from an FM tube radio.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/NOV07/nanoradio-layla.mp3]
Courtesy Zettl Research Group,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley
Bad reception? An old LP played with a broken needle? No! Quite the opposite. It’s from the most advanced, state-of-the-art FM radio ever devised. It’s not a tube radio, but a nano-tube radio! Edwin Armstrong would be pleased.
I’m just some guy who’s blogging as a hobby, so it’s interesting to check the month-end numbers. Excluding all traffic from home, and rounding down to be conservative, in October there were 92,000 hits on DogRat.com from 4900 unique addresses.
On October 17, Amazon.com created a section devoted to vinyl records.
One of D.F. Rogers’ possessions that I envy him having is the complete British catalog (or, should I say, “catalogue”) of Beatles albums put out by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs in the early 1980’s. The box set now goes for big bucks on eBay. I have a couple of the individual discs. The general consensus is the records sound better than the CDs; which is understandable, considering the digital mastering was done with first-generation equipment over 20 years ago.
Thanks to a tip from my cousin Lawrie (OK, she’s my father’s cousin), here’s another take on Danny Elfman’s delightful theme music to Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, featured here a little while ago.
When I was a boy I loved my Aiwa TP-32A reel tape recorder, but the single most satisfying piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned is a GE Superadio III. I bought it for $40 in November, 1994, and today it gets regular use sitting in the window next to my computer.
HD Radio and Wi-Fi Radio are coming along, and there’s satellite radio of course, but plain, old AM/FM radio remains convenient and reliable. And the Superadio III, having analog tuning, is about as plain as it gets. What sets it apart is its exceptionally good, albeit mono, sound quality.
Recently, the company that makes the Superadio III, Thomson of France, changed the brand name from GE to RCA. Or maybe it’s being made by another outfit. Whatever. The product seems to be pretty much the same as it’s been for nearly 15 years. It remains the absolute cheapest self-contained hi-fi audio system that I know of.
When I was a kid, it bothered me that most people were more interested in the ads in comic books than in the stories. Most of what was sold was junk, of course — the notorious X-Ray Specs for example — but once in a while a legitimately interesting product was offered. So, in acknowledgment of that, here’s an ad from a 1967 Marvel comic book. It’s the Digi-Comp 1!
If not exactly the first home computer, the Digi-Comp 1 was a working binary counting machine. Here’s a Digi-Comp 1 in action, counting from 0 to 7 in binary. It’s even done twice, in case you miss it the first time. 😉
Exciting, huh? But compared to the comic book ad the Digi-Comp 1 must have been a disappointment. First, there’s nothing electronic about it, and the atomic symbol would seem to imply it’s nuclear in some way. But at least the Digi-Comp 1 is described accurately as being a “mechanical analog of a binary computer.”
I hope the person who wrote the ad copy didn’t use a Digi-Comp 1 to figure out the price, because it’s listed first at $4.99, then in the coupon at $4.98. Oh well, they didn’t claim “down to the penny precision!”
The Digi-Comp 1 has, as you might expect, something of a cult following. Original units are often auctioned in eBay, and there is a replica of it available at Minds on Toys.
