EEVblog #856 - Mailbag

More Mailbag Monday

SPOILERS:
Qiktag Indiegogo
Apple iMac Power Supply
Victorinox Minichamp Swiss Army Knife
Caran d'Ache pen
Kübrich Ingenieure Hose Clamp aren't the Dodgy Brothers
HF Splitter Teardown from Bitshift Dynamics
The finest Audiophoolery from Nordost, the $50,000 Odin reference speaker cable:
And a package for Sagan

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[cemx]

Hose clamps - There had to be some in your video of the guy with about 2, 000 tins of used bits and bobs all neatly sorted and labeled.

[kristiandawe]

I've pretty much watch every EEVbolg video over the years, I don't recall any hose clamp videos.

[SoldererOfFortune]

Hi Dave! Paul from QikTag. No worries about opening late, poor marketing sort of failed QikTag, although quite a few electronic companies have ordered them as a dynamic business card slash keychain. The original idea is that the owner can set what information is shown on the linked page. Sometimes you wouldn't want to show your cell number, on house keys certainly not your address (as someone mentioned in the comments). A PCB is great material for this due to its durability. Cheers!

[jrmcferren]

Little hint to Emy. You need to clean your type on your typewriter. This will fix the ink filling in the center of the closed in letters like o.

[nferraro]

I started to laugh at "hose clamp aficionados", but, damn, those are really nice hose clamps.

[fpm]

You were right Dave. Wenger belongs to Victorinox. Wenger and Victorinox sold a lot of their pocket knifes at duty free shops at airports worldwide. After 9/11 small pocket knifes were forbidden and both companies lost a big portion of their sales volume (30% for Victorinox). Wenger went bankrupt and Victorinox could remain in the profit zone, but only just. Victorinox then bought the remains of Wenger and kept the brand and production site alive. In 2013 Victorinox announced that the brand Wenger will no longer be used for knifes. Instead they are now called Victorinox Delémont collection.

[catdumpling]

Dave, you nailed it with the control room matrix (ie, "monitor matrix"): it's basically a monitor switching box, with a few added features (you were also correct with the Talkback function, which is also usually built into mixing consoles.) Recording studios, especially ones that work with bands and musicians, will test mixes through several different types of monitors to ensure that the mix sounds good on a wide range of speaker types. It's not uncommon to see a large set of monitors that cost $5k _each_, alongside the cheapest, shittiest speakers available. Somewhat ironically, the "cheap and shitty" speakers are often most representative of what the vast majority of actual listeners will end up listening to the recording on!

There are much nicer monitor matrix units available, but ultimately they're all just glorified speaker switchboxes.

[Coolkeys]

Directional audio cables, lots bull shit flows in one direction and and even more money flows in the other :-)

[dwDragon]

Nice TI-83. That's still a perfectly usable calculator for some college calc/econ/stats courses. I have an old TI-86 and I hope it never dies... My favorite calculator.

[frostfirei]

The names are Chinese, they put the last name first and the first name last; therefore Song, is their last names. That is not called a "flathead"Screwdriver, but a slotted screwdriver, for use on slotted screws, which are NOT all flathead screws.

[tzisorey]

"These scissors have never gone sharp" Yeah, mine feel that way sometimes, too ;)

[mrnmrn]

13:30 This is a bidirectional RF amplifier for cable TV and cable net (one wideband amp for downstream + cable TV, one narrow band amp for upstream, separated with directional coupler). One input (bidirectional, so it's an output also for the upstream), an output for the TV, and another output for the cable modem.

The blue blobs at the F connectors are probably HV ceramic caps for DC decoupling, not PTCs (I'm watching it at 480p, so cannot read the values).

[MrFilosoffen]

The fat piece of metal in the TI calc might also be to protect the rather fragile glass display in case the plastic housing is flexing... That would make sense.

[Razor]

It would be interesting to test some $40, 000+ cables, While the $7000-10, 000 cables may have been BS, that may be because they just didn't put enough money into them. A few thousand extra dollars into the audio cables is sure to enhance your listening experience. Best of all, you will feel as if a weight has been lifted as your wallet grows lighter and lighter with each additional audio cable.

[TheJttv]

32:42 that hook blade is for opening clamshell packages - I'm a packaging science major

[garrettdustman]

Hey Dave! You probably wont see this, but anyhow, according to Victorinox, the "little flat head screwdriver" on the ruler section is also a single blade phillips driver! I use it ALL THE TIME on my Classic SD. It's very handy!

[Tangobaldy]

Nordost combats all of these losses by employing a “Micro Mono-Filament”
dielectric alternative.

string-type material,

I bet that booklet that went in the bin would have won a gobbledegook award.

[nodirbekchoriev]

23:30 audio decoder. It's a nice little product

[grafikschwarzmarkt]

Caran d'ache is a pretty decent thingy! I bought one, lasted 5years and no way it will break... Changed the ink about 6-7x, works as if it was new... Very nice thing of finest swiss engineering

[bigfootape]

That multimeter would have been good to save for death by HV pulse supply.