Wifey's Les Paul Custom   da hade

LP Custom   da booty

A snapshot of a recent project, in which the goal was to attain the kind
of lucid transparency that tube amps seem to possess. Was I successful?
Damn close IMHO and also the opinions of a few other esteemed golden
ears that I've demoed it to. Best sounding SS amp I've ever heard. The
Crown amp in the previous Les Paul photo sounds like absolute crap
next to it. At least the Crown beats it powerwise being this bugger is
only about 35 watts. Eventually when the design is slightly more evolved
tonewise, I'll scale up the power to realistic gig levels.

Here's another Ultra-Fi proto. The concept (or theory) is the same as the previous one,
however, the methodology is a bit different.

Here's the latest space charge simulator that I'm building for a friend of mine
into a rack mount this time. It's going to have three independantly adjustable channels,
and also will also have three volume pedals (one for each channel). It'll also have
a bunch of FX loops as you can see in the second photo

And, here's one of the PCB's that will go in the space charge simulator and also the
artwork for the PCB in the second photo

And here's the solder side of the board, which was hand soldered by yours truly.

And a combo picture of my wife and her mom (left) and myself and my mom (right) just
after our second wedding to each other in 1987. Below that is a picture of my wife and
a swarm of puddies back around the same time when we lived in New Orleans and
did a lot of charity work finding homes for orphaned cats. We had a small house there
and did what we could.  Eventually it all got to be a bit much and unbelievably, we actually
built a cage around our bed to keep the puddies out.  Thank God we finally acquired
the means to buy a house in the country where we built another house for the puddies
to call their own. We only have a few in the house with us these days.
The rest wander about the place or hang in their own house. You see, it's not that
we ever really wanted to live in close quarters with a swarm-o-puddies, it was
just the byproduct of the charity work we did. For every one puddy we ended up
with we probably placed in homes about 50 or more.

Aw what the heck. I guess I'll throw in a picture of Cluster Lee, a musician friend of mine from
New Orleans. He plays the French Quarter a lot  so if you see him there and if he happens to
be playing his guitar through an old SS PV bass head, don't be fooled. The only reason that head sounds
so good is because it was re-engineered big time by yours truly.

Hand rolled Teflon caps .002uf 550V

Crappy sounding Blackface Twin re-issue undergoing serious upgrade experimentation for better sound. (teflon caps involved)

A couple of rare glass capacitors (two piggybacked) left over from
when I used to work in the engineering department of  Memorex

A picture of my SHArc DSP development board running an algorithm I wrote to generate octaves.
Notice the waveforms on the scope in the background. The top waveform is the input to the DSP board.
The bottom waveform is the the doubled frequency output of the DSP board. Apologies for the blurry
picture. It wasn't till later I realized my digital camera was still in macro mode from the glass cap shot.

 Here's a trick for those small GK amps that seem to blow the Switchmode power supply chipper mosfets.
Instead of replacing the two ( hard to find) original TO220 mosfets, a single easy to get TO247 does the job quite well.
Also notice off to the left the axial ceramic caps added to bypass the supplies to to the pulse width modulator IC.

A picture of how you can mount an 8 pin SMD op-amp on a header and use it on a board that was made for an 8 pin DIP

Here's another method wherein you solder the SMD to an 8 pin DIP socket

Now let's depart from technical stuff.
Here's a picture of my brother who collects weird and rare musical instruments playing a skinny necked turkish "Saz".

Here's a picture of some wood carving that my father did.

Here's a picture of myself and the hazards of what can happen around our place should you decide to rest for a spell .

Here's a picture of my beloved wife Connie the patron saint of puddy's returning from a puddy rescue mission in New Orleans
after the flood.

Another picture of the wife torturing my cat with love.
Is this love or confusion.

A goofy ass picture of one of our horses

Well, I certainly taught *that* porcupine a lesson!.    Not our dog,  just some picture I bumbled across on the net.

A house near ours that didn't fare so well  with hurricane Katrina.

Ah yum. You take a can of black beans then mash em up really good with a pinch of sage, cayenne and onion powder. Mix in a couple tablespoons of canola oil or some other oil really well, then spread it out on a plate and top with grated cheddar, monterey jack, and chopped green onions. Then you should have something that looks like the picture below. . Then you pop it into the microwave for about 3-6 minutes depending on your mood at the time. Then after you yank it from the nuker, you  add a couple of piles of salsa, sour cream and Guacamole. Then out with a bag of your favorite tortilla chips and you're ready to dig in,, yum.  I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.   Goes good with cerveza too :-)