Made it back from RMAF last night. Drove a total of 4,450'ish miles round trip. Certainly got my road trip ya-ya's out.
Show went well overall with countless people coming through including many repeats who told us we were their best sounding room in the show. You know you're doing well when people come back and hang out listening for 30+ minutes or longer and get into that zone.
We did have a few anxious moments the day before the show (alright, an entire anxious day!) when our Linux music server decided to go sideways and the wifi hotspot link simply would not link. Tested it before we left Florida. Check! Tested it when we got to Denver Wednesday night. Check! Hooked it all up again Thursday morning in our RMAF room. No check.
After banging away at it most of Thursday we switched to Plan B (always have a plan B) which was a PC laptop running JRiver and a 1TB external drive loaded with over 900 GB of music files. Hooked it up to our Border Patrol DAC and ....no connection. Reloaded the drivers... no connection. Unloaded and reloaded the drivers....no connection. Finally switched to another laptop (Plan C?). Success! Turns out the Lenovo T500 laptop we tried initially didn't have all the correct Lenovo drivers loaded after it had been wiped and reloaded with Windows 7 a few months back. Details details details.
We had one hardware fatality. Our final prototype of the PS12B battery power supply suffered an "inertially induced failure" when hard braking of the F150 truck caused the unit to slide off the back seat and encounter the floor where the 2 batteries proceeded to crush a couple of parts on the circuit board. Had plenty of spare parts with me except for one of the parts that got crushed. So it goes. If nothing else it did demonstrate the need to securely restrain the batteries in the final production design.
All those challenges notwithstanding, the combination of Redbook digital files, 16 bit USB Ladder DAC, LDR3.V2 passive preamp, 8 WPC 300B tube amp, and 99 dB efficient hybrid horn speakers are indeed a killer combination.
My sincere thanks to our partners Greg Roberts (Volti), Gary Dewes (Border Patrol) and Pete Grzybowski (Triode Wire Labs). You guys are the best!
Regards,
Morten
P.S. Arrived back at the Tortuga compound to find our hard working PC engineering workstation dead, kaput, pfft! One day, and 1 new motherboard and power supply later and we're back up an running.
