Happy birthday Max.

I don't suppose you will be treating yourself to a nice new bit of Behringer kit then.

Didn't really need a question mark that, did it?

Have a good one.

Birthday bump(s)

Pensionable?

did i read it wrong, or is the opening thread the most vulgar piece of snobbery ever to disgrace these boards? i thought the 'tonmeister is good everything else is sh!t' thread he posted a while back tread a fine line. but this takes the cake.

whats your contribution to off topic? 'Terraced housing is sh!t, heres why...' or how about 'People on minimum wage should be shot'. You might have a good education, but your people skills are severely lacking. get out more.

A few punctuation and writing mistakes there. So I've corrected it for you:

Did I read it wrong, or is the opening thread the most vulgar piece of snobbery ever to disgrace these boards? I thought the 'tonmeister is good everything else is sh!t' thread he posted a while back, trod a fine line. But this takes the cake.

What's your contribution to off-topic? 'Terraced housing is sh!t, here's why...' or how about 'People on minimum wage should be shot'. You might have a good education, but your people skills are severely lacking: Get out more.


And you make not a lot of sense: I don't think your 'thesis' is correct.

G

Quote The real musiclover:

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Happy birthday Max.

I don't suppose you will be treating yourself to a nice new bit of Behringer kit then.

Didn't really need a question mark that, did it?

Have a good one.

Birthday bump(s)

Pensionable?

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Cheers matey.... Not quite pension territory yet

let's see, RME AD/DA, another POD, and Terry Pratchett's latest tome, and a late bacon butty Breakfast are so far the day's profits

have to wait for the Kids to come home from School before I get any more



Lets just all agree to differ and Raise a glass to each other's health this evening eh?

Salut grAInger


Max

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if you don't know who i am, i aint gonna tell you.

Well, Well! Happy Birthday, Max. Have a good one, and keep the 'phones off the hook!

G

Quote Guy Johnson:

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Well, Well! Happy Birthday, Max. Have a good one, and keep the 'phones off the hook!

G

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Wish I'd thought of it earlier mate... I've already done 1 Remix-recut to new vid edit this morning...

in MY religion, no one has to work on their Birthday !

Sorry chaps.... got a Bit OT there...

Max

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if you don't know who i am, i aint gonna tell you.

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PA stuff on FB

hey happy birthday maximus ... i hope it was a really good one ... have a pint for me

cheers
grainger

Quote trackstar:

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did i read it wrong, or is the opening thread the most vulgar piece of snobbery ever to disgrace these boards?

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oh no it gets much more vulgar round here (i remember the thread - piracy is as bad as burglary - or even piracy is as bad as raping young girls !!)... i realize they are not real opinions in the end, something akin to trolling actually. i dont see how anyone with half a mind could think they can spout such bull and expect everyone to agree. its what comes from living life in a so called "control" room ...

grainger

Something which stimulates discussion can't be a bad thing really.

Everybody agreeing?

Don't be silly.

In fact I completely disagree with you last post.



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Jack of all trades, master of some.

Edited by BigAl (08/11/05 05:12 PM)

Thing is grAinger, largely, this "discussion" has largely missed the point of my original utterance, which Andy lifted and used to start his dissertation

My Point was that what I loosely called "the Behringer phenomenon" has shifted the emphasis of our industry market from quality, innovation and technical excellence AND price, , to Price, price, price and price.,....

eventually this MUST change, or we will end up with no choice other than Behringer (or someone even cheaper and worse, less technically proficient ) , and someone like Neve, Uber expensive, REALLY VERY VERY VERY GOOD, but fiscally unattainable to anyone other than international broadcasters

it's easy to see the effects if you've been "shopping" seriously at a range of market levels for the last 10 years or so....

the number of manufacturers and breadth of product range is shrinking overall, SOME are growing as they absorb others and partly fill the voids left by collapses, downsizing and other reversals of fortune of their competitors.

but overall, the picture is one of a declining market in a vicious circle

this is NOT a good thing

the trend can (and probably will) end up in a defacto monopoly and this will utterly remove the need for competition on price or quality....

at which point, EVERYONE gets screwed, from bedroom hobbyist to Serious pro.


Just go and do a serious statistical study of product and market trends over the last 20 years, and then perhaps you'll need to re-appraise your position on "The Behringer bashers"

this isn't an argument about whether some decent results can be coaxed form less than ideal kit....

it's about the eventual extinction of almost anything but that less than ideal level of equipment.

A market where there is only a choice between Behringer or Neve is not one I look forward to., (names used as a generic example not specifics)

and nor should you.


Max

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if you don't know who i am, i aint gonna tell you.

hi max

fine lets start again (did you have a good birthday ?) ... i still dont agree, i cant see any other area of commerce where that has happened, in supermarkets they still sell 'the best' range next to the 'bettabuy' range ... but none of these analogies will help us when it comes to studio gear, and thats maybe the point - STUDIO gear - in the last ten years there are very few STUDIOs left to sell the high end gear to ? (wether thats good or bad is another thread) .. it has shifted to become a consumer market with behringer, edirol, zoom etc jostling for their share of the home recording boom.

can i remind you i NEVER said behringer are as good as NEVE and i would be as sad as the next muso if we did end up in the position you describe. i also agree stuff shouldnt be made that is uneconomical or impractical to repair (though we are already in that position with a lot of hi fi and cars etc already) i personally have only one piece of behringer, my other gear is made by rode, echo, joe meek and blue - all of whom make a range of very good cheap gear along with the higher end stuff

the home recording market IS a different market to the studio market though, i hope you can agree with this, and i still think for some one starting out, they CAN get the results with behringer and as they maybe unsure wether they really have the ideas or the abilities, i for one could not recommend they spend anymore than that to begin with. there is something distinctly distasteful about our consumerist nightmare of a culture where people think theyve got to get 'the best' to begin with, and that it will somehow make up for their lack of ability (witness the 90's boom in fitness fads ... all those expensive trainers !!! )

im not going to go on much more than this now, this has been a very interesting thread, but i would say in closing i think its unfair to label behringer (or any other cheap gear) as 'noisy and nasty' when there really is no evidence for that (it does sound like snobbery, sorry) .. there has been more threads on here about motu and mackie gear breaking down than behringer im sure ...

cheers
grainger

Quote:

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in supermarkets they still sell 'the best' range next to the 'bettabuy' range

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If you take the usual market leaders of Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda, the answer is no they do not. Exactly that which Max was warning against took place. There used to be bakers in every village and town and each was proud of the quality of their best bread. Now, although Tesco has improved its bread selection, it falls well below the standard of a good baker.

The same is true for fish. All the shellfish are dead. Indeed most of the fish on display at all three came to the shop frozen (which destroys the taste). But because shoppers are becoming used to the taste (or rather the lack of taste) of fish from Tesco, they shun the local fishmonger and he goes out of business. The result is that we now can only get fresh fish in a handful of shops in the UK.

Something that every person used to have access to in every high street in Britain has gone.

This is not a snobism thing as this lack of choice effects poor people more than it effects rich people. The rich will always have access to the best food. But now go out onto the High Street and try to buy a freshly smoked kipper, something every family in Britain had access to just a few years ago.

I could go on with every foodstuff on the shelves of the big three, from flour to butter, from cheese to chocolate.

Quote:

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there are very few STUDIOs left to sell the high end gear to

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Not true. There are more studios around today than ever before. What is diminishing is the number of good quality commercial studios. Private studios of the very highest quality seem to be everywhere. Mark Knopfler has just spent £10m on a new studio.

Quote:

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there has been more threads on here about motu and mackie gear breaking down than behringer

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I doubt it.

But Grainger has made several important points throughout this debate.

Firstly snobbism

A commercial studio has to use snobbism as one of the weapons of war. This is for the very simple reason that as a commercial studio, you have to be able to offer the customer something that they do not have access to at home. Even if a Behringer microphone would be every bit as good as a Neuman 149, you cannot charge people money for using something that cost £100 or less. I have had people come to us because we have a Lexicon 960L and then not use it. Go figure!

And yes, there has been a silly pissing contest between some desk manufacturers in the totally misguided belief that there is a demand for ultimate quality, throwing every other consideration to the Four Winds.

The customer looks at price, reliability, features and quality.

Amek, AMS-Neve and SSL chased the holy grail of building the best analogue desk in the World. They wasted vast sums developing products that the market was not prepared to take. All three companies stumbled and fell (into new ownership) as an indirect result of placing quality and features above the other two needs.

Sony thought that they could dominate the pro-audio market after the success of their DASH recorders and launched the Oxford. This baby did everything and I do mean everything, but almost nobody wanted it.

If you chase one or two of the magic four above everything else, the product suffers.

Secondly mic pre design:

You stated earlier that there is only one way to make a mic pre-amp if it is to be any good. I wrote that you were "as wrong as it is humanly possible to be." But in a perverse way, you were right, there is only one way to build a decent mic pre - very cheaply. All the cheap mic pres of this World are built in the same way and they all colour the sound and cause distortion, especially in phantom power mics. That means that there would be little point in putting a good mic into a cheap desk as the pre-amp will bring both down to its poor level of performance.

(Schoeps produced several interesting papers on this subject and a series of lectures at the Tonmeister Tage a couple of years back.)

The same goes for the eqs. A simple filter is very easy to build and costs almost nothing. A filter that does not produce phase anomalies is very difficult to build. That is (one of) the reasons so many people believe that one should avoid boosting a frequency - as you bring up one band, the rest of the signal is subjected to a comb-filter effect and the whole thing begins to sound as if you have shoe boxes on your ears.

So you may not be right today, but one day all other pre-amp designs may have to give way to that pseudo-balanced thing with a couple of ICs running all the eq and auxes. It's a nasty noise, but we will know no better.

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www.the-byre.com No longer Forum Member

> Just go and do a serious statistical study of product and market trends over the last 20 years
> A market where there is only a choice between Behringer or Neve is not one I look forward to.,

Max, I'm not sure I agree with the thought that we'll be left with only the ultra low and ultra high ends, as I don't think the current market place reflects this at all. To me, there's FAR more choice now than there was a few years ago, at all price points, whether it be mics, pres, effects or whatever.

Of course, some areas of our industry have suffered, you can't find a hardware sampler anymore for example, but I really don't think that's part of the same argument.

... and this bring us to another option.
DIY.
I bought bits 'n' bobs over the space of 3 years in the late 1990s
I got all the bits of kit that FM and SoS and what my mates were raving about.
As a consequence and since then as a home recordist (and ex-pro/semipro musician as most of us are..) I have learnt more and more about recording and my ears have gotten more and more attuned to what to listen for.
And I am not very impressed with the £20,000 of kit I have (it all adds up....!!)
I can remember how things sounded in professional studios I have recorded in and compare them to what I get.

Last year I made the decision not to buy any more kit BUT to build my own.
This was to faciliate two things...
1. To be able to have real high end gear at afforable prices
2. To teach myself how all this stuff works.. adn thus use it better

The teaching bit is coming along very nicely indeed.
The problem with the gear lust still exists - although now I get more excited about getting a Carnhill transformer, Elma switch, EAO illuminated pushbuttons and trying to find decent engravers.

oh - and in my village we have a lovely baker, two butchers, greengrocers, farmers who deliver 25kg of potatoes for £3.50..
Fish... have to go to the local Loch Fyne for counter sales for that

some good points there ... (though i dont know how you, mr byre, can be so disingenuous to say there are more studios than ever, when ive seen you on more than one thread berating the closure of yet another studio - studio culture is coming to an end along with a lot of the so called 'music business' in general, i for one wont shed any tears about that)

GEAR LUST - how many times is there some sad discussion on these boards along the lines "oh dear im really sad, i dont make any music anymore i just buy expensive equipment i wish i still had my atari/analogue synth/cassette multitracker" ? ... well if the whole market was demystified and people could see the important things are ideas, ability and environment NOT GEAR then it might save some of us from such embarrassing ennui ..

CHOICE - just because a tesco is a big smelly dehumanised place doesnt mean they dont have masses more choice than any little corner shop and generally at a better price (the point about bread is daft, when i go to my corner shop their bread is always stale 'happy shopper' stuff at 4 times the price of tesco, and the milk is always sour) - the choice in musical gear is enormous nowadays, i cant see it getting less either at any price point.

DESIGN - though my original statement was a bit dogmatic - there is really only one way to make any particular circuit because electronics only works one way, but i know there are a lot of subtleties in power supply design and pcb construction. take a fuzz box for instance all of them are based on forcing a signal through a diode. i dont see how behringer can be slated for copying such a design, when you have people on ebay selling their so called 'boutique' designs for 50 quid using the "same circuit that jimmy hendrix used" with 50 pence worth of components in it !!! - if you admit theres only one way to make a crap pre amp how many ways do you think there is to make a good one ?

i am massively in favour of cheap gear (hand in hand with the good stuff) because as far as i can see the only real problems nowadays all come down to a collective lack of imagination. maybe something to do with tv or whatever, but at least the more people who get the chance to have a go, the more people who shouldnt really have this stuff, the more chance statistically that we will get something really new ... i think there is much more interesting music about now than ever and maybe some of this IS down to cheap gear opening up the playing field

monitors for a fiver a mic for a tenner ? .. yes please

grainger

Quote grAInger:

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DESIGN - though my original statement was a bit dogmatic - there is really only one way to make any particular circuit because electronics only works one way, but i know there are a lot of subtleties in power supply design and pcb construction. take a fuzz box for instance all of them are based on forcing a signal through a diode. i dont see how behringer can be slated for copying such a design, when you have people on ebay selling their so called 'boutique' designs for 50 quid using the "same circuit that jimmy hendrix used" with 50 pence worth of components in it !!! - if you admit theres only one way to make a crap pre amp how many ways do you think there is to make a good one ?

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Ignoring all the other bits for a moment....

sorry but that's complete and utter bollox

seriously, sorry, it's nothing personal , but grAInger, it's plainly obvious you neither have any depth of understanding of that field, nor the background to do so.

there's almost infinite ways to create a circuit to do a specific job.

it's the differences between them in terms of both general topology and specific detail that gives each one it's unique tonal qualities....

there's different ways of using otherwise identical active devices that yield different results.

for as very loose example,

the MOTU 192HD, the Digidesign HD192, the EMU 1812M and (if memory serves me correctly) focusrite saffire all use the same AD/DA conversion chips.

however, they all have different sonic properties due to the entirely different surrounding circuitry... and it's NOT just the PSU./

they're all acknowledged as being good, within their market segment, but anyone thinking the EMU and Saffire sound exactly the same as the MOTU or Digidesign, is going to be somewhat disappointed . (although it's probably fair to say the Saffire performs above the expected level given it's street price... possibly thanks to the marriage of superb mic pre amps with reasonable converters)

and the MOTU doesn't sound EXACTLY like the Digidesign device either.... (although it's closer than either of the other two)

the same idea is also still true of distortion pedals.... 5 pedals using the same active element can , and will sound different, 5 ways , unless they're exact carbon copies.... and even then, component tolerances can result in different sounding units....

And there are fundamentally different topology ideas for generating a distorted signal... and by no means do all of them involve a diode as the core element.........


hell even at the most basic level, there's almost infinite ways of achieving a given resistance, capacitance or impedance in a single circuit element, never mind anything else...

(think about series and parallel components, just for a moment.... )

there's more to it, but I wanted to simply point out your false premise . in case you weren't aware that it was a fundamental flaw in your thinking....



Best regards

Max

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if you don't know who i am, i aint gonna tell you.

I must say, I do not often speak out loud when reading postings here or elsewhere, but when I read that bit about fuzz boxes and said "What a load of bollocks!" in a clear voice and my wife thought I was calling her.

The trouble here is that Grainger has decided that he is the 'Advocate Royal' for cheap kit when he is obviously not qualified to speak on this topic.

This is a pity because there is an argument to be made for products that are built at the very lowest price possible. I personally do not agree with that argument, but it is there. Grainger is not the person to make that argument. It would be nice to have someone with a knowledge of the subject make that argument.

I too am not the person to hold impromptu seminars on mixer design or even fuzz boxes. I built my first fuzz box using a whisker diode when I was 15 and it sounded so poor that I scrapped the idea and tried something else. I have built mic pres, but only copies of other people's designs. Right now I am working on an old East German mixer that I hope to convert into a 5.1 compressor and trust me, it is a million years from any design you have ever seen. The brilliance of the design allows you to put anything, mic, line, guitar into the one input and it deals with it perfectly. It is completely unbalanced and not a transistor in sight.

So you see, even I, with my limited knowledge of mixing desk design, know that there are many ways to build a mic pre. But yes all the nasty cheap stuff (fuzz box or mixer) is built more or less in the same way.

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www.the-byre.com No longer Forum Member

Quote:

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CHOICE - just because a tesco is a big smelly dehumanised place doesnt mean they dont have masses more choice than any little corner shop and generally at a better price (the point about bread is daft, when i go to my corner shop their bread is always stale 'happy shopper' stuff at 4 times the price of tesco, and the milk is always sour)

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I think the comparison was between dedicated bakers, butchers, greengrocers etc. rather than generic corner shops. There used to be all these different traders in one row of shops, still pretty convenient. You're right that corner shops as thwy now exist don't offer anything better than the supermarkets, but how can they? The supermarkets control the market for food in this country (despite what the monopolies & mergers commission may say).

I'd disagree about the choice too, they may have 1000's of lines but within each line you've often only a choice between the supermarket's own brand, and 1 other.
I'm lucky, I live in an affluent area, I've a choice of 3 supermarkets (1 of which is Tesco where I refuse to shop), 2 butchers and a couple of proper bakeries - no fishmonger sadly. This choice wouldn't exist in poorer areas though.

Re price, I've seen a number of comparisons where the supermarkets were all more expensive compared to the local greengrocer etc. based on a typical basket of shopping.

Quote:

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CHOICE - just because a tesco is a big smelly dehumanised place doesnt mean they dont have masses more choice than any little corner shop and generally at a better price (the point about bread is daft, when i go to my corner shop their bread is always stale 'happy shopper' stuff at 4 times the price of tesco, and the milk is always sour) - the choice in musical gear is enormous nowadays, i cant see it getting less either at any price point.

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The above is true because your corner shop is part of a wholesale chain that buys its goods from the same sources as Tesco. You have been denied choice by the OEM market.

When I was a boy, you could buy all kinds of different olive oil and the different oils came from different places. Spain, Italy, Greece, each looked and tasted different. Today, if you go to Tesco and look at the olive oil shelves, you will see at least twelve different oils ranging in price from £3 to £12 a bottle.

Some have got garlic in them, some have a sprig of thyme in them. But they all come from the same company in Seville. I think they are called Urzante or something like that. All twelve use the same bulk oil and it is the same stuff as is in the bottles at Aldi, Lidl, Asda and of course your corner shop. This one company produces oils at three different quality levels and that's it.

You have been denied choice.

The same is happening with microphones. If you buy a cheap microphone, you stand a very good chance of getting a microphone built in one factory in Shanghai. It may say Fame, Behringer, Audio Technica or whatever on the outside and the housing may be different, but inside is one of a small range of capsules that they produce. They will build then for you with your name on the front and even with a special design just for you. And you don't even have to order huge numbers to get this service. A few hundred units will get your own special brand of microphones in your own design of housing and box into production.

But inside the new Grainger Mics from Grainger Audio will be the same capsules as inside all the other mics they produce. The Grainger Groove-100 may look different, but it will sound exactly the same as the Behringer B1.

Old established names are waking up to the fact that they are loosing market share to the ultra cheap market, so sadly they find themselves having to do the same. It's called the OEM market and when the customer thinks that he is going up-market by buying something slightly better (more expensive and an old, established brand) he finds that the better mic sounds just the same as the cheap mic. That is because they may come from the same factory outside Shanghai.

You have been denied choice.

And as for what Steveman says about prices, the one thing that shocks one when one comes from the US or mainland Europe is how grossly inflated Tesco's prices are.

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www.the-byre.com No longer Forum Member

Quote The Byre:

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I could go on with every foodstuff on the shelves of the big three, from flour to butter, from cheese to chocolate.

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Waitrose is a little bit better. They do sell live seafood. Their bread is ok though I still perfer to make my own.

They are not trying to drive shareholder value in the traditional way.

Have you guys ever been to China? If you have, you know what's the real price for all the cheap stuff we buy.

I have been to China and even to a few factories out there. However production cost is only one part of the overall price equation.

That's true but it's a part big enough to move a lot of production lines there though the components remain the same. It's just ****ed up how people are treated there. Seeing pictures of the living conditions of many workers wouldn't make for a good advertisement for the western companies.

Quote Matcher:

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Seeing pictures of the living conditions of many workers wouldn't make for a good advertisement for the western companies.

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I agree, but what can they do? They all want to stay in business, so as soon as one competitor finds a way of producing products more cheaply (by moving production to China, say), then the others all pretty much have to do the same to remain competitive and retain their market share.

In an ideal world, the consumers would have the integrity to refrain from buying products made in Chinese sweatshops (although I must say that not all factories are like that -- some are more comparable to western employment standards)... but at then end of the day a large part of the buying public seems to want the cheapest thing going (free in the case of software!), and they simply dont see or understand the longer term consequences.

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Like they say in the ghetto, I feel you man.

Especially with relatively poor people this is a difficult issue because they are the ones who get most out of this because the cheapest gets cheaper. On the other hand one might have less money because of a lost job at the factory which moved abroad. Hopefully for example China's situation will get better as the country is starting to open up. I still can't believe how the olympics can be held there, but that's enough of that. I guess all this leads to world economics and the politics behind it and voting is our best shot at getting things right, unless one has money to direct more votes to the desired way. The current situation should please most of the people, although we've seen many demonstrations at the G8 meetings etc which speak their own language. I hope the other side of the China- phenomenon becomes more known, so the mainstream middle- class there could afford to have some of the luxury that most of us often take for granted.

There's an almost colonial arrogance about rich Westerners lecturing China on working conditions. They have one of the fastest growth rates in the world and are making massive strides dragging themselves out of poverty (poverty in China is retreating faster than in any other large country in the world). They are prepared to compete with capitalists at their own game and succeed, massively.

The working conditions at say SE Electronics are fantastic by "normal" Chinese standards, as is the pay.

What do you want to do? Fire them all and send them back to subsistence farming, and a real risk of death by famine if the crops fail?

(And yes, for the record, I agree China's industrialisation carries some environmental costs which they might usefully pay more attention to!)

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Dynamite with a laser beam...

Quote Steve Hill:

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There's an almost colonial arrogance about rich Westerners lecturing China on working conditions. They have one of the fastest growth rates in the world and are making massive strides dragging themselves out of poverty (poverty in China is retreating faster than in any other large country in the world). They are prepared to compete with capitalists at their own game and succeed, massively.

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I'm sure that the more you dig into this subject the more carefully you chose your words. These massive strides are done with the cost of the people's properties. The goverment there is rotten almost all the way, huge amounts of money end up to the accounts of the financial elite. I can't remember the exact numbers but tens of billion of dollars that are suppposed to go for health care and basic stuff has been disappearing for years and years. A normal one parent family can't afford to put children to school or to have a health care because of that. Some of the people there are desperate and commit suicides and some try to complain through the official route but the system is so corrupted that the complainments are never handled. The core of the government tries to handle the situation but with very few results. Some people have been beaten up in the courtroom and driven to distant places so they won't be in the central China to cause problems.

I just read an article from the biggest newspaper in Finland and watched a BBC documentary about China's situation and I went there about half a year ago, and that's what I have to say. And I'm not rich

Quote grAInger:

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i am massively in favour of cheap gear (hand in hand with the good stuff) because as far as i can see the only real problems nowadays all come down to a collective lack of imagination. maybe something to do with tv or whatever, but at least the more people who get the chance to have a go, the more people who shouldnt really have this stuff, the more chance statistically that we will get something really new ... i think there is much more interesting music about now than ever and maybe some of this IS down to cheap gear opening up the playing field

monitors for a fiver a mic for a tenner ? .. yes please

grainger

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Nothing too wrong with that statement.

Politicising the production of music? No ta, i'd rather be getting on and making some and having fun doing so.

Whatever recording gear is to hand.


Secret government agencies use Behringer, at least according to the racks in the Bourne identity the other night. At least it all looked like shiny silver Behringer! That's as political as i like to get.

cor ... good thread. i was being careful NOT to bring this down to politics, none of us really know what its like to be chinese so i think its best to leave that out of it. maybe we can come back to that discussion in 20 years time when china has bought the western world for a fiver !!! (only 50 years (or even less) ago most of us were slaves in the same sort of factories)

max and byre, you are right im not the one to explain electronics i dont have the depth of understanding, i definately dont take it personal dont worry about that (its just a forum, we are not real people) .. but as far as i know most preamps are made with mass produced ic's (the ones in my joe meek use burr and brown) i presume the ics only work with particular values of components around them ? .. thats not copying, thats engineering .. (max explain simply ONE other 'topology' for making a fuzz box (not an overdrive overloading a preamp, or some digital device) which doesnt involve a diode, please) .. (byre, do you always speak to yr missus like that then ?)

the supermarket discussion is taking us nowhere either, those of you with cosy memories of real bread and fish obviously dont live near one of the unhygienic, thieving, 'open all hours' corner shops most of us happily abandoned when the out of town superstores opened ... as for choice, which corner shop ever gave you the chance to buy fair trade coffee or organic potatoes, in MOST of them it was nescafe and radioactive spuds or nothing !!

cheers
grainger

I've never tried radioactive spuds.

My town has a few top class butchers, 2 or 3 top class bakers and a couple of good fruit & veg shops which are always queued out the door.
So supermarkets don't close the so-called traditional shops - not if they're good that is.

Not sure if they use any use Behringer gear.

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Jack of all trades, master of some.

Quote Steve Hill:

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There's an almost colonial arrogance about rich Westerners lecturing China on working conditions.

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There an almost colonial arrogance about rich Westerners lecturing everyone else on what we are allowed to think.