In article , JustMe
wrote:

"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
[snip]

There are also - apparently - at least two versions of the Kraken, and
their behaviours may differ. One review (HFC) comments that the
version under test delivers more current (5.5A) than a previous
version. They also say they got a dynamic power of 90W into 4 Ohms.

The Kraken itself is inside a half-width case, with an external
transformer in a case of its own.

Originally the Kraken was supplied with a single torriodal transformer
inside this case, with room for a second transformer, as a sonic
upgrade. Later models were supplied with the dual transformer PSU as
standard. Might these differences be the cause of the review
contradictions?

Yes, it might. Alas, this is one of the areas where the various reviews are
muddled. The HFW review claims that they tried both the single transformer
and double transformer PSUs and this (they said) had no effect on the
limited power into 4 Ohms. This is very odd if so. Hence their review may
simply be in error. However it is difficult to say without some more
reliable info. Unfortunately, plain errors of fact do occur in reviews.
[snip]


BTW Afraid I found the website awkward to use. e.g. Data in large (6MB
in one case) PDFs that are essentially large bitmaps scans of the
pages. Not
a
very efficient way to provide a few pictures and some lines of text.

Sorry about this. Most of the scans and specs are my own, which I try to
list as (still large) JPEGs. Because the site is an "archive", I've
tried to preserve the original source material and make that available,
rather then provide transcripts. To my mind, the originals reviews,
brochures and instruction manuals hold greater authenticity and are more
interesting artefacts.

I can certainly understand you wishing to ensure that material 'as close to
the original' is available. Unfortunately, this can make life difficult for
someone who has an old-fashioned dialup modem, etc - particularly when they
just want basic textual info plus a few images. For this, doing a few
webpages is much better in my opinion. Hence, ideally, you would have both.
However I can quite appreciate that you may not have time, or wish, to do
this. The material you have made available is welcome, and certainly *much*
better than if you had not done so. Your work is appreciated, despite my
"moan" above. :-)

The large PDFs you refer to are created from scans of the original
product brochures, which I believe are fairly rare. I don't believe that
these contain any further spec. not otherwise listed as text (laid out
in tables) on the product pages themselves.

OK. The problem was that I did not know this until after I downloaded the
pages and then viewed/printed them.

[snip]

Interesting data, but I wish it had been provided as simple HTML, etc.
Took ages to download on my old dial-up connection. Then involved
manipulating 35MB+ bitmaps to read/print. :-/

Really? I'm not aware of any Kraken-related file larger than 4MB -
"kraken_mk2_brochure.pdf". Admittedly this is large, but it is a
separate "download" and not embedded onto any one page. I've just
checked and the entire site is 54MB, so am uncertain which file you are
referring to - please advise.

What you are referring to is the PDF file sizes, etc. However note that the
bitmaps in your PDFs are compressed by the PDF encoding. This is then
decompressed for viewing/use.

If you load the PDF files and view them, you are then looking at bitmap
images (the scans) of each page. Each of these bitmaps is over 30MB
uncompressed. Hence if you wish to manipulate the pages this becomes a
factor - although your OS and software may 'hide' this from your notice.
The snag is that other people may then encounter problems which are
invisible to you.

For example, people with older machines or software (who may not be able to
afford newer items) may sometimes run into problems.

In my case I do not normally use either Windows or Mac. Hence I have to use
'third party' software to view/print/manipulate PDFs. I was able to do this
OK, but rendering the large images took a wait per page as a result of the
way the software had to 'translate' the pages for rendering.

The PDFs are excellent for providing good-quality printed output. But they
are - in my view - less excellent for web and screen viewing for the above
reasons. FWIW for that I tend to prefer HTML with GIF/JPEG/PNG images.

However, regardless of the above, the info you have provided is certainly
welcome, and I am glad you have produced the files/pages for people to
access. I tend to be over-sensitised about the above issues as I use
non-Windows/Mac machines and have a history of producing 'educational'
sites where one of my concerns is "Will people in third world countries, or
who can't afford new kit be able to read this material?"

Slainte,

Jim

--
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Audio Misc http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/AudioMisc/index.html
Armstrong Audio http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/Audio/armstrong.html
Barbirolli Soc. http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/JBSoc/JBSoc.html