For the record, I use Facebook. I find it a convenient way to stay in touch with a small group friends and family, some of whom live in far away places. I may see most of these people in person on a regular basis, but some I cannot, and Facebook makes staying in touch much easier. I have frequently noted that I graduated high school just before the internet became the ubiquitous entity it is today, and, in spite of my best intentions, within a year or two of graduation, I found it impossible to keep tabs on the many friends whose company I enjoyed, but who had moved away to attend college or see the world. I wasn’t able to exchange email addresses with my classmates, and none of them knew at the time what their telephone numbers would be for the next six months, let alone six years. (Remember, too, that, at that time, almost no one had a mobile phone, and even those who did had to get a new number each time they moved.) Facebook, for better or for worse, has made it possible to keep up with the lives of the people you care about, even if you cannot be near them.

Facebook reportedly has nearly a billion active users worldwide, with revenue, mostly from advertising, at over $3 billion per year. When its stock goes public on Friday—at an initial price of nearly $40 per share—it is expected to bring in more than $100 billion, and make its CEO one of the richest men on earth.

But let us put this in perspective. The Coca-Cola Company, in business since 1892, sells well over a billion drinks every day. It earns tens of billions of dollars each year in revenue and employs well over a hundred thousand people. There is a Coke bottling plant in my town. The Ford Motor Company, in business since 1903, is the world’s fifth largest auto maker, selling millions of vehicles each year in the United States alone. Its net profit in 2011 was over $6.5 billion. Ford employs over two hundred thousand people not including the many thousands who work at Ford dealerships across the country, selling and servicing the vehicles. As I write this, Ford stock is trading at $10.28 per share; Coke is trading at $62.46 per share.

By the end of trading on Friday, who knows where Facebook’s stock will be trading? Maybe $75 per share. Perhaps $100. It will certainly be trading higher than Ford, but may trade higher than Coca-Cola, or even McDonald’s. It will be trading higher than Microsoft, the company that makes the software that a vast majority of Facebook users use to access the site. This defies reason. Facebook may have millions of users; it may be hugely popular; it may be open in your internet browser right now, but Facebook is not worth more than Ford, or Coke, or McDonald’s.

I am not saying Facebook is not a valuable brand. Obviously, with so many users, the potential for ad revenue is substantial. But the internet is an entity even more mysterious than the stock market, and history has shown us that investor enthusiasm for internet companies has a tremendously costly downside. America Online was once the most-used internet service provider in the United States. Its name was practically synonymous with “internet”. It became so large that it was able to buy Time Warner, the company that owns half of the entertainment you consume each year. A decade after the AOL/Time Warner merger, AOL had a net revenue of -$700 million per year.

I don’t know if I believe that Facebook will someday crash as spectacularly as AOL did, but I don’t believe it will be the final social networking site on the internet, and I don’t believe it will worth much ten years from now. Amazon.com is one of the few websites that survived the dot com bubble of the early 2000s and came out stronger. But Amazon actually sells things. Lots of things. So does Ford. So does Coke. Facebook doesn’t. In fact, if Facebook tried to sell its service, tens of millions of people would immediately stop using it. Likewise, the advertising that supports the site can only become so pervasive before users resent it and flee to some other, perhaps yet-to-be-developed service. This may already be happening. Ask yourself how Facebook, whose revenue is dependent on advertising, could become worth more than the Time Warner Company (trading today at $35 per share), which owns Time Warner Cable, and at least ten cable television channels, all of which are bursting with advertising. It doesn’t make sense. And when you consider how readily users abandoned Friendster and MySpace, the future doesn’t look bright for Facebook.

So, consider my warning: Unless you can buy Facebook stock when it goes on sale on Friday—and quickly dump it—don’t buy it at all, because I don’t see any way that, ten years from now, Facebook’s stock price will be anywhere near where it closes on Friday afternoon. And however popular it is today, no serious person could believe that Facebook will be around as long as Ford or Coke.

MLB.TV is like Netflix, insofar as you stream content through a device like a video game console, and select from menus like on Netflix. But instead of movies, you are selecting baseball games. Any baseball game, in fact, being played across all of Major League Baseball. So, want to see the Hated Yankees playing against the Orioles in Baltimore? No problem. St. Louis at Cincinnati? Sure. Kansas City at Oakland? Yep. You can even chose which announces you want to hear. That is, if you want to hear the regular Atlanta announcers in the game against Houston (playing tonight as the Colt .45s), you can do that. Or you can hear the Astros’ announcers. And, unlike, say, a DVR, which only allows you to rewind an unrecorded program as far back as the moment you tuned in, this service lets you rewind any game to the very beginning. Oh, and when the inning ends, instead of going to commercials, you see a blank screen. It’s enormously refreshing.

In 1989, Back to the Future, Part II predicted that by 2015 we would have hoverboards, flying cars, and holographic billboards for Jaws sequels. It didn’t predict this.

Edgar Villchur, who was ninety-four years old, gave the world the acoustic suspension loudspeaker. The AR-1, made by his company, Acoustic Research, changed the way speakers were produced. Unlike many of the existing speakers at the time, his speakers were fully enclosed, and virtually airtight. The vacuum inside would cause the drivers to “spring” back to their proper position automatically, whereas other speakers at the time used actual mechanical springs, and the cabinets that enclosed them were enormous. With Villchur’s technology, people could finally have loudspeakers that were unobtrusive in the home. My AR-3as are actually quite handsome, with walnut cabinets and grill cloths of Irish linen. Stereophile and The Absolute Sound will tell you that the 3a is at or near the top of the most important loudspeakers ever created.

For me, though, it isn’t the innovative technology or the appearance of my AR loudspeakers that makes me love them. It’s the sound. These speakers have changed the way I hear music. My enjoyment has been increased in ways I cannot fully articulate. Considering how important music is to me, I can, without hyperbole, tell you that they have made my life better. For that I am extremely grateful to Edgar Villchur.

I receive hundreds of email messages each day. Approximately five of them are legitimate. The rest are what is commonly called spam. I get messages about pills, investing, internet auctions, vacation deals, and countless other things, but none are authentic communications from parties with whom I have any relationship whatever. On the contrary, many of these messages claim to have business with me, but manifestly do not.

Some of these spam messages attempt to deceive me with realistic looking subject titles, like “Student Loan Information”, or coincidentally come bearing the name of someone with whom I regularly engage in correspondence. In this way I sometimes click on a message believing it to be from my friend Anthony, only to find it is not. Sometimes, however, the spammers don’t even seem to be trying. “Follow-up to our talk about refinancing your house” is one I have received. Really? How absent minded would I have to be? One I got today was “Shocking Tim Russert Sex Tape”. Even if this was a real thing, why on earth would I want to see that? I mean, if I got one that said, “Shocking video of you eating cookies in your yard”, yeah, maybe I’d think that was real, and I’d be concerned enough to click a link. But the other thing? No way.

I hesitate to say anything about this here for risk of attracting more attention from spammers, but I assume many of them are robots anyway and don’t know the difference.

Something must be done. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for a month or so, and I have it set to filter junk mail, but I still have to regularly sift through the junk to see if any genuine correspondence has been misidentified. Every day something is. Is there a better way to handle this?

I know many people who use an Apple product of some sort or another. Mrs. Hill uses an iPhone, and many of my friends and classmates have iPods and iMacs. Some of these people, like Miriam, find their Apple product useful, and appreciate whatever convenience it offers, but have not succumbed to the Cult of Apple. Others, however, are obsessed. Sadly, many journalists are in the latter group. I get why. They have iPads and iPhones and apps and all that, and since it’s cool to them they suppose it’s cool to everybody. And I admit, I have seen some iPhone apps that I have thought interesting and even amazing. But the coverage Jobs’ death has received seems somewhat out-of-proportion, as do the accolades some have gone out of their way to heap upon him.

Is the iPhone cool? Sure. But it wasn’t a radically new idea. The iPad is just a bigger iPhone, or, more accurately, a smaller, less-capable notebook computer. And the iPod, while ubiquitous (indeed, you cannot cross a college campus or ride any public transit system without seeing legions of them), is just a small Walkman. People have had it for decades. I don’t even think the iPod was the first portable MP3 player. None of these products was really shockingly new or revolutionary. Steve Jobs was no Johannes Gutenberg or Thomas Edison. I don’t mean this as a criticism of Mr. Jobs, and, to the best of my knowledge, he never compared himself to those great inventors. My point is merely that some in the media have treated him that way.

Was Steve Jobs a great businessman? Given the apparent success of Apple, I’d say undoubtedly. But far more than technological innovation, I think Jobs’ success with Apple was due to clever and aggressive marketing. And when I say aggressive I mean extremely aggressive. Apple commercials have been, and continue to be, omnipresent. Television commercials, print ads, and billboards for Apple products are everywhere, and these ads have been perfectly crafted to appeal to a certain type of consumer. In one type of commercial, Apple uses a catchy, sing-along-type song that viewers cannot forget. This is a tactic that many companies have used, but Apple did it with remarkably effective simplicity. In another commercial campaign–and one that I hated–Apple took two guys, one representing a Mac, the other representing a Windows-based PC, and made the actor representing the PC appear foolish or stupid. Again, the hipster-quotient was excessively high in these ads. The last campaign I will mention is one I think truly insidious. The “If you don’t have an iPhone…” commercials, which feature shots of the iPhone, while a narrator tells you that, “if you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have an iPhone”. Obviously. But what the commercial is trying to say is that if you don’t have an iPhone you are not cool; you are not relevant; you are not a good person. That campaign appeals to the basest acquisitive consumer impulses. It’s the ugliest sort of advertising: buy this or you’re nobody. The folks at Conan did a pretty accurate parody of an Apple commercial last April:

The title of one of the many op-eds that appeared following Steve Jobs’ death this week hit on something that reminded me of this comedy bit. “Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia“—which appeared in the New York Times, a newspaper published in the heart of Apple-country—is about the Apple CEO’s lack of reverence for any technology. “One of the keys to Apple’s success under his leadership”, writes Mike Daisey, “was his ability to see technology with an unsentimental eye and keen scalpel, ready to cut loose whatever might not be essential”. Apple customers who found their iPhones or iPads suddenly usurped by a newer, more-expensive model, must understand the drawback of such an “unsentimental” business model.

Granted, a key requirement for success in business is making people buy something new when they already have something old. Light bulbs burn out, cars break down, and clothes go out of style. But Apple fanatics seem have had to endure this to an absurd degree. And if, as Mike Daisey argues, Steve Jobs was an “enemy of nostalgia”, all the focus on buy-and-replace makes sense. Apple users, then, are not meant to experience long-lasting relationships with any single technology, because the future success of Apple requires that these users embrace a new technology. That may be a smart business strategy in the short term, but what will it mean in years to come?

Whether or not any aged hipster will one day write a “Long May You Run”-style ballad about his old MacAir is probably not important. But the anti-nostalgic mind is capricious and is always searching for the new thing. Apple may have seemingly-faithful users today, but if they are as unnostalgic as Steve Jobs, they will only stay if Apple appears to be the newest. If their products are not unique, and their marketing style is easily imitable, what will happen when someone comes along and out Apples Apple?

I never saw a Shuttle launch in person, but I am certain it was a spectacular experience. A couple years ago my elderly grandmother attended one, and she was thrilled. Still, I cannot say I am broken-hearted to see the Shuttle retired. Decades after giant Saturn V rockets took men to the moon, low Earth orbit never seemed as impressive. Moreover, given the enormous advances in technology since the Apollo missions, I cannot help but think we could have done more. I hope we will. Though it has no practical benefit that I can see, a manned mission to Mars would be a historic endeavor, and a genuine source of pride for the USA. I would be happy to see that in my lifetime.

Tonight the History Channel is broadcasting a special entitled Stealing Lincoln’s Body.  “Outstanding”, I thought when I saw the listing, since not only is the Rays vs. Red Sox game currently on a rain delay in the ninth inning, but I am a passionate Lincoln fan, and am presently reading David Herbert Donald’s wonderful biography of the greatest of all Americans.  History Channel productions, however, have frequently failed to impress me, commonly employing silly reenactments, and generally lacking the authoritative scholarship associated with PBS efforts.  Stealing Lincoln’s Body has some slightly silly reenactments, sure, but it is much better than average for a History Channel project.  And it has something else that struck me as revolutionary.

Describing Lincoln’s funeral procession through New York City, a famous image of a young Theodore Roosevelt observing Lincoln’s coffin passing beneath his window is shown.  But, like magic, the image appears to come to life, and from the apparent distance at which the photo was taken, the camera zooms in on the two figures in the window, and, lo, there is the boy Roosevelt.  They zoomed and enhanced!  They did it with a couple other historic photos, too, and each time the effect was startling.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, television detectives.

I had learned about motorized bicycles when I stumbled upon an eBay auction for an engine kit.  Since I go to school or work–and usually both–every day, and sometimes make multiple trips, the prospect of shaving several minutes off my commute was appealing.  Moreover, the cold winter mornings and blazing hot summer afternoons are unpleasant on a regular bicycle.  But I rationalized that they would be more tolerable on a motorized bicycle, since I’d move quickly, and, thus, spend less time in the winter cold, and expend little energy, and, thus, get less sweaty in the summer heat.  I bought one of those motor kits on eBay and made my machine using a bicycle given to me by Sarah Jean Russell.  When I began riding my Green Monster, I learned that, indeed, riding fast in the cold beat riding slowly in the cold, and I appreciated that my commute took half the usual time.  But I didn’t get a chance to learn about beating the summer heat:  I only rode my motorized bicycle until mid-April, when concerns for my safety, and annoyance at the myriad problems associated with motorized bicycles ultimately exceeded my passion for speed.

That all came back to me this afternoon when I finally met the owner of the custom motorized bicycle outside Larry’s Giant Subs.  He was an older fellow, and in incredibly profane language he told me how much he loved his bike, but how much trouble he got into with the police, who don’t seem to agree on whether motorized bicycles are motorcycles that require special licenses and registration, or bicycles that don’t.  And he alluded to the fact that his wife took out an insurance policy on him.  I can do without all that.

Before I brought these speakers home last month, I knew practically nothing about them.  But, a quick internet search took me to a wonderful website called The Classic Speaker Pages, and there I found the document that became my bible as I undertook the project of bringing my AR-3as back to life: “Restoring the AR-3a”.  The Classic Speaker Pages also have a discussion forum devoted to Acoustic Research loudspeakers, and several members of the board have extensive experience with the AR-3a going back decades.  They provided valuable assistance as I remedied the little technical issues that, understandably, affect a forty-year-old speaker.

What goes wrong with the AR-3a over time?  A couple of things.  The first is something that goes wrong with all old loudspeakers: woofer surrounds deteriorate.  Most speakers use foam to connect the cones to the baskets, and over time that foam disintegrates and crumbles away.  The early AR-3a used cloth surrounds, and while the cloth itself will stay perfect, the material used to keep that cloth acoustically sealed fails over time.  Acoustic suspension speakers like the AR-3a rely on a practically airtight cabinet, and when the material that seals the cloth surrounds deteriorates, the cones move too freely.  In the bass-rich AR-3a, too much movement in the woofer can destroy the voice coil.  Replacements for AR-3a drivers are no longer made.

Meanwhile, inside the AR-3a cabinet, two issues almost always need addressing.  First, the forty-year-old capacitors have drifted from their original values, and need replacing.  That’s no big deal, since capacitors are inexpensive and easy to find.  The second problem that plagues many Acoustic Research loudspeakers is corrosion in the potentiometers.  The 3a has one potentiometer each for the mid-range driver and the tweeter.  They are fairly simple contraptions, but invariably have become oxidized or corroded, and that means they often no longer make electrical contact.

So, bad capacitors and bad potentiometers mean that many old AR-3a loudspeakers no longer sound the way they should.  And, when people play them loudly without making sure the cloth surrounds are still sealed, they risk serious damage.  I was extremely lucky that my 3as had no damage whatsoever.  Even the walnut cabinets are perfect, which is almost unheard of.

Following directions in the “Restoring the AR-3a” guide, I quite easily re-coated the cloth surrounds on the woofer with Permatex Hi-Tack Gasket Sealant that I readily found at the auto parts store.  A very thin coat over the surrounds and dust caps–which are also cloth–sealed everything very well.

With the woofers out, I removed the fiberglass that fills every AR-3a cabinet.  The crossover network inside seems very complicated at first glance, but after staring at the schematic it began to make more sense.  I was fortunate that these cabinets had never been opened, and all the wiring matched the schematic perfectly.

Not wanting to get in over my head, I took the potentiometers out, cleaned them, and reinstalled them one at a time.  One of the four was like new.  The rest showed a good amount of oxidation.  My Dremel tool took care of that.  I re-soldered each potentiometer as I put it back in, and avoided needless confusion that way.

The original capacitors in the AR-3a look nothing like the capacitors made today.  One large box inside the cabinet houses a 50- and 150 micro-farad capacitor.  A separate small box contains the 6 micro-farad capacitor.   I simply cut out the old capacitors and soldered in the new ones.  It is amazing how much smaller modern capacitors are than the ones installed in older speakers.

Having cleaned the potentiometers and replaced the capacitors in each cabinet, I then replaced the grey putty that encircles the woofer opening, providing an acoustic seal.  The original was still somewhat malleable, but I didn’t trust it to do the job, and new putty is cheap.  I ordered it from an eBay seller that specialized in Acoustic Research restoration projects.  I placed the heavy woofers back in each cabinet, tightened the screws, then re-installed the grilles.  I was ready to test the speakers.

I carried them into the living room, hooked them up to my stereo, and played the music I always use on these sorts of occasions, Trevor Pinnock’s recording of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.  It is complex music that isn’t too bottom-heavy, but has plenty of texture.  I set the volume to a low level and pressed play.  I put my ear to each driver on the right speaker, and was thrilled to hear sound from each.  I had to tweak the potentiometers on the back of the cabinet: the AR-3a has plenty of bottom end; the mid-range driver is strong, too, and needs to be turned down a bit; and the tweeter is bright and clear, but needs to have its pot turned wide open.  Satisfied, I put the grille back on and moved over to the left speaker.  The woofer and tweeter seemed perfect, but the mid-range driver produced no sound.  I was crushed.

My first thought, of course, was that the potentiometer was still a bit dirty, so I rotated it, hoping to find the sweet spot.  No luck.  So I carried the speaker to the back room and began the arduous process of opening it up again.  The guts seemed just right.  The right colored wires connected to the right components, just like the schematic.  I inspected all my solder spots, and they seemed to be fine, too.  But maybe one was a little loose, so I did it over, re-stuffed the cabinet, re-sealed the woofer, and carried it back out to the living room for another test.  (It took me several days to find the time to do all this.)  Still, the mid-range driver produced no sound.  I began to worry.

Of all the things that can go wrong with the AR-3a, the worst, of course, is a bad driver.  They don’t make accurate replacements for the originals, and when you can find authentic ones on eBay, they sell for hundreds of dollars.  That seems like a lot of money for a one-and-a-half-inch dome speaker.  If I did have to replace the driver it wouldn’t be the end of the world, since I paid nothing for the speakers, and even putting a few hundred dollars into them would still be well worth the expense.  But I certainly hoped that it was almost anything besides the driver.

I didn’t have a multi-meter to test the driver, but the engineer at work loaned me a small tone generator used to test speakers.  You press a button corresponding to the frequency you want to generate, hook the leads to the speaker and see if makes a sound.  I was dreading the result, but to my great relief, the mid-range driver emitted a 15kHz tone, which told me the driver was fine, and the problem was somewhere else.  I went to Home Depot the next day and bought a small multi-meter, then began the process of testing each component inside for connectivity.

The potentiometer was still the most likely source of the problem, but the meter showed that it functioned perfectly.  The wire from the potentiometer to the speaker terminals on the front of the cabinet were also fine.  So the problem lay somewhere before the pot.  My multi-meter doesn’t work on capacitors, but I doubted that a brand new cap would be a dud.  I was stuck.

I turned to the AR Forum on The Classic Speaker Pages, and posted a message describing my malady.  A short time later somebody posted a list of potential problems, still convinced that it was a wiring error.  One thing mentioned in passing, though, caught my attention, because it related to something I did inside the cabinet.  When I removed the potentiometer for the tweeter, I un-soldered all the wires leading to it, then re-soldered them.  But when I removed the pot for the mid-range, I cut the last quarter inch of wire, re-stripped, and soldered the pot back in.  A long coil of seemingly bare copper wire leads to the mid-range pot.  (You can see it in the center of the picture here.)  I just soldered that where it was supposed to go.  It never occurred to me that that copper wire had a thin but tough lacquer coating.  Having cut the last bit of that copper wire, I had cut out the portion with the coating removed and re-soldered a coated portion.  That was the cause of my trouble.  I corrected my mistake, closed the cabinet, hooked up the speaker, and repeated my listening test with felicitous results.

The AR-3a sounds amazing.  The bass is deep and solid, the mids are stunningly lifelike, and the treble sparkles.  Listening to Bringing it All Back Home, I was stunned by “Mr. Tambourine Man”.  The acoustic guitar seemed completely natural, so that if I closed my eyes, I couldn’t tell that there wasn’t some living person playing an acoustic guitar in my living room.  Meanwhile, new details are being revealed in songs I have known for a long time.

I am indescribably lucky. Huzzah, AR-3a!