It was a rumour, Nile Rodgers talked about it but now it's real! The Shapeshifers new album Sound Advice contains the track Sensitivity which is a collaboration of him with Shapeshifters. Basically it is CHIC with the Shapeshifters since they used a demo track given to them by Nile of the unreleased CHIC production from 1981. This original song was done by Johnny Mathis on his album that was called I Love My Lady. You can clearly hear CHIC on this track that was on the Mathis album as Love And Be Loved. Nile playing his guitar, the strings and Bernard playing a very cool basline, it's a flashback in time! The song starts familiar with Nile (?) counting off  "1,2,3,4.." and at the end you hear the strings playing the I Want Your Love tune..  Hopefully Sony/Columbia will come to their senses and finally release the Johnny Mathis album!! buy it here

[read more]

The Elac CD400 and CD500 were mentioned here before, I like those vintage 70's decks made by Nakamichi for the German Elac company. I recently found another CD500 (left in the picture) and today I received the CD520! This CD520 (right in the picture) is basically an upgraded version of the CD500, the limiter has gone and has been replaced by DNL, the Philips noise reduction that the early 70's Naks also used. The record/playback head has also been upgraded, it is called here FGO head, judging from the shape and mounting it is the same head as used in the early 70's Naks like 250, 350 and 550.

[read more]

The low-end Nakamichi CR-series are not the most desirable of all Naks but now I have both... CR-1E and CR-2E plus a CR-4. Repairing a CR-deck is not my speciality, yet.. The CR-2 had a big problem when I got it, it didn't want to do anything when play, rew or ffwd were pressed. After some investigation I managed to loosen the cam + motor litle bit and moved it around as much as possible. This got the CR-2 moving again, only it wouldn't stop! This was caused by one of the switches the cam touched when changing position, one of them was always in a closed position so bending it fixed this! The main difference between the 1 and the 2 are that the 2 has a digital counter, mute, bias fine tune and adjustable output volume. While looking insite you notice the modern pcb which made me thinking of upgrading the standard cinch output connectors with gold plated connectors...

[read more]

One of my treasures has been a Nakamichi ZX-9. I've owned it for years but it always had problems. Last week I finally brought it to Tom van der Hoff, THE Dutch Nakamichi technician. He went over the entire unit, fixed the 400hz generator, some damage done to the pcb by previous repair attemps and gave the unit a total check-up and of course his magic touch! Now it performs like it should have all those years and once again i'm a happy owner of a new Nak!

[read more]

My first Nak was a 582, I still have it. This 582z I found on Marktplaats.nl was sold broken, something with the transport appeared to be wrong according to the seller. I received the unit today went over it and it appeared the 2 crucial lights were dead. The first light is the light on the stop-button, if it's broken the unit doesn't function at all! The 2nd light was the auto-shutoff light, if this one is broken the unit stops playing after a second, crucial as well! Then there was the controlcam belt, another common problem on Naks with the classic transport, if this one is worn the transport doesn't function as fast as it should or doesn't function at all in this case.... After fixing these problems (cost less than 5 euro's) the unit is playing wonderful again! This makes me remember how nice these 582 units are!

[read more]

I've released the 1.7.9 version of my pet-project the MMBase Lucenemodule and these are the main changes:

New Features:

1. Extractor plugins
   Lucenemodule's dependencies on pdf and word content extraction are now handled by Extractors. This makes the module less depending on some external jars. Extractors have to implement an interface and have to be declared in the definition xml file. Extractors are executed by their mimetype by the Lucenemodule. You can register the same extractor with different mimetypes if you wish. The previously used dependencies for word and pdf are now included automatically as the default and can be overruled by defining a extractor with the same mimetype.
2. Support for Excel and RTF
   These formats are now supported as Extractors.
3. StandardCleaningAnalyzers
   This Analyzer which is available for Dutch and English are useful in most cases where you want to search and index word with special characters.
   Words like 'één' can then be found in their original form 'één' and base form 'een'.

Improvements:

1. Cache cleanup
   MMBase cache is now cleaned when indexing of nodes takes place to keep the memory usage low, the behaviour of the 1.8 HugeNodeListIterator was simulated here.
2. SearchTag custom queries
   The custom queries in the search tag are not supported anymore, the taglibs match tag should be used.
3. re-use-index
   This option in the module xml file will keep the index in tact and only does updates on the index on a restart of MMBase. Use this option in combination with a large interval time to keep the module from re-indexing.
4. Usage of Lucene 1.9
   The new version of Lucene is used and the module now uses the new Lucene 2.0 api.

Bugfixes:

1. Various bugs were fixed with the help of Alban Hertroys and others.