He leaned in and said conspiratorially: “I’m blind in both eyes.”
I said, “Yeah, I figured that out.”
“What gave me away?”
“The part where you couldn’t see?”

Then he said: “Last week there was this woman who was totally in a hurry and hassling me to help her, and I was going just as fast as I could, but then she asked me another question when I was looking for something with my head down. So I whipped my head up and my glass eye flew out. MAN. Then I had to go find my eye, and it was all in the dust and everything…” I said, “What’d the woman do?” “Oh yeah, well, she left. Just took one look and NRRRRROOOOOM out of here.”

So I told him about my mom teaching a little girl who had two glass eyes. They had to find transportation for her to school other than the school bus, because she kept freaking out the bus driver. They’d load her into the bus, get on the road, and when they got to school, the bus driver would turn around to help the little blind girl out and the girl, every time, had taken both her eyes out and put them in her mouth, where she was rolling them around. The driver would have to figure out how to get her to spit out the eyes without choking on them or biting them, and then somehow get them back in her head, and it was just too much outside the bounds of a normal school bus driving job description.

You can download them here:

Tropa De Elite - English subtitles for Brazil DVD

Here also are the workprint subs that we edited and refined to make the DVD subtitles, in case you are looking for those:

Tropa De Elite - English subtitles for Bootleg Workprint release

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Sketchup model file

Small Animals

Periscope Train Ride torrent

When I was a teenager, I was convinced that some day I would own a good stereo, just as certain of it as some boys are which particular Lamborghini they’d own as adults. I did not pick out particular brands and model numbers. But I knew what it would look like, in particular the large dominating tower speakers, trimmed in a dark burnished zebrawood veneer with accents of chrome. Powerful, accurate, expensive. I loved music, and surely I deserved the best equipment to listen to it with. This teen consumer dream got tucked away on the back shelf.

I’ve had several mid-fi stereos. I lost one receiver to poor shipping on my part back from my first year at college. I lost my next receiver and a CD player to a thief who slipped out of my house with all my portable consumer electronics in a yellow recycling tub, wrapped in what happened to be the top sheet from my only nice set of bedsheets (reserved for visitors). He left the speakers, which probably looked a bit beat up and old, and anyway his hands were surely full.

When this last stereo walked off I did not replace it. I lent the once-expensive-but-now-antique speakers I’d inherited in my grandmother’s estate to a friend, who is still borrowing them and who offers at polite regular intervals to return them to me when they come up in conversation.

The fact is, by then I hardly missed the stereo. It was out in the living room I never sat in, and I was listening to MP3s on my computer in my office, on $100 tiny cubes on the desk with a little baby “sub”. Fidelity had definitely taken a hit, but being able to download anything and immediately play it was far more important. I missed the great click-wheel UI on my CD player, but Winamp was better in nearly all ways. I dismissed MP3s when they were first shown to me, but I came around hard & fast.

Accessibility has trumped every other concern since then. First I set up a MP3 CD player in the kitchen to listen to music there. Then when we bought our first house I wired it for Ethernet, and started buying SlimDevices hardware. I always bought used, refurbished, or close-out. I strove for best bang for the buck, always doing just enough to keep the library expanding and the library accessible. Making it sound great was not a priority.

Even as our music collection grew, I’d periodically check in on my nice stereo fantasy. Usually it took the form of a look at one or two of the stereo magazines at the bookstore. They gave me mixed feelings. Mostly, these were bad vibes - I was suspicious and dubious. The reason is simple, and obvious to nearly everyone who comes in contact with what’s left of modern High Fidelity and audiophiles: most of it is total bullshit.

Knocking the high-end stereo industry is stupidly easy. The industry has set themselves up for this. Preying on insecure men with a weak grasp of both the scientific method and the power of suggestion, they’ve straight-facedly moved the line forward on more and more ludicrous ways to add obscene costs to the things they sell. Whenever I flipped through one of the popular stereo magazines, the thing that always stopped me cold - dead stop, put the magazine down and walk away - was cables. Sorry, I mean “interconnects” that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Any electrical engineer can and will tell you that these are not only wildly overpriced, but offer no measurable benefit over the stuff you can buy at Radio Shack. Audiophiles and industry shills will insist for various bogus reasons that double blind evaluation of audio equipment is invalid. (I always wonder if they’d like it if the medical industry evaluated their drugs and medical treatments without consideration for placebo effect.)

A very inexpensive CD player gives excellent fidelity, and a basic receiver gives ample low distortion wattage. Beyond that, and you’re probably just paying for a name or a fancy brushed aluminum case. You can buy these used off Craigslist for under $100 and do great.

And yet - I knew that better speakers were important. One popluar rule of thumb for buying a stereo is put the majority of your budget into speakers.I wanted better sound, but the stereo industry actively sickened me. I was content to be thrifty and knowingly low-fi. I was completely terrified of being a dupe.

And then one day this link turned up in one of my RSS feeds. Ooo, I thought, fancy speaker. Oh no, tube amp, he’s crazy.. but wait a sec, this speaker is a design from somebody? With a walkthrough? This pair of links got me started investigating the world of do-it-yourself audio, in particular do it yourself speakers.

There were a bunch of guys out there building their own speakers, and if they were to be believed, the speakers they were making would cost 4-5 times their parts cost in the retail market. I was intrigued. I kept drifiting into the orbit of the scene, bookmarking a few relevant sites, then forgetting again for a few months. Some of the designs (especially the European ones) were exotic, sleek rounded shapes, unbuildable by me. Others were just absurdly impractical, with giant speakers the size of small cars. I kept coming back to designs like the Dayton 3 - no-nonsense efforts by no-nonsense middle Americans. There were kit designs too, but I kept shying away from them - wasn’t I trying to cut out the middleman? I focused on the free designs.

I eventually realized I was looking for not just a design, but also a designer. A guru. The one I kept coming back to was John “Zaph” Krutke. The most important words on his index page might be these: “- this page is advertisement free - - there is nothing for sale here - “. . He rails against subjectivity and snake oil on his site. He actively discourages emailing him, and professes not to care much if you build his designs or not. But the community refers to him with deference. His test data is popular, even canonical for the community. He says he likes his speakers as accurate and impartial as possible.

I got tired of having my nose pressed to the glass, took a leap of faith and ordered the parts for one of his designs, the SR-71. I’m going to save you a long description of me trying to learn carpentry. A month later I finished a pair of speakers that are electronically correct, very heavy, and look reasonably good when you get two feet away from scores of minor cosmetic errors.

They also sound pretty good. They’re likely the best pair of speakers I’ve ever owned. I’m told by speaker designers and other builders I could easily spend $1800 retail to buy speakers as good as these.

I want to say more than that, but I’ll either be lying or making stuff up. Both of which I’m good at. And so are you, are so is anyone with ears for that matter. It’s very easy to imagine or project on to your perceptions when listening to speakers. It’s bad enough to be someone else’s dupe - it’s worse to dupe yourself.

Soon after building my speakers another builder in my area made it clear that he really, really wanted to hear these speakers because he was considering building them. When reading online forums about speaker building, you get into a bizarre game of comparison telephone, where someone will ask how design X compares to design Y. Someone will often respond that while they haven’t heard design X, they have heard design Q, which someone else said was smoother/brighter/harsher than design Y. Everyone knows this is extremely subjective at best, but it approaches the level of comedy when there may only be a dozen actual built examples of some DIY designs on the planet. So, for this neighbor of mine to actually have an opportunity to hear the damn things before building them - it was an almost unheard of luxury for him. I understood completely, and let him come over for the afternoon to listen. He brought his current speakers, a kit he’d built five years ago.

We were two attentive guys paying as much attention as we could to our hand built speakers, and at the end of the afternoon we had almost nothing factual to say about them besides the fact that his had “more” bass, and mine had “less, but maybe more accurate” bass. I could make some stuff up to make myself sound cultured and perceptive, which is what I assume most stereo magazine reviewers do, but again I’ll only be fooling myself.

Building your own speakers is satisfying, in the same way that I assume making your own table or nightstand is. I was startled by the flush of pride I felt when I first hooked them up and heard them work, looking halfway decent, sounding very good. It was probably worth doing the project for this reason alone. I’d spent the whole project trying to tamp down my expectations, but couldn’t stop a dumb happy grin welling up.

Just as importantly to me, I know I haven’t been ripped off. There weren’t two tiers of sales guys making 400% margin on the parts. Zaph writes at detail about the technical aspects of the design, enough to convince me of its quality. If I paid too much for anything, it was the fault of the weak dollar vs. the Euro, as my speaker drivers were from Norway, and I for one can handle being a victim of the global economy.

I may still own a pair of fancy tower speakers one day, but if I do chances are good that I’ll have built and finished them myself. They definitely won’t cost as much as a Lamborghini - and the brand name will be Me.