Ye Olde ThinkPadde & Co.

My thoughts on the whole ThinkPad thing going on out there.

...

Imagine you're a college student. Or maybe you don't have to imagine. But, anyway -- imagine: it's your first day of freshman year, you've gotten your high school grad money and bought the nicest laptop computer you can afford. You wonder what other students will be computing on, so you get a laptop that at least sort of fits you in with the crowd you're hoping to coalesce into. This is probably a MacBook for most students, or maybe a Dell XPS gaming machine. You adorn it with some stickers of favorite national parks, skateboard brands, your college logo, what have you, and you sit down in your first class and open it up to take notes. Then you see the person next to you. They have a laptop that looks like a prop from an early-2000s business-setting movie: an American Psycho-style computer. "Damn," you think to yourself, "what a hosehead. How's this nerd going to type up a Microsoft Word doc full of notes?"

Now, switch scenes. Imagine again that you're a college student. Not just any college student, but one aspiring to be a Computer Science major. You've gotten your high school grad money and bought the nicest laptop that you can afford. This doesn't mean some specced-out Nvidia RTX 5090M blower-fan monstrosity with an RGB backlit keyboard. Of course it doesn't. When you think "nicest laptop," you think... Pad. That is, think ThinkPad. And not any of those newfangled post-2012 models with the stupid chiclet keyboards and modern processors. No, you're going all-out with your grad money... you've been scouring eBay for a ThinkPad T420 with an i7, something that will run a video game or two if you feel like it. And, you've found one, at long last, and at a reasonable price, too. You feel like the monarch of the world with your T420, and even make a joke or two on your friends' text group -- I mean, Discord server -- about getting a high while using it. "Ha!" you think to yourself, "I've got a laptop no one can lay shame to. It's the most desirable model, and with an i7 at that!" But, then... you sit down in your first class and open it up to take notes. And, the inevitable, tragic moment arrives that shatters your ThinkPad pride. Your deskmate pulls up to you with... a T410. They start it up, and you see LibreBoot flash on their screen before GRUB arrives, a quarter-second visual exchange. Another second or two passes by, and my god, they are running Gentoo. Too cool for even Arch Linux. A few keystrokes later, and they're in VimWiki, ready to take notes. And what have you got? A T420. Running Ubuntu for heaven's sake, and two years more capable of running the latest software. Yours is in pristine business-used condition (according to the eBay seller) and the trackpad even has most of the little bumps. You glance at your deskmate's 'Pad again, and their trackpad isn't even visible beneath the rows of sticky notes notating custom keybinds, long since memorized, but taking those off would detract from their studying time, and probably their cachet, too.

... 

Thanks for reading! I've never been great at finishing written pieces, so it kind of just ends there. Maybe someday I'll write a proper tapering-off of the saga.

QRW 

Technical Differences: JBL L16 Decade, L19, and 4301 (Introduction)

Similar speakers: JBL L16 Decade, L19 and 4301 series

What is the difference between these?

Magazine scan credit: Nesster, flickr. License: CC BY 2.0 DEED.

Introduction

In this post, I plan to cover some technical differences between several similar JBL speakers.
Each of them is a two-way speaker with a 1.4-inch diameter pulp cone tweeter and an 8-inch diameter pulp cone woofer.
I will use JBL's official documents on these speakers for reference, along with my own knowledge of the speakers. Here are the JBL documents I will be using:

• JBL L16 Decade
• JBL L19
• JBL 4301 (direct download to pdf)
• JBL 4301E (Independent website www.cieri.net archive copy, higher-resolution)
• JBL 4301E (U.S. Library of Congress archive copy, lower-resolution)
• JBL 4301B (direct download to pdf)
• JBL 4301BE (direct download to pdf)

Additionally, I have included some other links to articles; credit for those goes to their respective authors and publishers. The links will take you to the appropriate pages to read. I have read the articles and will utilize some information from them in my explanation -- you may benefit from reading them, too.

Another thing to note about the JBL models before I begin:
There is also a version of the 4301 called the 4301 WX. As far as I can tell, there is no official JBL document on the web for this model. In fact, the WX suffix, which appeared on several other JBL speakers in the 43XX series, is a bit of a mystery. I may look more into the WX suffix later. For now, all I can offer is that it does not appear to have any difference in specifications from the JBL 4301 (no suffix.) If you, reader, know anything about the WX suffix, please comment below. It would be helpful to both me and the rest of the vintage JBL speaker community!

Please stay tuned for Part 1: JBL L16 Decade!

Greetings!

Welcome to my New Blog!

This blog will be about things I like and am interested in.

I will discuss topics such as vintage speakers and stereo equipment, as well as music and recordings I like, and other interesting things.
Some of those "other interesting things" may include:

• Video games and consoles
• Computer hardware
• Computer software
• Compact Discs
• Other gadgets and collections of mine

I hope you find all that interesting, too!

--.

Quentin
May 9, 2024