Welcome to and Neville Roberts' Home Page!

Last updated during March 2024


RSS Consultancy
Weather Satellite Images
Physics, Engineering and Technology
Audio Journalism
Technical Audio and Miscellaneous Items
Orchid Photographs


Weather Satellite Images

View the latest weather satellite images that I have recorded directly from the satellites as they pass over my location in Dorset, UK.
Saved images of storms, hurricanes and wide composites
Listen to a sample of the APT audio received from one of the NOAA satellites that contains the visible and infrared information used to generate the images.


Physics, Engineering and Technology


The Institute of Physics
Home Page
(formerly The IEE)
The Institution of Engineering
and Technology Home Page

The Engineering Council

RSS Consultancy


Audio Journalism

Hi-Fi Choice Magazine

Copies of articles are available to subscribers on the Hi-Fi Choice website.

May 2012 ->

Issue 358 ->

I am a monthly contributor to Hi-Fi Choice magazine.

June 2018

Issue 437 sample

Going Live! Excerpt from my Vivaldi in Venice recording review and download an audio excerpt of the Interpreti Veneziani recording.

Stereonet Web-based Audio Publication

The on-line publication is available in several editions: US/Canada, UK, Australia/New Zealand and Asia.

December 2019

Stereonet UK

Reel-to-Real

March 2020

Stereonet UK

Valve amplifiers

May 2020

Stereonet UK

Setting up turntables

August 2020

Stereonet UK

Falcon Acoustics IMF100 Loudspeaker Kit Review

November 2020

Stereonet UK

Chasing The Dragon Vivaldi in Venice Vinyl Review

March 2021

Stereonet UK

Recording On Location

April 2021

Stereonet UK

Falcon Acoustics Q7 Loudspeaker Kit Review

September 2021

Stereonet UK

Falcon Acoustics IMF 200 Loudspeaker Kit Review

November 2021

Stereonet UK

Nordost Blue Heaven RCA Interconnect Cable Review

December 2021

Stereonet UK

Silent Angel N8 Network Switch Review

The Reel-to-Reel Rambler Web-based Audio Publication

I contribute technical articles on professional open reel tape recording and tape reviews.

August 2018

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

A Lifelong Reel Obsession

September 2018

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Recording Chasing The Dragon’s 'España'

October 2018

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Yarlung Records’ philanthropic approach to recording excellence

February 2019

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Vivaldi in Venice - The challenges of making live recordings

June 2019

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Capturing ambience

December 2019

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

A chat with me at the Ascot Hi-Fi Show Live 2019

December 2019

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Recording the Bach Cello Suites

March 2020

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

'A Day in the Life' Quentin Collins recording

September 2020

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

A review of the new Chasing The Dragon sampler tape

November 2020

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

‘Yuko Mabuchi plays Miles Davis’ from Yarlung Records

April 2021

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

RX Reels' carbon fibre tape reels

October 2021

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Studer MPU Boards review

March 2022

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

A recording with a difference - Mendelssohn's Octet and recording techniques comparisons review

March 2022

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Bert Kaempfert's 'Bye Bye Blues' from Horch House

November 2022

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Lyn Stanley – Novel Noel – A Cool Jingle Jazz Celebration

July 2023

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Chasing The Dragon’s new tape recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade

February 2024

Reel-to-Reel-Rambler

Lyn Stanley – Black Dress Ballads

audioXpress Magazine (USA)

Copies of articles are available to subscribers on the audioXpress website.

July 2008

audioXpress

CDs Under Canvas - The Tentlabs DIY CD Player

November 2009

audioXpress

A New Approach to Tube Design

November 2016

audioXpress

The Vinyl Frontier

June 2017

audioXpress

Head Space

February 2018

audioXpress

The Reel Thing

August 2018

audioXpress

The Challenges of Live Recordings

I have also written a number of guest editorials from May 2018 to March 2020 for the audioXpress online newsletter - The Audio Voice

Australian Hi-Fi Magazine (Australia)

Digital copies of the magazines are available via the Australian Hi-Fi subscription website.

Sept.-Oct. 2019

Australian Hi-Fi

A Pressing Problem... With LPs

Jan.-Feb. 2020

Australian Hi-Fi

The Vinyl Frontier

Hi-Fi World Magazine

April 2001

DIY Supplement 57

Design and Construction of a Quality Stepped Attenuator

November 2001

DIY Supplement 61

Building Quality DIY Mains Power Leads

November 2001

DIY Supplement 61

Upgrading the WAD Series II Modular Preamp

April 2002

DIY Supplement 64

Review - Njoe Tjoeb 4000 CD Player

April 2002

DIY Supplement 64

A Moving Coil Cartridge Head Amplifier

May 2002

DIY Supplement 65

Review - Origin Live Turntable Kit

August 2002

DIY Supplement 67

Upgrading the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 Valve CD Player

February 2003

DIY Supplement 71

Cartridge Alignment with the Vinyl Essentials Test Record

October 2003

DIY Supplement 75

Upgrading the Upgrade - The New Origin Live Turntable Motor

April 2004

DIY Supplement 78

The New Origin Live Ultra Turntable Power Supply

December 2004

DIY Supplement 80

Stepped Attenuators - The Final Instalment?

February 2005

DIY Supplement 81

A Touch of Glass

April 2005

DIY Supplement 82

The ProLogue One AABB Upgrade

April 2005

DIY Supplement 82

Tube Hoops

August 2005

DIY Supplement 84

HD83 Extreme Makeover

October 2005

DIY Supplement 85

Book Review - Sound Design by David Attwood

October 2005

DIY Supplement 85

An Eighth-Wave Transmission Line Loudspeaker

March 2006

Vol.16 No.1

The History of Vinyl & Phonograph Cylinder Recording + audio samples

April 2007

Vol.17 No.2

Rewired for Sound - rewiring a tonearm

April 2007

Vol.17 No.2

On The Run - the evolution of my Hi-Fi system

June 2007

Vol.17 No.4

Soundbites - Logitech Wireless Hi-Fi Link

August 2007

Vol.17 No.6

Soundbites - Black Rhodium Cables

September 2007

Vol.17 No.7

Arms Length Review - The Audio Origami Tonearm

September 2007

Vol.17 No.7

Soundbites - Sennheiser OMX90VC Earphones

September 2007

Vol.17 No.7

Glass Time - The SuperTubeClock Valve CD Clock Upgrade

February 2008

Vol.17 No.12

Olde Worlde - The Reel Thing - The Sony TC-377 Open Reel Recorder

October 2008

Vol.18 No.8

Soundbites - Philips GoGear MP3 Player

October 2008

Vol.18 No.8

Soundbites - Ringmat CDi Blue Statmat & Dampers

January 2009

Vol.18 No.11

The Holy and the IV - The PrimaLuna ProLogue Eight Upgraded

March 2009

Vol.19 No.1

Soundbites - TJ Full Music Valves

June 2009

Vol.19 No.4

Soundbites - Sonic Freedom Offspring Spikes

June 2009

Vol.19 No.4

Soundbites - Black Knight Figure of 8 Powercord

October 2009

Vol.19 No.8

Buy buy Blackburn! - A New Valve Range from Blackburn MicroTech Solutions

December 2009

Vol.19 No.10

A History of Test Card Music

January 2010

Vol.19 No.11

Spinning the Bottle

January 2010

Vol.19 No.11

Kinetik Energy - The New ISOkinetik Modular One Turntable

February 2010

Vol.19 No.12

A New Concept? - The Clearaudio Concept Turntable

February 2010

Vol.19 No.12

Review - ISOkinetik Upgraded Rega Turntable

March 2010

Vol.20 No.1

The Rega RB1000 Tonearm

May 2010

Vol.20 No.3

TEAC for Two - The TEAC T-H380DNT Stereo Tuner

March 2011

Vol.21 No.1

Out of the Blue - The Kiseki Blue NOS Cartridge

July 2011

Vol.21 No.5

Cable Sound - Do Cables Make a Difference?

December 2011

Vol.21 No.10

Squeezing More Out of a Squeezebox!

September
/October 2012

Vol.22 Nos.7 and 8

Trough-Line Triumph! - How to restore and upgrade this legendary FM tuner

September 2022

Vol.32 No.7

Letters & Emails - A mention of the Trough-Line articles in the final issue of Hi-Fi World


Technical Audio and Miscellaneous Items

Stepped Attenuator Calculators

For Hi-Fi enthusiasts wishing to build their own stepped attenuator to replace the volume control in their amplifier, I have written two Javascript programs to calculate the values of the resistors required; one for a resistor string attenuator with up to 24 steps and the other for a shunt attenuator with up to 50 steps. I hope you find them useful.

300B Triode Testing

If anyone wants to test 300B triodes on a valve tester that doesn't support these valves, click here to read how I solved the problem with my B&K Dyna-Jet Valve (Tube) Tester Model 606.

For anyone interested in television engineering, I wrote an article for Wireless World back in 1979 on the design of a unit to electronically generate colour television pictures from a black & white source. More recently, I wrote an article for the Test Card Circle on Baird 30-line television and have included both articles below.

August 1979

Wireless World

Colour Synthesizer Design for the PAL System

April 2004

The Test Card Circle Magazine

30-Line Television: Baird for All to See!

Colour Bar Test Generator

If you need a simple colour test pattern on your monitor, click on the Colour Bar Generator link, or on Colour Bar Generator with Tone for the colour bars with 15 seconds of 440Hz tone followed by 5 seconds of silence. Press F11 to toggle between full screen view and normal window.

Hi-Fi and Professional Audio Equipment Maintenance

If you have any high-end audio equipment that needs to be repaired, calibrated, maintained or simply set up correctly, then look no further than The Audiophiles Clinic, who can offer a complete service for any professional recording studio or high-end audio enthusiast. Owned and run by a highly-experienced electronics engineer, acoustic engineer and self-confessed music geek, he certainly did an amazing job restoring my Studer A810 professional tape recorder to 'better than new' by using modern audiophile components in the restoration process.

As I have an EPROM programmer, firmware images of three versions for the Studer A810 (25/86, 01/88 and 25/91) plus a few of the correct type of blank EPROMS, I have been able to upgrade my machine's firmware from version 25/86 to the most stable version 01/88. For more information, click here.

Music

Other interests include light and classical music, especially baroque. My classical recordings are listed in Album_Details.PDF.

I also have a comprehensive collection of the excellent quality light music used to accompany the BBC test card and am a member of the Test Card Circle. I have a copy of virtually every tape from 1959 through to 1982 on CD. The tapes were 1/2 hour long up until 1972 and then were 1 hour in length. Most of these CDs have been made from the original BBC coded music master recordings and the later ones are therefore in stereo!

In addition to the BBC test card music, I have copies of the music used to accompany the Channel 4 test card when the channel started broadcasting on 2 November 1982. I have copies of the first nine 1-hour tapes used, again from the stereo masters, as well as the original Channel 4 theme. I also have a collection of library music recordings (recordings that were not commercially available) and much of it was used for television theme tunes and interval music.

UK Speaking Clock Emulator

To indulge in a little nostalgia, I have written a program that emulates the UK Speaking Clock 'TIM'. The Visual Basic program should work on any PC running Windows 11, 10 or 7. Pat Simmons was the voice of the United Kingdom's Speaking Clock from 1963 until 1985. The program uses your computer's clock as the reference and speaks the time using recordings of Pat Simmons' voice - just as you would have heard if you had dialled 'TIM' or the number 846. You can download the program from here as a 16Mb ZIP file - save it on your computer and unzip the contents, then run the Install file to install it on your PC and click the 'Install' button. If you get Windows Smartscreen 'Windows protected your PC' warnings about running the installation and the first time the program runs, click on 'More info' and then 'Run anyway' (it is quite safe!) - you will only need to do that twice - once for the install and once to run the program for the first time. You can remove it at any time using the uninstall feature of Windows Control Panel 'Programs and Features' in the usual way. When installed, the program will be available in your list of programs under 'Speaking Clock'. Enjoy!


Orchid Photographs

Prior to 2000, the orchid photographs were taken on a Nikon FE 35mm camera using the standard Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens with off-camera flash and extension tubes as necessary. The photographs were taken on Fujichrome 'Sensia' ASA100 or 'Sensia II' ASA200 colour slide film. These slides were then scanned on a Nikon 'Coolscan' scanner.

From 2000 until 2004, the photographs were taken on a Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera. From 2005, a Nikon DSLR camera has been used (a D70 from 2005-2009, a D90 from 2010-2011, a D7000 from 2012-2017 and a D7500 from 2018), together with an AF Micro Nikkor 60mm f2.8 D lens. For illumination, either an off-camera Nikon SB600 flash unit with diffuser or a ring LED unit on the lens was used.

The resultant JPGs have been scaled down for the web - click on the thumbnail to download the picture.

Tropical Orchids



Brassia verrucosa

Cattleya Braziliensis

Cattleya velutina x Laelia Crispa

Coelogyne Cristata

Coelogyne Cristata
'Alba'

Coelogyne fuliginosa

Coelogyne fuscescens

Coelogyne Intermedia

Coelogyne lawrenceana

Coelogyne Massangeana

Cymbidium hybrid

Cymbidium hybrid yellow

Cymbidium hybrid yellow
(focus-stacked)

Cymbidium Alexanderi
'Westonbirt'

Cymbidium Alexanderi
'Westonbirt' (7 blooms)

Cymbidium Minneken
'Pink Tower'

Dendrobium Ainsworthii

Dendrobium Delicatum

Dendrobium Delicatum spray

Dendrobium Golden Blossom
'Sunset'

Dendrobium Hastings

Dendrobium hybrid

Dendrobium kingianum

Dendrobium Maihime
Beauty

Dendrobium Nobile

Dendrobium Pink Doll
'Elegance'

Dendrochilum latifolium

Encyclia cochleata

Epidendrum ibaguense

Epidendrum Prismatocarpum

Laelia virens

Laeliocattleya
Meadow Gold

Lycaste Skinneri

Masdevallia Teipels
Mary Candy

Maxilaria Praestans

Miltonia Kasserine
x Franz Wichmann

Neobenthema gracilio

Neobenthema gracilio
spray

Odontioda Fireflower
x Odontoglossum Hallii

Odontioda Flintstone

Odontioda Galaxy

Odontioda Harry Baldwin x
Carl Keyes x Elaine Herioda

Odontioda Honiton Lace

Odontocidium Tigersun

Odontoglossum
Bictoniense

Odontoglossum Luto Purpureum
x Mach Two

Odontoglossum Pulchellum

Odontonia Susan Bogdanow

Oncidium goldiana

Oncidium maculatum

Oncidium
ornithorhynchum

Paphiopedilum gratrixianum

Paphiopedilum
lawrenceanum x ciliolare

Paphiopedilum King Arthur
'Bourgogne'

Paphiopedilum leeanum

Paphiopedilum Maudae

Paphiopedilum Petronella
x Queen Anna

Paphiopedilum Nitens

Paphiopedilum Prince Edward of York

Paphiopedilum Rosy Dawn
'Alba'

Paphiopedilum Rosy Dawn

Paphiopedilum Rosy Dawn
(2 blooms)

Miniature
Phalaenopsis hybrid

Phalaenopsis hybrid

Phalaenopsis hybrid

Phalaenopsis hybrid

Phalaenopsis hybrid

Phalaenopsis Sussex Pearl

Phragmipedium
Ainsworthii

Phragmipedium
Calurum

Phragmipedium
Don Wimber

Pleurothallis

Polystachya Pubescens

Rossioglossum grande

Sarcochilus Fitzhart

Sophrolaeliocattleya Jewel Box

Stenoglottis longifolii

Vuylstekeara Cambria
'Orange'

Zygopetalum intermedium

Zygopetalum 'Ladybird'


'Hardy' Terrestrial Orchids



Anacamptis pyramidalis

Anacamptis pyramidalis
(Badbury Rings, Dorset)

Anacamptis pyramidalis
(spray)

Bletilla striata

Bletilla striata
'Soryu'

Calanthe Kozu
(focus-stacked)

Cypripedium Emile

Cypripedium fasciolatum

Cypripedium formosanum

Cypripedium Gisela

Cypripedium Gisela
plant (focus stacked)

Cypripedium Hank Small

Cypripedium Lucy
Pinkepank

Cypripedium parviflorum
v pubescens

Cypripedium Ulla Silkens
(in garden)

Cypripedium Ulla Silkens

Dactylorhiza fuchsii

Dactylorhiza fuchsii
(Badbury Rings, Dorset)

Dactylorhiza fuchsii
(spray)

Dactylorhiza fuchsii
(St.Leonards, Dorset)

Dactylorhiza praetermissa
'Anada' (in garden)

Dactylorhiza praetermissa
'Anada'

Disa Diores
'Inca Warrior'

Disa Kewensis

Disa Kewensis
'Ann'

Disa Kewensis
'Mandarin'

Disa uniflora
'Firebird'

Disa uniflora
'Marguerite_Kottler'

Epipactis gigantea
(in garden)

Epipactis gigantea plant
(in garden)

Epipactis gigantea

Epipactis Renate

Habenaria radiata

Listera ovata
(Batcombe, Dorset)

Ophrys apifera
(in garden)

Ophrys apifera

Orchis mascula
(Badbury Rings, Dorset)

Orchis morio
(in garden)

Orchis morio

Platanthera chlorantha
(Badbury Rings, Dorset)

Platanthera chlorantha
& Dactylorhiza fuchsii

Pleione praecox

Pleione tongariro

Serapias lingua


Orchid-related Links



Bournemouth Orchid Society

Hardy Orchid Society

The North of England
Orchid Society

The Orchid Mall

Orchid Research Newsletter -
Kew

American Orchid Society

Bournemouth Natural
Science Society

British Orchid
Council

Wessex Orchid
Society

Orchid Accessories

British Paphiopedilum Society

Elite Orchids

Orchid Alchemy

Isle of Portland
Orchids


I have written an article on orchids entitled "In Love with Orchids" for a Chinese lifestyle magazine, UK Laomao. This is the same article as published in Chinese.



Thank you for your interest!


Email me



This page has been accessed times since September 2004.


(c) 1998-2024 Neville Roberts BSc CEng CPhys FIET MInstP