Look at this months Practical Classics there is a review of socket/torx sets by various manufacturers.

The Halfords professional that I have used, have been good.
They used to do a life guarantee on sockets, I dont know if they still do. No hassle exchange, on one occasion because there was not a single socket available, it was robbed from a professional set!




pmh (was peter)

Have a look on the good garage guide on this website.

www.honestjohn.co.uk/directories/good_garages/DirG...m

On the way back from work last year I flagged a chap down on the A1 by in Citroen BX whose offside rear wheel was blatantly loose. He replied frostily to the effect that he couldn\'t feel anything wrong and scorched off. By the time I had got 10 miles further on I found a 3 wheeled BX missing a chunk of rear wing and with the bumper trailing on the deck. I didn\'t stop again.

Also flagged a chap in a Ford Sierra down years ago outside Leeds on the M1. His near side rear tyre was flat but not shredded. When he opened his window to converse with me the blast of raw alcohol was overpowering. I pointed out the tyre problem. \"Can\'t deal with it now\" he slurred, \"Got to see a man about a dog\". And he took off down the hard shoulder.

Also a while ago I had a hired Tranny headed for South Wales. I was following a truck far too closely when it emptied the contents of its radiator dramatically under the truck and therefore over the front of the Tranny. I tried to pull out and flag them down, but the truck was empty and the Tranny full of Mum\'s furniture. By the time I had crept abreast of the truck, it slowed suddenly and pulled over. I followed it and got out to explain to the driver. I had hardly started when he interrupted, swearing at me to the effect that he could quite well see what had happened and now to go away and mind my own business.

It\'s a thankless task\' trying to help ...

H.

The above points about sound quality are all very true and equally valid, but there are a few more things to consider:

* MP3s don't just chop off the high and low bits - they take advantage of lulls in the 'busyness' of the piece to lower the bandwidth required to play it back, they even out parts of such complexity that the average listener wouldn't notice, and they use many other subtle and intesely mathematical ways of cropping your music file down to around a tenth of its original size on average.

* The type of music you encode to MP3 will drastically influence the quality of playback, all other things being equal. You might find that very sparse techno comes across just fine, whereas classical recording can lose clarity and the sense of 'space'.

* In some cases, the quality of certain instruments may decrease - cymbals can become murkier, highly overdriven guitars may sound less defined - just because a frequency is outside the range of human hearing, it doesn't mean that it has no effect on the frequencies you *can* hear - soundwaves are very complex things, and removing or altering any part can have surprising knock-on effects

* I find that the optimum encoding rate is 192bit, as it mainatins a fair copy of the CD original without sacrificing too much of the original feel. Many encoderS allow you to choose a 'variable bit rate' setting which constantly changes the compression ratio to take advantage of bits of the music that are more simplistic and so require less hard work to decompress. Opinions are still divided over this one, but good encoders seem to do the job just fine and it does reduce the size of the final files.

* Make sure you pick an MP3 player with the most flexibility - if it can playback multiple bitrates including VBR, and can play files from folders under different CD formats with no filename length limitation, you're doing well. Always approach a decent ICE specialist rather than going to somewhere like Dixons, as most of the high street folk really don't have a clue about the subleties of theie products.

* You do have to bear in mind that the quality of the original recording will directly affect the quality of your MP3 - its the old 'garbage in, garbage out' adage again :)

* Despite the above, don't worry too much about the idea of compressing music - minidiscs use compression and digital recording techniques of any kind sacrifice some of the original sound. Every single disc in your CD collection is playing back less than was originally present when the musicians were recording the session, but the techniques are so snazzy that you can only tell if you have a very good ear, and listen to the original master tapes side by side with the final recording

* Always remember that while the MP3 standard is legal, much of what is done with it isn't - any licensed piece of music you rip to MP3 is an illegal copy, despite you owning the original.

Even with all that in mind, the MP3 format is fantastic - it opens up the music world in ways we've never had before. There are other standards (such as Ogg Vorbis) which give arguably better quality playback than a similar MP3, and take less space to do so. The future is looking good...

Have fun! :)