YA TA!

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YA TA!

shadesofmauve:

pyoorkate:

shadesofmauve:

*have you ever looked at a sound forum? There is no middle ground whatsoever between ‘person who doesn’t give a shit’ and ‘total audiophile who cares about things only your dog can hear’)

Yeah, they always entertain me with their oxygen free rare earth element cables connected using unicorn polished gold plated connectors… In contrast I like to think I exist in the middleground and have retained a degree of sanity. We have ‘nice’ speakers and a ‘good quality’ amp (that got rave reviews back when it was introduced).

I have a decent vinyl deck. Our CD / DVD player is a ‘whatever’ item (I’ve only ever had one that made me realise there was a difference between cheap CD players and better ones, and that was back when finding a CD player for under £200 was incredibly difficult (it took me a year to save up for my £100 CD player made by *RadioShack)). These days I think you have to pretty far down the CD/DVD/Blu-ray ranges to get to something that sounds shit.

The cable linking that kit to the speakers was not the cheapest, nor by any stretch the most expensive. Mainly I picked it because it was hardy enough to run under the floor & through the wall without me worrying I needed to run it in something.

The things that amuse me the most though are things like the blind audio testing my friend did with some audiophiles where they couldn’t tell the difference between coat-hangers and their posh new cables. Or, and I’m not sure if I told you this story, a visitor to our house (who will remain nameless) has another customer he visits who has an extortionately expensive Swiss or French valve amplifier that can only be serviced by paying for an engineer to visit from said european country.

He’s got a £10000 record deck.

He’s got some of those ridiculous oxygen free cables.

It would not surprise me if he’s got an Acoustic System Phase Corrector.

He was showing it off to our informant, but after playing just one piece of vinyl he proclaimed that the problem with vinyl was that it was lots of hassle, and that he preferred to listen to MP3s on it.

*sigh*

* Well, actually it was a ‘Tandy’ own brand.

LOL, yes, you DID tell me that story, and my eyes roll as hard reading it now as they did then. Some people with money really ought to let others of us spend it for them. :P :D

Have I played you the Flander’s and Swann song “High Fidelity?” It’s about JUST this audio-nerd thing, and it’s awesome. If you can’t find it online I’ll upload it for you. :)

I have indeed heard it, and it’s just perfect. When I stole my parents vinyl collection I made sure to steal the Flanders and Swann, so I’ve got “The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann”, and both the Hats (At the Drop Of & At the Drop of Another). They’re quite delicious.

I’m currently using old junky bookshelf speakers in the living room off a 1975 JVC receiver that’s AWESOME. (It is, in fact, so awesome that I blew out my less junky pair of bookshelf speakers with it. Oops). I’d like to get better speakers, but that couple hundred bucks needs to wait for the studio completion.

(I had old floor-standing Cerwin Vegas, but they’d gone to college with both my uncle and my dad and been our family speakers, and they were partially held together with duct tape. Then my cat decided it would be nice to live inside one, and the other was starting to experience unrelated-to-cats low-end distortion, so I found ‘em a home on craigslist with a guy who needed to cannibalize the parts for his Cerwin Vegas. YAY NOT LETTING THINGS DIE).

Aye, all my old kit’s gone off to other people to be loved. My very battered amplifer (of similar vintage to your JVC one) had blown it’s power transistors 3 times, I think, by the time I decided that perhaps it should have a new owner. It was a shame, though, because it was lovely.

But I am weak, and I quite like having a remote (although I barely ever use it). After much faffing about and looking at amplifiers that I could justify I chose the Cambridge Audio. It’s mated with some Gale bookshelf speakers. I’ll probably get some nicer speakers when we land in the States, but these were the ‘quite nice, lower end of the budget’ speakers.

I really wish I could’ve saved my old speakers, but they’d essentially turned to dust.

The weakest point is the Raspberry Pi, because it can’t do two audio outputs simultaneously. I want it to have audio on HDMI so that when watching TV shows we don’t have to have the amplifier on; but I also want it to do audio via a USB audio device. I don’t really want to have to switch between them, because then I have to switch the TV on to select tracks which I’m waaaay too lazy to do.

I keep looking out for a really early Slim Devices Slimp3, but they’re depressingly sought-after.

My computer speakers are a very nice Bose pair (er, when I say ‘very nice” I mean “about $100, sounded better than anything else in store”, not “four digits, made with real phoenix tears”) and my digital music is FLAC, so that’s okay. Haven’t bought the cable to connect Fancy New Tech Digital Music to the old receiver, yet (in current set-up it’d have to go by way of the PS3 and that’s a thirty dollar part).

Ah, my office music setup is designed to make audiophiles weep. While I have my nice Sennheiser headphones for editing the podcast (which I really should record tomorrow), the amplifier upstairs is an ancient valve amplifier… which would be lovely, but it’s mono. So it’s Mono with two charity shop bookshelf speakers. It actually sounds remarkably nice, it’s got that warm valve sound.

The kitchen sports a valve amp too, of a sort. It’s got a Bush VHF61 radio :)

There’s something delightully silly about listening to digitally encoded audio being played through valve kit. 

I did buy fairly nice in-wall speaker cable, but we’re talking “The decently thick stuff from the big box hardware store” not special-for-audio-nuts cable. I looked up in-wall speaker cable before I purchased it, and saw people insist the wire lengths had to be the same… then someone else came along with math and showed that probably only mattered when you started to run speaker wire the length of a football field. :P

Ha! Yeah. They’re all nutcases.

And yes, this is not real audiophile cable. It only came from Maplin, who I’m sure would like you to believe it’s nice cable. But it’s just copper in some plastic. It’s not even shielded. If I was running it miles or near lots of mains stuff then I’d worry more, but it’s not noticably hummy :)

…clearly what this all boils down to is that we need to get into the job of selling Acoustic System Phase Correctors. :P

Handily our local wood recycling place has a large stock of them going cheap, so we could get quite a stock ;)