MIA

[rrcrain]

OK, I've been MIA for quite a while now, but I've been busy. I am now officially engaged to be married, no date is set though and I've completed an electronics project and have been in seventh heaven listening to my stereo.

I have a 25 year old stereo system that still makes most audiophiles drool. At its heart, it consists of 1 AA-1800 Heathkit amps and its matching pre amp and a pair of Acoustic Research AR90 speakers sporting new crossovers hand built by your truely. I also rewired the crossover network to allow them to be bi-amped and routed a hole for the new connector block in the back.

With the bass crossover now split from the rest of the network, I quickly discovered the bass crossover assembly was allowing harmonic multiples through; IE, I could hear Shania Twain's voice coming out of the bass drivers. Old and new crossovers did the same thing, and I discovered it's a standard design problem of all passive low pass crossovers.

My answer was to procure a Marchand XM26 tube crossover. Assembled, these puppies go for between 1700 and 1900 dollars, but they are a full $1,000 less in kit form. Aside from a few glitches here and there, the unit was finished off late last week, put in place and powred up.

The results are nothing short of incredible. In spite of its price, it is absolutely worth every penney. Thankfully, my fiancee loves music as much as I do.

Computers? She hates them.

[NeoGen]

Hey!! Glad to see you're alive!! :D

You've got your life well set to go there I see. :) Congratulations on the engagement! And I'd say your crazy spending that much money on a 25 year old stereo system, but then again I'm no audiophile, so I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your system and a normal nowadays system. But I'm sure it must be different because you're not the first person I hear about doing things like that. :)

See if you can smuggle a computer or two inside the house, nothing too flashy, just a couple of discrete boxes, and set them to run something. Keep them hidden amongst a pile of other stuff, electronic components and things like that and your soon-to-be wife will never know :P :lol: :lol: LOL

I'm kidding about that last part. :P Do run your life there the best you can! Marry her first, and think about computers later. But come around to tell us the news once in a while, ok? :)

[Beerknurd]

Congrats!!!!!!!

[rrcrain]

Thank you, I do feel very blessed to have found her, or her to have found me.

Concernng my stereo, it's 25 years old, but one would have to spend over $5,000 PER amp to get something matching the two old beasts I own and I'm not gonna do it, and thats just to replace my amplifiers!

Many of the old pieces from that era still beat the hell out of anything built new today, until you get into the stupid price ranges. Even then, some of the stupid priced stuff built today is over priced junk. Trust me, you can really hear a major difference in sound. Let it be a silky smooth voice, a pounding ZZ Top bass line or laid back jazz, a good system lets you play it loud without pain.


For new stuff, look for Rogue Audio for the electronics, Jolida for the CD player, Rega for the turntable and Canton for the speakers.

[Lagu]

Rrcrain!

If you will hear the most beautiful and silvery voice, buy a CD of the worlds greatest tenor in the world, The Swedish Jussi Björling. He has played a couple of romantic songs. Many peoples in the USA love him and has a own website http://www.jussibjorlingsociety.com/views.html. There I hawe wrote a letter to the Yahoo group as you can read. You may like modern music, but try it. You should perhaps love it or hate it.
I have more links if you is interrested. Perhaps your new wife should like it?

Good luck when yoy shall be married. Your life may not be as before, but do the best of it. Listen on your wife, enjoy her and talk with each other i a friendly way. Help her in the household in an equal athmosfary. You may tell her, you will stand up for the humantietes. Tell her that your volonteer by your PC:s will prevent her from to be sick in the future. She can not say it is so silly, if new medicins faster can creates thanks to your PC.

Lagu :D

[Anonymous]

Welcome back Mr Music :)

People with a passion do seem to spend vast sums on it. My passion was table tennis. I had a custom made bat that cost US$100 over 10 years ago :shock:

Congratualtions on your engagement. I would disguise your computer(s) as a pair of speakers :roll:

[Ototero]

Sorry, the previous guest post was mine. :oops:

[vaughan]

Congratulations Richard. Look after her well.

[Empty_5oul]

ot - i have the same passion. and my bat is worth about £100 right now.

[rrcrain]

I've reserved one of Jussi's CDs at borders and will pick it up tonight.

Another artist to give a listen to is Ray Montford. He is an independent artist out of Canada that plays acoustic guitar. I believe he composes and masters his own pieces, but is difficult to locate as he also does his own distribution. Check out his web page www.raymontford.com and I think you will be impressed.

[Lagu]

[quote="rrcrain"]I've reserved one of Jussi's CDs at borders and will pick it up tonight.

Rcrain! Great to hear, you will listen to Jussi. Many peoples get tears in their eyes so beautiful is this voice.

Thank you.
Lagu :D

[Ototero]

Hey Oli, TT, DC, AMD, a lot in common :lol:

[Empty_5oul]

ot maybe have a game with me someday then :thumbleft:

[Ototero]

yeah, why not.

[NeoGen]

rrcrain, you must be the person indicated to ask this question. Can you tell a difference in the sound between an MP3 at maximum quality (320kbit/s) and an original song (uncompressed)?

I can tell a very slight difference in MP3's at 192kbit/s and the original songs, but only if played really loud so I can focus on the background sounds. But above that, I can't tell the difference anymore... :P

And then again, there might be a difference but probably computer speakers aren't the best ones to make the test...

[Anonymous]

There is a difference. MP3 is a poor method to encode and compress music, even Microsofts WMA format is a major advancement over MP3. The best MP3 is perhaps FM radio quality.

[rrcrain]

Sorry, that last post was mine.

[NeoGen]

hmm.... I just might start compressing my songs here in wma then... :)

[Empty_5oul]

if you have a MP3 player you have to check what that can take or if you are gonna get one what it will take. would be a shame to convert it all to wma and then find it can't be used.

[rrcrain]

Converting an MP3 to WMA will make it worse! Both compression methods throw away data and compromise sound quality.

[Empty_5oul]

cd quality is much less than 320k though, surely you can't lose that much quality during a conversion.

what would you recommend to store music in then richard ?

[Anonymous]

The MP3 format is very old and admitted to be the worst format of any existing format currently available. The best one I know of is Sony's and they made it proprietary so no one can use it, the next best is microsoft's WMA format. The best format is the old wave format. The wave format doesn't compress the data file.

The reality is this. The best file format (wave) for music is also the largest, the worst (mp3) gives the smallest file.

[Ototero]

Have you looked at OGG files. Supposed to be better quality and smaller files.

But there arn't many players around.

[rrcrain]

Never heard of them.

I've the hard drive storage to handle wave files and do only those anymore.

now, if I can only cure my main computers ills.

[NeoGen]

And there's also APE files, of Monkey's Audio, that is supposed to be a lossless compression format, although I don't know much of it.

And I wouldn't recompress my mp3's to wma, that wouldn't improve anything. But many of the songs I got on the pc in mp3 I own the original cd's, and those maybe it would be worth re-ripping from the cd's this time to WMA.

[Empty_5oul]

neo you could try it and the play the WMA and MP3 and see if you notice the difference. i doubt the difference would be that much with MP3 being at 320

[rrcrain]

Depends on your system. Car audio won't make much difference either way if any. A system from Rat Shack, Best Buy or Circuit City MIGHT make a little bit of difference but probably not.

Find someone with a high end stereo system and you can definitely hear the difference in the dynamic range and frequency response. MP3 "squishes" the dymanic range and lops off a bit from the very hign and very low end.

I didn't believe it either until I heard it for myself... Unfortunately, I have a high end system that makes the differences very obvious.