Jump to content

ednaz

  • Posts

    156
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    United States

Retained

  • Member Title
    Freshman Member

Personal Information

  • Location
    Northern Virginia

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. Nope. And every person is susceptible to a hundred kinds of bias including bias about other peoples' bias. Which happens to be the most common bias - assuming that everyone else on the planet is no different from you. If we weren't all significantly different from each other, we'd have been exterminated as a species through the inexorable process of inbreeding. I've had a blast taking people who believed scientifically unsupported baloney like " peripheral vision perceives color" or "the way to respond fastest to a stimulus is to have it in the center of your vision" into tests of their personal ego-centric biases, and capturing the results on video. The whole madness of "anything I don't agree with has got to be manipulation by controlling powers" or "anything I don't agree with can't be true because I define human consciousness" or "anyone other than me is wrong because {fill in the blank reason} is the basis of why millions of people believe in election fraud (it's impossible anybody could disagree with my opinions), with zero tangible evidence, despite nearly $100MM being spent on looking for fraud and finding nothing. As a species, we're on the decline. Because of ego driven ignorance.
  2. Anyone who doubts that peoples' hearing abilities vary significantly is just flat out belligerently ignorant. Why would hearing be any different than every other of the human senses? There are people who can taste a wine and tell you the grape variety, year, region, and often the vineyard of origin, where most people would be fortunate to get the grape variety right. (And some can tell a red from a white, and that's it.) No surprise - the number of taste buds on tongues, and ratio of different types of buds, varies wildly across the population, and the willingness to practice and learn to attune those taste buds varies even more wildly. There are people whose reaction times are 4-5x faster than the average person. In one part of their body, but not in the others. Some people can smell mercaptan, others can't. Genetics. Some people can smell a perfume and name all the scent components. Most of us just know there's perfume in the room. There are people who can look at a color patch and tell you which Pantone number they're looking at. And as to hearing. Some people have perfect pitch. I don't, I only have relative pitch. (You can look those up, Mr. Henning. But you won't.) With a little more ability - I can tell if an orchestra or musician is tuned to A 440 or A 432. My guess is Mr. Henning would not be capable of that. I can also tell you what kind of metal bell is on a trumpet or trombone when I hear it played. A lot of people can do that though, it's why you see whole orchestral brass sections playing identical instruments. It makes me a bit crazy hearing an orchestra that isn't that conscientious, the blend just isn't there. (Although if they're mixing red brass and silver bells, much harder to pick apart.) Many musicians can tell the sound differences between one piece and two piece bell construction, and have strong preferences. And you, Mr. Henning? At my advanced years, I can still hear the goddamn mosquito repellers that some businesses put up. Some of the differences are genetic, some are epigenetic, some are talents (you're born with), some are skills (you can develop.) And yet there's Mr. Henning, who holds out his inability to hear distinctions in sound waves as the superior definition of human auditory abilities. One wonders if he thinks his taste buds, eyes, nose, and central nervous system are also the acme of human achievement.
  3. I can confirm that adding a sub can improve the sound of the other active system components by taking some weight off the built in woofers. When I added a sub to my LS50 wireless, it made a huge difference in how the lower midrange and mid midrange sounded. KEF's LFE connection takes a huge load off the main speakers. Striking enough that for a couple days I was switching back and forth between sub and no sub to listen harder. (and to kick myself for waiting over a year to try it.) When I added a sub to my LSX speakers, it was even more of a transformation. Adding a sub to passive speakers doesn't have that much of an effect unless you've got both sub and speakers wired through electronics to reduce the low frequency burden on the main speakers.
  4. Recommendation for a couple BluRay disks for your journey. I got two Bernie Dresel and The BBB disks - his past two albums, and his current, are BluRay releases. They have a 2 channel, a DTS 5.1, LPCM 5.1, and a 9.1 mix. I've only got a 5.1 but... color me hugely impressed. I've heard so many multi-channel recordings that reminded me of the old "quadrophonic" mania, where stuff is panned into a channel just because. This was NOT like that. The multi-channel mix was pretty straight up - it had a feel of being right in front of his big band, where you'd stand if you were conducting. (I recognize that having been part of a 16 piece to 20 piece big band for four years, and having been one of three people who ran rehearsals.) The only difference is that Bernie is very front and center, where in a stage big band would typically be back and to one side or the other. But you know, he's the star, so... This is the tightest big band I've heard since Don Ellis and the Stan Kenton touring band. The experience was good enough that I'm now thinking about trying a 7.1 setup...
  5. Be open to sudden ideas for New Years. Sometimes you stumble into a life experience. My family was vacationing in Cambodia during the holidays of 1999, and when we checked into our hotel in Siem Riep, saw a poster in the lobby for a New Year's Eve party at the hotel that would end at 1am, followed by a wakeup call at 430am and a walk through one of the larger temple ruins areas, with each person having their own lantern. The party was amazing, great food and a surprisingly good cover band, with thousands of candle driven hot air balloons released at midnight. But the temple walk... they had little lamps along the path (with a suggestion to stay inside the lamps because the snakes would stay outside the lit area). An hour and a half of walking through ruins in the dark, with several Cambodian folk groups scattered through the area completely out of sight providing background music. Those carvings take on a totally different feel by lamplight with fading intoxication from the party. Walk ended up in a huge temple courtyard with the most elaborate high end breakfast we've ever had in our lives...blini and caviar anyone?... followed by watching the sun rise over the temples (with champagne), an hour performance by the local folk dance group (just back from a world tour) and a guided walk back led by three archaeologists who'd been working on restoring the temples since Pol Pot was deposed. (The event raised money for their restoration work. They said they raised three years worth of funds that evening.) All this instead of our plan to have a nice dinner and go to bed early on New Year's Eve. Our son was 7 at the time and still whispers when he talks about it. So maybe poke around for something other than the iPhone video experience... who knows?
  6. I'm really intrigued, and look forward to hearing all kinds of details that will let me assess whether it's worth the dollars and effort to replace my current computer-based home media server. What I've got now is reasonably new, and began as a NUC. But there are now fanless cases for NUC components - you basically take everything out of the NUC, and the pieces-parts go into the new all aluminum case that's almost completely head sink kind of fins. The cases come with heat sink connection pieces for some parts, like the M.2 drives. We really appreciate the difference. No more fan noise, and if we were streaming to two or three zones, the fan in the NUC could get pretty annoying. And then... a lot of NUC (including the one we used) have a high rate of fan failure. So the upgrade to fanless was partly driven my need. I've monitored temperatures in the new case, and they're lower than in the NUC with the noisy fan, even when streaming to three zones.
  7. Those BX5a speakers are a secret gem. I LOVED my BX5a speakers, and I had a set of the 8 inchers too. The worst thing about both speakers was that the bass extension was wild, and VERY sensitive to distance from walls. The BX8 in particular.... easy for them to create boomy tuneless bass if not set up properly. Eventually sold them off because a move to a new home had fewer rooms needing an audio system. The neighbor who bought both pairs of M-Audio speakers is still deeply in love with them. She uses them for her home AV room... the 8 inchers up front, the 5s in the back. I read all your comments about running ethernet wire, but it's just not in the cards for us in our new place. The best electrical contractor I've ever known gave us a price for running ethernet for us. It was eye popping. Didn't include the cost of paying a drywall guy to fix all the holes that would have to be punched in the walls and finished basement ceiling. So, we're using wifi for serving music from our music server with Roon, to 5 rooms. We've got a mesh network, and we've had three rooms listening to different music at the same time with zero problems. In our family room, we DID compare using ethernet from server to digital translator to DAC versus using wifi, and I thought the wifi sounded no different, maybe a touch better, as did a few visitors who I dragooned into a comparison listening evening.
  8. Great podcast. It's always fun to get the backstory to something like RP. When I listen, I'm always amazed at how many new artists I get introduced to, and even more amazing, many new favorites are artists from back in my young days that I just hadn't come across.
  9. Using the KEF Egg also, and it's a nice little setup for me when I'm working on editing photos. They're set a bit farther apart than I'd like, given the size of my editing monitor and the distance I prefer for editing, but it doesn't seem to affect the sound. Instruments in the middle come from the middle of the screen, with a nice little soundstage on my desk. They have the KEF sound character, too, reminding me of my living room LSX speakers.
  10. How about LSX? A year and a half ago I was thinking about getting one of the Dynaudio all in one systems for our small living room, which would provide background for the dining room across the hall. I couldn't find a system to listen to, but listened to a number of competitive systems... and was bemoaning how much space the best sounding systems took up. 32" wide for the Dynaudio 7. That's the whole damn table top! (The RS200 is a pretty big item itself, and looks like it demands space around it.) And then heard a pair of KEF LSX. And I went... now THAT sounds really nice. Where I was listening, I moved the speakers farther apart, then back together in what was just like an all in one system. Moved them near the wall and back, onto a table top, and realized that the LSX are an excellent alternative to an all in one system. For starters, they don't take up much space compared to most all in one systems - placement has a lot more flexibility than "large mass goes here" all in ones. I think of the LSX as "all in two" - a whole system in two small separable pieces, with minimal demands on table or room space. The only thing I've noticed is, despite having "table" mode, they definitely benefit from a pad underneath each speaker to help decouple them from the table top. I hope to find a way to listen to the MacRs200 at some point, but it would have to sound amazingly better to bump the LSX out of my living room, and convince me to give over an entire table top to it versus a small zone on each of two separate tables. We move them to the dining room sideboard for guest dinners, leaves plenty of room still for dishes and a vase of flowers or two in between them. Move them back to the living room after, one on the edge of each of two side tables. Two minutes to set up (and another two to wake up and be ready.) Plus DLNA, and Roon compatibility.
  11. I had a pair of LSX that I used in my living room, and I began with low expectations - just better than the single box solutions for social background music. They won me over big - enough that I thought, I'd be shush-ing guests if some favorite came on. To reduce total pieces and wires, I decided to try a set of wireless LS50s in our master bedroom. (Replacing a Peachtree Audio integrated, B&W CM2 plus subwoofer speakers, different wireless DAC's rotated in and out.) Sold everything after two weeks. One week for the speakers to settle down, and then... those two speakers slayed the competition in the room. The imaging... yikes. Side effect. The sound characteristics of the KEF driver setups is very seductive. I have one high end system in my studio I've loved for almost 20 years, another in our family room... but the sound of the KEF and their character are quite different from both, and have put me in questioning the longstanding favorite systems. That uni-Q setup is quite seductive in many ways. Would I upgrade my existing KEFs? Don't think so, but would I upgrade my studio system from its current big floor standing speakers, oversized integrated amp, streamer plus DAC? Yeah, that's crossed my mind more than once.
  12. I just spent a half hour rehearsing my explanation to She Who Is the Final Judge of All Things On Display Other Than In the Basement as to why we need this three box thing added as an endpoint to a component stack that already tests her design sensibilities, and I'm just not cutting it. But I am looking forward to the Twenty, because I've been through a few different server designs, and while the NUC we have now is less visually objectionable than previous solutions, it's still got fan noise, and because a fan, the tendency to suck in dog hair from time to time that requires disassembly and cleaning. Fan free it's gotta be.
  13. Right out of films about 2040 that were made in 1980.
  14. Discourse that rapidly declines into ad hominem attacks is to a great extent caused by people mistaking rudeness for frankness, mistaking being an asshat with not being politically correct, confusing arrogance with confidence, and overall taking everything way too personally by making everything way too personal. (That last one is the connection to religion...) The biggest compliment I got in my decades of business strategy and technology consulting was from a client who told me that I was the only person who could tell him that most of the decisions they made were wrong, that the application was built to anti-scale, that their strategy was so inward looking that it drives customers away... and they'd nod their heads with me, sigh, and say, well then, let's get to work fixing all that. (And btw, that is what I got paid for.) Or as he put it more colloquially, I could tell him "his baby's ugly" along with "and you and your wife aren't such a feast for the eyes either" in a way that he'd not take it personally but as honest observations, and would start asking for tips about hair styling and lighting and makeup. I didn't pull punches, or sugarcoat. But I stuck to honest, objective facts, and stayed away from I think, I feel, I believe. You can do that in business and in technical realms. I'm not sure that it's all that possible in more subjective realms. Disagreeing agreeably, being destructive in a constructive way, downgrading a product or strategy without degrading it - all are actual skills, maybe even arts, that must (and can be) learned and practiced and polished. And if you can't do it, perhaps you shouldn't, until you put in the time and effort to learn how to disagree in an agreeable way.
×
×
  • Create New...