August 09, 2008

24375518.jpg

Beijing Olympic 2008

Posted at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2008

Friday used to be a busy night but business has apparently taken a nose dive this year. I would be doing no more than 2 hours’ real work on an 8-hr shift. Tonight no special guests after the night club and I’m now updating this blog which has been neglected for some time.

Moving house in about 2 weeks’ time. Already dumped over 20 bags of used clothing and still have probably 10 more bags to go. Smaller house, cheaper rent, all good.

Posted at 03:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

I used to be one of those people who would spend hundred of dollars for a few feet of speaker cable, hundreds for a moving coil phono cartridge which couldn’t output a strong enough signal to directly feed into a pre-amp, hundreds for a pair of vintage valves which was nothing more than a high-resistance light bulb, several hundreds for a pre-pre amp which served no useful purposes other than stepping up the output of a MC cartridge, a couple of thousands for a pre-amp, a couple of thousands for a pair of speakers and several thousands for a power amp. After roughly USD6,000 and yet still could not get a single sound byte out of it because to complete the setup, it needed at least another thousand for a belt-drive turntable (excluding the arm, by the way).

Feeling excited (deservedly so after emptying over USD7,000 from my pocket) for the set-up, I’d invite my ‘friends’ home to showcase my toy but only to find out that my set of equipment could hardly be classified as ‘audiophile’ - USD7,000 was barely enough to buy an ‘audiophile’ power amp. Not for a single piece of equipment? No, not for a McIntosh.

Embarrassed, dejected, I went on in pursuit of the true and sweetest sound for the next 15 years until one day I had to flee the country (stupid me again) and dumped everything I owned behind.

I have been playing through a pair of USD50 desktop speakers for the last few years now although I still have a set of so-called ‘hi-fi’ which I bought in a 2nd hand shop. At first, I was still trying to find a way to play music from my computer and stream it to my hi-fi because I thought the sound would be better and more realistic and for the simple fact that it’s not easy for an old woman like me to get up every 40 minutes to switch a CD. The simplest way to stream music from a computer to a hi-fi is to buy a Slimcenter which I couldn’t afford. I did, however, manage to find a software alternative to do the streaming after some hard googling. Having played with the streaming for a few days, I discovered that I actually didn’t enjoy the sound of my hi-fi. I went straight back using my USD50 desktop speakers.

It’s not that my hearing is nearly gone. I can still hear if the notes are being played by the left hand or the right hand in Für Elise or A Certain Romance when a CD is played from my hi-fi. The problem, I believe, is the medium.

The delivery of Music has changed so much from my ‘audiophile’ days when people were still arguing if a belt-drive turntable was reproducing more realistic sound than a CD player. Those days when I would be willing to play a 30% premium for a Chesky CD were long gone. What we have nowadays are m4p, m4a, mp3 and wma (a few flac maybe but I’m not sure). Very few of us would mind when playing ‘Candle in the Wind’ in an iPod, Elton John would actually appear standing on top of the piano instead of sitting in front of it. The extra USD20,000 an ‘audiophile’ spent is to get: Sound Stage (simply translated - Elton John should be sitting in front of the piano, not on top or 5 feet away from it.) and accurate Sound Imaging (simply translated – John Bonham should be playing in the middle of the stage behind Jimmy Page and stayed there for an entire song instead of shifting his position sometimes 5 feet to his left and sometimes 3 feet to his right in the space of 5 minutes or the 1st and 2nd violin doesn’t switch place in the middle of a concerto).

It is physically impossible to talk of these qualities in a flattened audio image. What was not immediate apparent to me, however, was the fact that the deficiencies of these popular audio formats tend to be hidden from a set of low-fi equipment. It’s crappy but sounds pleasant enough. A set of ‘hi-fi’, on the other hand, will lay bare the inadequacy of a lossy audio format and at times, to the point of becoming irritating. In this low-fi age, we should be happy as long as John Bonham doesn’t appear to be drumming with a pair of chopsticks.

Here is my current setup and I’m fairly pleased with it.

These are no longer useful. Email me if you are interested to buy.

Posted at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2008

Here is a search engine using Live Search for everything Ubuntu.

Check it out.

Technorati Tags: ,,

Posted at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

A series of letters from Eric Sommer. Please read them if you want to find out more about what lies behind those warm handshakes.

Posted at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

My first test with Windows Live Writer. First impression - Smart!

I have never been a fan of Microsoft because most of the things they did were Windows related and typically could not or did not interact very well with the outside world. Live Writer, at least, seems to be working seamlessly with my MT blog. It has taken Microsoft awhile to recognize that we, as customers of a machine bundled with XP or Vista, do have a choice to use non-Windows stuff.

Will do a test on my Wordpress blog and a diary in my localhost after this.

Cheers!

Posted at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

 

Everything here is CopyLeft. Feel free to cut and paste.