Re: empty feeling

Rosemary <mentally_subnormal@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell wrote:
Rosemary wrote:

<snip>

With me, every once in
a while (and it's very rare - certainly doesn't happen anything like
as often as once a month), my eyes seem to just refuse to play the
focussing game.

Completely at random, or just when you're tired? Have you ever been told
you have a lazy eye?

<snip>

I have a set of these:

<http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/icm_eng.nsf/root/05343>

which do me just fine.

<grin> Ah - spending more money. Read the reviews. Yes.

? You takin the piss or what mate?

Erm, no - they sound like excellent headphones, but quite a lot more
expensive than the PX100s. On the other hand, Rebecca finds that the
PX100s do very nicely for AC/DC when she's in the office doing some
marking. It's the only way she can cope with the crapness of her
students.

<snip>

but they're wee wall-
mounted thingies cause there's not much space,

Re-assess priorities, that's the ticket. We don't have much space: so
the speakers are used to display plants and photos on top.

No, unless they're in the middle of the room, there is seriously nowhere
on the floor to put these things. Either in front of the telly, in front
of the fireplace or in front of some bookshelves.

Ah...

I don't know how big
your house is,

The fireplace has been removed, we have no telly, and the speaker
position takes priority over bookshelves in the front room.

but from what you say it's bigger,

Possibly, but they don't get much smaller without being considered tiny,
sort of thing - aside from the extension, but we've got no bookshelves
in there. Half a bike engine, but no bookshelves.

or at least better laid
out, than mine.

It's a conventional 1967 shoebox (same age as me), but with an extension
on the back for a larger but appallingly laid out kitchen.

The really annoying thing is that they have to be mounted
quite high on the wall, which makes it sound like someone's playing a
piano that's hung from the ceiling.

That calls for a <chortle>.

I'd love some decent floor-standing speakers. My dad has some ancient
ones which sound nice, but he's hooked them up with bell-wire and stuck
them behind the sofa, which makes me want to rescue the poor things.

Bell wire isn't necessarily a problem - if they're low power, or driven
by a current/transconductance amplifier (which they're not, I'll bet).
But stuck behind the sofa - argh! <heh> I've got some spare Wharedales
in the loft - I forget what model, but £100 rrp. Thing is, the 1970s
single driver speakers that my dad made for his sister but got passed to
me seriously outclass them. Anyway, they cost us a quid from Richer
Sounds (with another purchase) - so if you'd like to nick your dad's
speakers and replace 'em with another set... (well, he'd never notice,
would he?)

<snip>

But why would I bother with an iPod when I've got a nice CD player?

Because you'll get better quality sound with headphones than with any
sanely priced speakers.

I listen mostly through headphones. Mind you, with my headphones,
everyone else is listening to it as well - that's the problem with open-
backed phones.

<grin> Tell him to go into another room - there's only the pair of you
there, surely?

But to get best results, you need a good
signal source. The headphone output of the average amp isn't great.
But an iPod is an excellent signal source, and you'll get much better
quality from that (probably) than taking the headphone feed from the
average CD player -> amplifier's headphone output

iPods are expensive

I wouldn't say so, not when compared to other devices of a similar
capacity and so on. I've seen `other brand' mp3 players of the same
capacity at a higher price in the shops, for sure. And you can't beat
'em for the ease of getting the music on 'em in the first place.

and pretty pointless for my situation AFAICT.

Which is more significant.

I don't
really listen to much music when I'm out, so there's very little point me
paying money for a nice mp3 player.

Fair enough.

And you can get an awful lot of music on an iPod, not just one CD.
And it's easier to select a different thing to play.

I enjoy getting a CD out of the case, looking at the sleeve art, reading
the sleeve notes, etc., and I can put my hand straight on any disc I want
without having to go through menus.

No need to mess with a menu as such on an iPod - the coverflow display
is quite nifty (you get the cover art, if not the sleeve notes), and you
can flip through it without the sort of fiddle that you get with menus.

<snip>
So I reckon that `rip yer CD onto computer and shove it onto an iPod'
would give you much higher quality signal than anything but a very
good CD player, and the iPod's output stage is very high quality -
unlike most amp's headphone outputs, which are often not quite all
they might be.

What do you mean by a good CD player?

There's the rub - one that sounds good, really. Thing is, I doubt
there's much difference between CD players that are `good enough for all
but the seriously fussy' and `the best there is'. So an iPod isn't
likely to be a significant improvement on a decent CD player.

I quite like the one I have, which
I got recently to replace a dead multiplayer, but I couldn't really
afford anything more pricey than - it's just a mid-range player.

Probably rather like the one we have here.

On the other hand, if you've got really good gear to listen through
already, the only advantage of an iPod would be that you could get
loads of music on it. Oh, and videos too, and it's got a gorgeous UI,
and... But it's the sound that's the important thing.

You can get HDD marketed as jukeboxes which you can load up with mp3s I
think, or hook up to a wireless network and play things from the
computer.

Oh aye - Apple does a neat little gadget to send music over the wireless
network to an amplifier (and it does Ethernet<-> WiFi). But those HDDs
for music - load 'em up with losslessly compressed music, surely?

I just use a cheap mp3 player I won with
some very basic phones for listening out of the house, cause with
background noise and stuff going on quality doesn't matter so much to
me.

It matters to me rather a lot. But then again, I don't walk around
with a portable music player.

Neither do I :-) That's why I use a cheap (read: free) one for the rare
occasions when I want to.

Fair dos.

<snip>

I've read tests which prove conclusively that if the listener thinks
that the audio gear should sound better, then it does. Most
audiophile bleatings are bull***.

I'll go with some of that, but there are differences to be heard if you
make a big jump in terms of quality.

There's no doubt that some audio gear is lots better than others. But
there's not a lot to choose when you get up to the really good stuff -
except when it comes to speakers, which are the hardest bit of the
reproduction chain to get right.

Thing is, back in 1950-blah, Quad came out with the Quad II power amp
and the Quad 22 control unit (pre-amp, switching, filtering, and so on).

My dad's got a set (two IIs, one 22).

It's as good as any other amp I've heard - nicer than mine, for sure,
and mine is a Marantz that cost £200 five years back. And the Quad gear
was designed in the 1950s (the set my dad's got has had a full service,
replacing lots of bits and so on - 1950s electronic components are not
likely to be in spec these days, although unused valves won't
deteriorate).

I'd rather have a proper stereo amp but I can't really bring
myself to buy one when I've got a perfectly good surround amp sitting
there smiling at me.

There's no particular reason why a multi-channel amplifier shouldn't
have each channel as high quality as that on a stereo amp.

No, but if you buy a stereo amp and a surround amp of the same price, I
bet the stereo amp sounds better than the surround one playing stereo,

Oh yes, but you'd expect that - five channels for the price of two means
less quality per channel.

cause you've got fewer channels so each one should theoretically be
higher quality.

For the same price, yes.

There was a mention on the radio of an art installation featuring 40
speakers each driven by a different signal source - each of the voices
of this piece:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spem_in_alium>

That's funny; I was listening to a few different recordings of a couple
of pieces - a Beethoven symphony and Carmina Burana - and thinking about
the recording quality, and came to the conclusion that the only way to do
it is to have each instrument recorded separately then played back on
loads of different speakers in the same configuration as the orchestra -
which might get a little expensive.

The thing about that art installation is that you could move around the
room and hear the singing very differently depending on where you were.

The thing about stereo speakers and a well-made stereo recording is that
- well, an explanation is complicated, but it's theoretically possible
to perfectly re-create the original sonic wavefront at a position
between two speakers, so if you've got things set up right and you're
sat in the right place, you should hear a perfect re-creation of the
original sound, right down to being able to locate each instrument in a
different place. But you only get a single viewpoint (hearpoint?). If
you move around, you don't hear things as if you were really there but
in a different place - what happens is that the full-on `being there'
effect becomes less convincing the further from the `ideal position'
that you move.

FWIW, Decca recordings tend to be stunningly good.

Rowland.

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