BoomMF

While I was picking up some speakers, I asked the dealer about cartridges. I'm still hunting for an endgame MC. He proceeds to show me a trade-in he has, customer bought a Mcintosh MT10 (as photogenic a turntable as there ever was) and swapped out the cart. It's a Mcintosh branded Clearaudio Talismann v2 Gold low output MC. He sent it home with me to check and see if I liked it. Cool. Popped open the phonostage, monkeyed with some jumpers, and set it up for thr new cart. Installed the cart and immediately upon touching the tonearm to drop the needle, I get a buzz. Fuck me. So I dusted of the multimeter to track down the problem. I had to pull EVERYTHING apart tracing back the continuity problem. Made it all the way to cable interface, so I pull out the mount to get to it and noticed the set screw holding the tonearm in the mount was set too deep and snapped off a copper lead. I don't know how it happened, we don't need to point fingers. Contacted Transrotor, in Germany mind, to see if they had a replacement to that piece that they could send me and they were like nein. Argh. So I busted out the soldering iron and dropped an ugly bead (soldering isn't like riding a bike apparently) where the copper lead was supposed to terminate, threw it all back together and viola, dude's grounding like a champ. Crisis averted. The Talismann is an eye-opening experience. There's a noticeable increase in life to records. I like to test with Kind of Blue, but Randy Travis's voice on Storm's of Life (MoFi) is something I know like the back of my hand and he has never sounded so present as with the new cart. I had my heart set on a Sumiko Starling, but damn son. Gonna play it a lot this week and give homeboy the yay or nay.

You're a vegetable.

Fuck and yeah.

Nice haul, but scoring that Guaraldi is next level.

Walmart is doing their $15 vinyl sale. Every Walmart I visited in the east Austin area had every title on sale for $15, and I mean every. $50 Rolling Stones Hot Rocks, $15. $70 George Harrison All Things Must Pass box set, $15, and on and on. Good luck.

Which is really something Slash would hope for his guitar tbh

I try to hit up a Hard Rock Cafe whenever I travel (sometimes I just want predictable food), but the one here in Cabo is sparse as fuck. Nonsense like Nikki Minaj's shoes and like 4 things from Third Eye Blind. Buuuuut, they had this bad boy. I even saw them on that tour, maybe I saw this exact guitar and forgot about it because of its bland ass, way too OG for me top, who knows. I do know that I never even thought about fucking up the pickguard like that as a relic'ing technic, so I go to bed a better person tonight.

Transrotor Zet 1

Finding relevant reviews of boutique hardware years after launch from any brand is, I find, harder than it should be. Emotiva's processors are like a lot of products at this level - when they launch, their hardware far outpaces the state of the software. The hardware has a lot of untapped horsepower and over the course of its life the product will have most of its rough edges polished smooth. Most of the reviews of the Emotiva RMC-1 still available online by reputable reviewers, for example, are deep dives into a product whose name still exists but the processor is in a very different form today. The processor as reviewed no longer exists. And by the time we're several generations of software revisions into the life cycle, you're hard pressed to find a professional reviewer willing to give the product another exhaustive battery of tests - the machine is old, unsexy news. That's where the user base comes in. It's like buying any other niche product - You might want to take into account the company's history of software updates and, perhaps just as importantly, how active the users are. You know how buying a 3D printer, it's probably more important to see how active and numerous the users/owners are than any tech specs (which in 3D printings case, are usually just the product of off-the-shelf parts anyway, so specs between companies don't vary all too much anyway.). Boutique home theater electronics are the same. The health of the culture around a product will tell you everything you need to know and can't find in stale reviews. Long story short, Emotiva make rock solid amps (arguably in the conversation for the standard here, when all is said and done), processors that need a touch of massaging but yield industry leading results and well worth the effort, and an installed user base, with a knowledge base that that implies, that can see you through just about any unique use case you can come up with. You might get better performance (and I mean might) out of a Trinnov, but have fun tracking down someone that can answer a question when things go sideways. There are other companies that produce quality processors and amps that the above applies equally to. Anthem comes to mind. jmho

They have a switch on the back labeled off and surface of the sun.

I've had the home theater wired and speakered for Atmos almost since I moved into this house about 5 years ago but only just these past few days have I had a processor installed that can handle it. Decided to swap out the Marantz for an Emotiva RMC-1 pre/pro and XPA-9 amp. My biggest problem was deciding how to fit everything into a room that was designed and built before "home theater" was even a thought experiment. And what little extra space I had has been quickly consumed by physical media. I thought racking everything might be a good solution but have you seen what quality carpet-lined studio racks are going for these days?! Scrounging around my storage I found an old slanted rack that I used in my music room's previous life and it should do nicely until I find one that's more visually appealing or until I find that the cabinet's rake is giving the mounted optical drives fits, forcing me to swap it out. So far everything's copacetic. This also allows me to dedicated the top of the unit to the record player, which I'v wanted to do for a while anyway. The Turntable and acrylic base weigh about 70lbs, so this meant I had to brace it. I cheated by using the center channel speaker, but since the processor plays the record player's input in reference stereo this shouldn't be a problem as the center channel will never be active while records are being played. Since the Nvidia Shield is controlled via bluetooth I'll probably hide it in the back to further unclutter the area. The RMC-1 (running v2.5 firmware) has been amazing so far. It's room-corrected with DIRAC Live and the sound in this space has never been better. I feed it SACDs via a Sony UBP-X800 (which by default is set to downmix audio by default, so tracking down why it wasn't passing Atmos info was a goddamn pain. What kind of psycho engineer makes THAT the default and calls it something vague like "BD Audio mix." ffs) and I can tell that's going to be my next addiction (collecting SACDs). With the XPA-9 I now have the power to fully realize the speakers' capabilities. I hear it time and again and it's true, clean excess power does the most, pound for pound, towards improving speaker performance. I went from a "rated" 125W (8 Ohm) a channel, and a low volume ceiling, to 300W @ 8 Ohm across the front line. (490W @ 4 Ohm, while these are upper-to-moderately sensitive 6 Ohm speakers). Suffice it so say, this has breathed new life into these towers. And it does it all while being cooler, which is a concern since I do not intend to use the rack fan I purchased just yet. I saved a couple of 2U spaces (covered with blanks for now) for Emotiva's ERC-4 reference CD player and an Xbox One X, but I'm lagging on the latter because I think I might just upgrade to a Series X in here too (rack kit for the One X is inbound though), but that's gonna be 4U and a whole other world of problems. The former is a differential CD player with DACs to die for (and USB in to leverage those DACs across any number of other sources), but more importantly will complete a sexy unified hardware asthetic. And when it's all said and done looking cool is probably more important. The rack is getting there. I have space to push the wall currently hanging the red black-out drapes several feet, and one day I might do that. I dream of having a dedicated stereo speaker setup to compliment the current, cinema focused speaker setup. (This is why I went with the XPA-9 as it has two extra full power modules/channels which would be great for a Zone 2 stereo setup. But Emotiva also make a 2-channel differential XPA amp that might be all the endgame power I need and would slot in perfectly into the rack and would look killer.) tbc

I recently mounted a framed Android tablet to a wall to use as a Spotify frontend, bluetoothed to a receiver that feeds a whole-house speaker distribution switcher. Works fine but neither Spotify nor the tablet itself have a screensaver (which would be killer displaying album art or, be still my heart, Pop-Up Video-style factoids about the artist) and Spotify's interface doesn't make for the most attractive or functional kiosk. Do any of you nerdz know a good Android frontend/kiosk app that can clean up Spotify and maybe even use the camera for motion detection? It seems that in 2022 with cheap tablets and cheap streaming services we'd be trippiong over solutions for this...

#shirtpr0n

The 2018 Remix LP is fantastic (Animals has never sounded better imo) but the 5.1 SACD is my new reference disc (Pink Floyd seem like a band that would have gotten into 5.1 from the get-go, are you kidding me?) 5.1 is Animals realized. And ditto on the Dogs talk - that dude is a jam of jams. Sent from my SM-X900 using Tapatalk

And as a side note, Root was designed by a Texas Ex.

But they don't sell Gilmour's hands at Sweetwater, sooooooo...

A nylon signature guitar? This a wild world we live in.

Nothing more late-80s, early-90s Americana than Gold Laces sitting beside those Deluxe saddles. Power ballads just jump off this sweet motherfucker.

Get you a Phantom chess board and we can play remotely!

Any of you big brains know what kind of rack Herman has against that back wall?

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Here's your chance to get the paterfamilias: https://www.christies.com/about-us/press-archive/details?PressReleaseID=10168&lid=1&fbclid=IwAR1LwN-W1QVHB4joW5DkDfr4E-f4ZR_XkGTl58jggx9Yx7CW9plkPjzipoA Oh snap, that was last year. The listing says it's estimated at $150k - It sold for $980k. I wonder what Joe B. is doing with it now...

This is vinyl. If it isn't overpriced, overwrought, and over engineered for its simple task gtfo.

Paul is about to invent the Tube Screamer. Guitar will never be the same. We are all witnesses. Sent from my SM-F936U using Tapatalk