Year: 2025

Thursday, February 13th 2025…Slow and steady wins the race…

So, I got the new tweeter in the Klipsch yesterday! Voila, treble…. kinda’ nice. I went and ordered a replacement tweeter for the other speaker, thinking that it’s the same problem. Probably a surge or excessive volume blew it out. The crossover looked pristine anyway. I also purchased some new tweeters for the Energy’s 22 Reference’s. They were notorious for blowing out (melting the voice coils) the tweeters after the ferrofluid liquid (used for cooling) dries up in the tweeter domes. They are still my favorite sounding speakers though, and while I do have a few speakers to compare them to. That said, I would love to own a pair of Klipsch Heresy or some Pioneer HFM-150’s. I was very close on an auction for a pair of 1500’s, but I wasn’t thinking about my bid and lost the auction :(.

I have a pair of Energy 22 Reference’s, Magnapan MG-IIIb’s, Walsh Ohm2’s, Klipsch RF-15’s paired with a Klipsch 12in Sub, a pair of Baby Advent’s, a pair of Bose 601’s, a bunch of Mirage Nano-Sat’s, a Mirage 10sub, and a wireless Klipsch 12in Sub.

I still miss my Pioneer Elite DSS 3’s – they served me faithfully through my college days and took a beating 😛

-Rat

Friday, February 7th 2025…and thus, Uncle Mark’s Basement (UMB) was born…

My brother gave me an interesting idea. Backstory… so we would have the family over for dinner around the holidays and my basement which has been a focal point due to me collecting interesting things and consequently, interests to other guys. My nephews would go downstairs and play darts, listen to music and fart around with the things that they would run across. It’s my man cave with all things that interest or are reflections of me. As a guy, it has taken years (a lifetime) to find some of this crap. My daughter calls me “the man of 1000 hobbies”. See my home page if you really want to know what interests me. The main floor of the house is a muted/toned down interpretation of me – lol. This idea/concept resides in every red-blooded male. While we may grow and become adults, we are still 10-year-olds in our heads.

Anyway, I will attach another site to this site via a subdomain. Where I can go through some of the things that you may find in my basement- that would speak to me, and consequently maybe interest the 10-year-old in you.

-Rat

Thursday, February 6th 2025…”Bring out your dead…”

For some reason, that was the first thing I thought of when I typed the date… vintage “Monte Python & The Holy Grail”. Any-hoo, an audio update is that while I rewired (bi-amp’d) the speakers – which didn’t work (still no sound from the tweeters). I purchased another tweeter and crossover off eBay. I will replace the tweeter first to see if the tweeter is fried. Or, if the tweeter is still not working, I will replace the crossover. We shall see how things go and if I still need a new replacement tweeter or crossover. I didn’t think the crossover was still necessary when bi-amping a speaker. Afterall, if the sounds are really coming from the same place (amplifier) and it amplifies the same streams of music wouldn’t it be at different frequencies? Wouldn’t it be easiest letting the preamp divide up the frequencies?

-Rat

Friday, January 17th, 2025 – Happy New Year!

Hello Gutenberg! This is definitely different. I didn’t think that I installed this plug-in but I’m glad I did and that it’s working now. I remember it crashing my site and having to disable it.

In any event, Happy New Year 2025 readers!

Update: I hit the 100K point mark in Duo Lingo for Russian! Making it my most studied language. However, I have to start furthering myself in the Russian language and not just working on points ;p. I am also going to start to try and learn Hindi. I have a new goal – keep my Russian up and learn Hindi at the same time. I can try and practice with Vikash and Pooja.

Update: I had a doctors appt on Jan 3rd and I got the directive that I have to lose some weight, and my doctor recommended that I start limiting my carbs. So, that is what I am doing. I did some keto stuff last year and although it wasn’t sustainable, I used a pretty good app on the iPhone (Carb Manager). I am using the same app this time but adjusting my carbs to the recommended amount. I mentioned trying to diet last year and was using the “Lumen” to try and get my body into fat burning mode. While I could never get it there, I could only burn carbs or glucose. I got frustrated and ditched the Lumen after 2 or 3 months and figured that I was metabolically inflexible and had no idea how to combat it. Well, this time I have a strategy. This time, I am trying to be “Ideologically Flexible” (flexible in thought) so, I will see what I can do to adjust my diet and exercise this time. Anyway, the last time was a stupid time to diet – right before a 12-day cruise to the “ABC Islands”. Yeah, I know – stupid. I haven’t busted out the Lumen yet. I had a bunch of concerns for the doctor on resting heart rate and metabolic inflexibility – since diabetes runs in the family. I am taking 6 weeks off from watercolor painting and trying to get a jump start on exercise (my art teacher was not feeling well and is taking the first 6 weeks of this year off – at night). Hopefully, he is feeling better and will resume night teaching. I retired my old weight bench and bought a new one – it is much safer. I don’t have to worry about weights crushing my larynx.

Update: After almost a year of audio frustration, I rewired my Klipsch speakers I got from my brother and decided to bi-amp them. My theory is that the crossovers are fried so I will use the receiver’s crossover to bypass the speaker’s crossover. That should increase the speaker’s performance as well as cut out the distortion and attenuation. I went to a record show and bought 2 new albums (vinyl) – Evanescence – Fallen (2003) , Triumph – Just A Game (1979) and some record cover sleaves. I also found some replacement needles for my turntable. Around Christmas, I purchased an audio streamer so I can rip all my CD’s to it. Currently, they are all in the cloud (Apple). I also have a NAD streamer, but I lost all the data someway, So I am not very keen on re-burning my CD’s. The cloud is bullet proof, but you are beholden to apple forever. I was also looking at ROON. I love the MAC mini. I may try something like that – if I can ever figure out how ROON works.

-Rat