Category: Music

Thursday, February 27th 2025…Can’t wait!…

So, when I get home today, I am going to do 2 things – first, replace my Energy 22 Reference tweeter (I just got an extra one used via eBay) and second, pack up my other tweeters and get them ready to ship off to the guy who will recondition them. And while I’m doing that listen to some music. I need to treadmill it and sling some weights around – I have MEPS to get! (flipping MyZone). I am also doing a class centered on electronic circuits – it’s funny how much stuff I forgot. Also, it’s kind of interesting using this software called Tinkercad that can do some of the circuit analysis – it’s all virtual! It kind of floors me – yeah, I know that I should expect things like this, but I remember doing all this stuff by hand – meaning with pencil and paper. My original electronics teacher from COD was an engineer at Bell Labs and was on one of the teams that worked on a part the development of the integrated semiconductor. He was probably in his 70s at that time. He had some interesting tales.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 26th 2025… Well, I’ll be…..

Just when I thought I wasn’t going to find an M52, I find one – new, vintage 2012 and in a box nonetheless! Whoda thunk? I’m happily going through and burning my CDs to the Vault2i. I have a crap load. Now I’m beginning to wonder, do I have enough to contemplate getting rid of some Apple products and pick up Roon? Supposedly, you are supposed to have over 5k of songs in order for it to pay off. I’m kind of happy with BluOS and do I really need or want to stream to my iPhone? I’ve lived with being able to stream to any device within the confines of my house. Do I really want or need another 15$ per month service? Do you ever get rid of a subscription – I really need to think on this? Hmmm…

On a separate audio note, I subscribed to “Audioholics” which is an audio blog site.

-Rat

Monday, February 24th 2025…I’m bummin’…

I was thinking that it wouldn’t be so difficult to find a NAD M52 digital music vault for my M50 digital music player. Crap was I wrong. For the past 3 years, it seems you would trip over them (per hifishark history). This year, they all reside in Germany, and no one wants to ship to the US. Save that guy on Reverb who wants to charge what it would have costed new. BFD, he replaced a drive – so what (it’s a flipping RAID array). Maybe I’ll try reformatting my RAID array again and see if I can get it to connect. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Yesterday, I fired up the baby advents again – I forgot how nice they sound. Also, today I got a replacement tweeter for the Energy’s (below). Hopefully I won’t be sending this one for reconditioning any time soon. I have 2 pair now to send.

-Rat

Saturday, February 22nd 2025…I’m a burnin’ fool…

Burning Man 2925

I am reburning all my CDs in my collection to the Vault2i, so I can catalog and stream them. I had burned them all to iTunes about 20 years ago, and just recently (within the last year or so) I burned them to an external drive that I had attached to my NAD M50. Needless to say, it got corrupted somehow, so now I am starting over again but on a newer platform. On another note, I found out that my tweeter that i ordered for the Klipsch’s is stuck at some post office distribut6ion center somewhere out near Fox Valley. Also, as it turns out, I have a lot of country music these days – amazing. They must be from my wife or my bro. The only country that I can remember having was Charlie Daniels Band and Garth Brooks. It will be interesting (either confirm or deny) when I start hitting (burning) my old CDs again. I am not going the country route without kicking and screaming.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 19th 2025…”It’s hump day! W00t, W00t!..”

I must say – I’m super excited that I finally found a guy to fix my Energy 22 tweeters! I have been looking for a couple of years. I was bummed that the audio guy closed up shop in Tinley Park right before COVID hit. He replaced a tweeter or 2 on the Energy’s. I’ll have to get them packaged up (the new guy does them by the pair) and ship them. For the price, he said that you’d get new voice coils, gaskets, and ferrofluid. How cool is that? Hopefully I’d be good for another 20 years (conservatively).

I brought my Bluesound Vault2i streamer upstairs and paired it with my Pioneer Elite SC-07 receiver and some simple (RF-15) Klipsch speakers. I’m still down a speaker (waiting on a replacement tweeter) and haven’t hooked up the sub yet. But at least I can listen to music now and it’s not muffled (no tweeters) while working and burning CDs. I think what I like about it is that it utilizes Bluesound for the metadata (data about the CDs) and doesn’t need Roon or some other subscription service. Although it also doesn’t serve music to anything outside your network, it can pretty much serve music to anything within your network. I am still waiting on a NAD M52 for my M50. I had an external hard drive serving as a content device, but it was short lived – about long enough to burn around 100 CD’s before it went FUBAR. Think of it as another streamer that Bluesound shares and can serve up music in the basement. Yeah, I can also serve it from the office, off the vault.

– Rat

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

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

Monday, October 1st 2024…honest to Christ, if it’s not one thing, it’s another…

Now that all my WordPress woes are somewhat behind me for the time being, my music components are giving me grief now! You would think it would be easy, plug and play – nope, plug and prey! In this technological world, everything is inter-connected. From the musical perspective, I have a new school setup, feeding an old school setup. Well, albeit a somewhat new school setup. I have vintage 70’s stereo components being fed by late 2016’s technological stereo components. In otherwards, I have a 2015 NAD M50 streamer with an external DAC feeding CARVER components (PT-1250 Amps and a 4000t Pre-Amp) and a current Node 2i BLUESOUND streamer with external DAC. I was ripping all my music via the NAD and something happened that reset the auto CD setting to play and not rip a CD to a drive. I have an external drive attached to the NAD. Which pisses me off because everything is buried in a “simple” app. Upstairs, I have a Pioneer Elite SC-07 receiver powering a pair of Klipsch RF16s and a Klipsch sub. The speakers sound like shit, no treble (seems blown or crossovers are crap) I was thinking that I would pair the Elite with a Node Vault 2i which would allow me to rip upstairs and play downstairs and use the Node in the living room and keep the NAD downstairs. While I’m upstairs, I have to repair the Klipsch speakers (pull them apart and check the wiring and crossovers) and configure the receiver. I think I may even try a CARVER TFM-25 amp and use the Pioneer as just a preamp (as a check for the output signal in case It’s the Pioneer that has a problem and not the speakers). Always something…

-Rat

Monday, August 26th 2024… I didn’t get Gumbo, but I did get a classic Ruben…

I wanted to do the Maple Tree Inn for my birthday this year, and while I didn’t get to go… I did get to go to Irish Fest at Galic Park and had a classic Ruben from Ashford House (Flippin’ authentic Irish!) We did the “Guiness Experience” which was an awesome deal and fairly informative. We got to sample a flight of 5 beers – Harp, Smithwick’s (pronounced Smith-ick’s), Guiness Draught (draft – draught is the Gaelic spelling), Guiness Extra Stout, and Guiness Foreign Extra Stout. There were all approximately 6oz pours which I felt was an exceptional deal and a souvenir Guiness pint glass! There was a lot of information to take in and in the end, I felt that I had a better appreciation of the beer and the brew process. I also found out that there is a Guiness Brewery, right here in our Chicago area!! I also heard the wonderful Shannon Rovers and an awesome and extremely talented Abba tribute band! They had an great lineup of talent this year, and I wish I could have attended all the days (Fri, Sat, and Sun). Also, I got a year older. ;(

On a separate note, I ran across a song that I kind of fell in love with – Babylon by David Gray off his album White Ladder. It’s been in my playlist for a long time. It came out in 1998. To funny. I always attributed it to John Mellencamp. Sorry David!

-Rat