For the Audiophiles of the Cafe'

[dillon]

Decided to find the right cabinet and set up the turntable again in a separate system in another room using the Yamaha C80 and B1 pre and power amps currently idle, with my 40 year old Advents. I'll find a tuner to match my Carver equipment and move the Sherwood tuner to the second system, and also look for a digital to analog converter so I can use my tablet to stream radio and perhaps finally figure out the iPod I inherited from one of my kids. I'm giving the little Bose bookshelf speakers to my son. My currently operable system has Polks. Any suggestions for a converter are welcome.

[crfriend]

Any suggestions for a converter are welcome.

The odds are that the headphone jack on the thing is plain old analogue, so a simple headphone jack on one end of a cable with two RCA-style connectors on the other are all you'll need. Adjust the "volume control" on the tablet/iPod so you don't overdrive the line-level inputs on your main system and you should be good to go. No special hardware required at all.

No matter how much digital manipulation and transmission has been involved, always remember that the last couple of meters remain analogue -- at least until we get digital brain-implants (which I think are still a ways off).

[Big and Bashful]

Now digitising the Rick Wright album mentioned previously, full setup is:
Rega Planar 3 with RB250 tonearm and Shure V15 cartridge (don't know which generation), Rotel RC972 pre-amp and 2 RB972 stereo power amps in bridge mode powering a pair of Celestion Ditton SL662 speakers, very gently to avoid colouring the recording, which is in uncompressed audio on a Sony MDS-JE480 minidisk deck.
Don't know the model number of the NAD phono pre-amp and I am not going to disturb it until the recording is finished.

[crfriend]

This one's more for Big&Bashful than anybody else, but all are free to join in.

So, the question is: "What is this?"


Well, the answer is simple -- it's a "music box". It's a Silicon Graphics Indy, incept date sometime in the mid 1990s, and I use it the way that sane folks use a tape deck. It's got all the usual features, pass-through monitoring, level-controls, and assorted other adjustments, but can do all sorts of other cool things as well that can only be done in the mathematical domain such as normalisation, and sub-cycle edits.

The highly astute will notice the wallpaper on the laptop (which is functioning as the Indy's serial console at the moment) wallpaper is one of the Voyager probes. This is appropriate as the name of the laptop in my network is "Voyager2". Just visible in the shot are two of my Sun Netra T1s and a SPARCstation 2. The rest is assorted wiring and the foot of my refrigerator.

[Big and Bashful]

Nice toy Carl, I would love to have something like thqat to play with (Hmmm, a few pints of Bucks Fizz followed by a bottle of wonderfull 2004 Merlot seem to have blunted my keyboard skills!)

Happy New Year everyone!

Now back to more wine and more steak pie, life is ha4d! daamn my drunken fingers!