NJAS Wall Posting

NJAS Member Wall Postings and Comments

Radio Tower Gone
This a cracker electronics story!
Comments:
§ OMG!! Unbelievable!! Possibly brilliant, criminal minds!!? Could never had imagined. So highly motivated. Very impressive!! So many questions!! OMG!!
⤷ posted Feb 16, 2024

Nobody gets out alive.

220watts in, 2.2watts out
Comments:
§ No matter who it's for Victor, I enjoyed it. Funny if I forget a name I usually remember the equipment. Recognize the Klipschorns, always a good sound with tubes. I never heard the horns from Avantgarde. If anybody in the club has them I'd love to hear them.
⤷ posted Dec 6, 2023
§ Hey Victor, Just noticed this wall section. 2.2watts is more than enough for real speakers...
⤷ posted Feb 9, 2024

Double Decker Records closing
Double Decker Records, which buys, sells and trades vinyl records, is set to close Dec. 2 at 808 St. John St.

Interview with Jimmy Webb
Here we go again! An hour long interview with songsmith Jimmy Webb on my prescient topic of the song Wichita Lineman. Enjoy!

Who knew he was an audiophile?
Yahoo News Article
After leaving Apple, John Ive has apparently set his sights on the audiophile turntable market, with a new Linn Sondek LP12 50th anniversary edition, only $60K!

Before giving back this DAC I made a couple videos

Among the members who showed up to help me move two years ago was a Michael Mattera, of Oakland, NJ, who took some of my audio gear on consignment. Does anyone have a phone number or email address for him?
Comments:
§ Ivan, according to all of our member lists I don't see anyone with that name.
⤷ posted Jun 21, 2023
§ Michael Materiu is on Facebook. Is he the guy?
⤷ posted Jan 31, 2024

Here's an interesting video on playing piano at lightning speed.
Comments:
§ It's here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qri_DvU_9aM

Also interesting, especially around 2:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkH6jz1gy3Y
⤷ posted Feb 26, 2023

Go read my Oct 2017 newsletter article...
So, hot on the heels (not really) of my NJAS newsletter article about the song Wichita Lineman, music producer and educator Rick Beato presents his take. You can read my article (Oct 2017 newsletter), and watch his video (which is fairly long) in any order, I suppose, though I think I was pretty prescient here!

As a coda to my article, I suggested there that a POV issue could be fixed by "...and he needs you more than wants you...â€, but the singular "needs" and "wants" would be awkward. Now I think the fix would be "... and he'll need you more than want you...", which seems very powerful to me. Test it out for yourself and let me know!

Coda to the coda. As most would point out, the song is predominately in the first person, so the narrator's nickname for himself is "the Wichita lineman". The problem is a bit more subtle than perhaps suggested in my original article. The only verse (repeated in the chorus) in the third person is "And the Wichita lineman is still on the line". So, replacing 1st with 3rd at top of the chorus sets up a slightly lonelier rendition of third person alienation: "He'll hear you singing in the wire; he can hear you through the whine...". However, I can see the advantage of staying predominately in the first. It's good to think about changing up lyrics this way when analyzing a song, and it would be nice to know what was going through the songwriter's head. This happens more than most people realize when songs are remade.
Comments:
§ One question that I thought about, what makes music great? It's true that the song changes from 1st person to 3rd person and that there are some unusual chord changes in it. But to my mind the greatest song would be one that I would severely miss if it disappeared. For example, Hank Williams, "I Can't Help It If I'm Still In Love With You."
⤷ posted Jan 14, 2023

Network Music Storage Limitations
I got my offsite backup drive out of storage the other day and brought it in to update it. Then I was reminded of how USB external storage docks/cradles often can't handle large drives because the drivers predate the time when drives were multiple terabytes (TB) in size. Tera being the one after Giga, which is a billion, of course.

Basically, if you are storing things on a drive larger than 2 TBs, there's a good chance you can't use an older USB 2 external drive dock to access it, as I found out with my 8 TB backup drive. It will misread the drive size. This won't damage the contents of the drive right away unless you try to perform some sort of write operation on it, but it can look like the drive is somehow damaged because the error message will say that the drive is corrupted. It is PROBABLY NOT corrupted, but will need a direct SATA connection instead, either perhaps with eSATA or put inside on the main SATA bus. Of course, even newer drives will make use of non-SATA connections, as the computer industry can't resist coming up with newer ways of doing things to annoy everyone. However, those drives simply won't fit in the older SATA docks, so the problem is largely moot.

If you encounter this situation, there is sometimes a way to correct the issue on the drive by copying the GPT table to both the beginning and ending of the drive--but only once you can correctly read the drive. There are drive utility programs that can do this, though it's a bit of an expert move. Once you have the duplicate made, the drive is more likely to be readable through the USB dock. In my case, I removed my 2TB music SSD from inside the computer and put the 8TB backup in its place, then put the 2TB SSD in the cradle, which allowed everything to be read correctly. However, it does mean the same trick won't work again if I go beyond 2TB for my main music drive. I'm putting this out there in case anyone in the club is looking for a lot of network storage for their hi-res music collections. Obviously a prebuilt product is less likely to have this issue since it was professionally made, but this issue can affect backups and upgrades. Best of luck.

Wiki for Schumann Resonances
If you were at CAF and saw the Synergistic demo, you heard a lot about "Schumann Resonances". These are Radio Waves at Extremely Low Frequencies (ELF). These are not sound waves and therefore not audible, but there is some evidence that the strength of these signals correlates with blood pressure (probably because of nearby thunderstorms and changes in ambient atmospheric pressure). At any rate, it's a good example of how audio markets itself. There's no reason to think that Schumann Resonances (a real if not very reliable natural phenomenon) has anything to do with how well an audio system works, or affects hearing, but it creates a verbal connection between a real scientific (not even engineering) thing and the shielding technology used by Synergistic. You might as well say that the color you paint your listening room will affect how well it sounds. Synergistic is not the only company that makes such vague connections, but they are very explicit about it, so it's easy to discuss. We also don't know exactly what the Synergistic boxes actual do when they are turned on, so we get the double-hop problem of not only how to apply SR's to audio systems in theory, but also what Synergist Research ("SR" again) does in practice--that is, if you can make the first connection, does SR correctly engineer it. A good engineer will happily talk about their implementations all day long (like, say our own Mike K. of Arion Acoustics). Every reasonable question should have a good answer. At any rate, the demo was fun, if opaque.
Comments:
§ Thanks, Jim. Synergistic is the poster child for all that is wrong with audiophile tweaks. This product in particular is pseudo-science BS. Ted takes a real phenomenon, like Schumman Resonances in the Earthâ€™s magnetic field, then sells something that cannot affect that phenomenon but will somehow magically make your system sound better (for lots of money). If you believe the marketing, your system will absolutely sound more enjoyable because enjoyment is in our brains, not our ears. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances
⤷ posted Nov 26, 2022
§ I was first made aware of Schumann's Resonators at a club members house/meeting. As they were on during the HiFi demo there was nothing to compare to.I asked a fellow member about the resonators and was intrigued enough to do research and purchase two resonators sans enclosures from Wallmart for $14 each. Sitting 8-10 feet away I felt something not good or bad minutes later.Afterwards,I pulled into one of my Bass amps and played. The sound was less than desirable. Days later in a double blind test,I had a friend play with his back to the resonators and switched them on and off during test. Afterwards I explained what I was doing and asked for feedback.
my friend and I agreed that at times the amp sounded better. Those better sound were with the Resonators off! Schumann's discovery/research is real.The Resonators are real.Snake Oil? I don't think so. Can it affect electronics absolutely. But the perception of net gain large or sublime lives with the beholder.
⤷ posted Jul 9, 2023
§ Barry: The devices were called "Schumann Resonators" but we don't know what they were actually doing. It's entirely possible they are "Schumann Resonators" in name only!
⤷ posted Nov 28, 2023 by JimOfAllTrades

Only 17 rooms?
NY Audio Show
If I am reading the web site correctly,the show, which is just a few weeks away, has a whopping 17 rooms with 31 brands. So, for this wannabe audio show I should spend money to buy tickets, travel to New York, pay a fortune for cans or risk getting mugged on the subway or the street? I will stick to the Capital Audio Fest, thank you very much.

Known for Illuminati and later Black Cat cables along with StereoLab
Other than the headline, we haven't found out much more detail.