2009 — 26 August: Wednesday
Tonight's picture of Christa shows her in the ICL Beaumont car park early one morning in the summer of 1974:
She kept her little camera for a very long time, I remember. My eyes are about to slam firmly shut, so it's time for some sleep. G'night.
Oops!
Morning, it seems, has entirely vanished. A flurry of emails, a tad of Pioneer screen resetting, a few minor tweaks to the video side of the A/V system diagram, a couple of cuppas and a splodge of breakfast cereal and — before I know it — it's 12:03.
The sordid saga: set the Pioneer screen to its "dot by dot" setting (no overscan). Turn off the image "orbiter" that twitches the picture around to reduce the risk of screen burn. Connect the Oppo Blu-ray player directly to the Pioneer (well, as directly as possible, given that its audio output needs to get into the Audiolab while its hdmi video output is handed on without any tinkering to the screen), bypassing the Edge scaler. Route the other video kit through the scaler (which contains essentially identical technology to the Oppo for working its pixel magic tricks). Now relax and chill out ahead of the loudspeaker demo session in "Audio T".
No sign of the sun, so far, but not much of the rain that was forecast, either.
There are days...
... when BBC Radio 3's choice of afternoon music is soul-soothing. And there are days when it isn't. This is an isn't. Though it should improve when Igor's "Rite" gets cracking.
It did.
Later
It's 18:53 and the supper, having heated, is (I hope) ready to eat. Meanwhile, I've been making the enjoyable acquaintance (earlier than expected) of the new NAD CD player. I've plumbed the Sony Freeview box into it to use just as a digital radio, and I've also confirmed its willingness to accept 320 Kbps VBR mp3s via its USB port. I've set it to resample everything at 192KHz and, of course, it's converting back to analogue with 24-bit processing. It amazes me to recall that it cost only £50 more than my very first CD player almost exactly 26 years ago. That player was a Marantz CD63T with 14-bit word-length and 4x over-sampling. But they are many many generations of technology apart. And the new box was made in China, of course, unlike its remote ancestor (made by Philips in Holland).
The final batch of incoming audio goodness (possibly starting as early as this Friday) will be a pair of PMC FB1i loudspeakers, followed by a dinky little PMC TB2+MCi centre (dialogue) speaker. And some expensive electric string with which to tie them together, of course. The existing Castle Avons, which have done well for the last eleven years, will now be relegated to the back of the living room, displacing the Sony pair I've been using for rear surround sound. That just leaves me with the "problem" of what to do about an LFE subwoofer. My Kef unit will remain in place for a few months, methinks, while I gently let the bank account recover from the recent shocks. I can, of course, happily spend those months reminding myself of all my music. Dad (who was a fine, self-taught pianist and violinist) would have loved to hear some of his vintage jazz on my system, I'm sure, and I'm equally sure Christa would have enjoyed it, too.
There remains (of course) a fly in the ointment. Although I'm now using Freeview-derived digital radio both upstairs and downstairs, there is still a time discrepancy in the processing, so there is still a minor-league "bad P.A. system" effect while traversing the stairs. I think I can live with that.