2014 — 19 February: Wednesday
The weather1 actually isn't looking too bad, for a change. Breakfast comes first, though, followed by the packing of a pocketable lunch. Today's little trio marches on its stomach, as it were.
I shall also...
... be packing five Blu-rays. I'm going to lend Season #1 of "Game of Thrones" to Mike for him to try. Since I know he's already enjoyed "Spartacus", "Rome", "A Knight's Tale", "The Name of the Rose" and Tolkien's minor-league saga (of course) I predict he will feel right at home spending ten hours or so with the interesting folk in the Seven Kingdoms. The production values (whatever that curious phrase means) are high and the video quality is superb. I can't comment on the quality of the audio surround, but the stereo down-mix sounds fine.
I no longer use the Oppo BD player's second hdmi output for audio (I was having problems persuading some of the file formats I use to disgorge their audio content via that "digital SCART"). So the Audiolab pre-amp is now completely unhooked from the hdmi digital audio/video world. Closer study of page 66 of the Oppo manual set me on the 'true' path. I now use a simple SP/DIF co-ax link, with the player's audio output set to bitstream. This is (so far as I can hear) perfectly happy to convey two-channel audio from all my disks and media file formats with equal felicity. Up to and including those troublesome Linn FLAC files at 192 KHz and 24-bit. That does for me. Simplicity rules.
Now, about that breakfast...
Does it add up?
Peerless. Truss (of whom I'd never heard) is apparently Elizabeth Truss, our education minister:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies claims that maths achievers "earn 7% more at 30" than others. It does not ask if people who earn more just happen to have been good at maths. Truss too is obsessed. Shortly before the crash in 2008, she wrote that Britain's "world-class mathematicians have aided its ascension as one of the financial capitals of the world". They had elevated British financiers from mere bank lenders to "masters of the universe" through their brilliant derivatives modelling and trading. We needed more of them, she pleaded. In that case, I assume it was being too good at maths that cost Britain the worst recession and the deepest misery since the second world war.
I, too, recommend the John Allen Paulos book "Innumeracy".
By keeping an eye...
... on the contour lines...
... you should be able to deduce the point2 at which we were forced to retrace our steps when the road (which had already been marked as "Flood — proceed at your own risk") became too deeply covered by water for the non-wellie brigade. We ended up walking about 6.7 miles instead of the planned 6.3, but kept our powder dry.
If there's a...
... stickier fruit than a nice, ripe mango I have yet to meet it. Yum.
Even closer study of...
... that page 66...
... followed by some brief, but successful, scrabbling around up in Peter's room for a simple high-quality stereo audio cable, followed by an afternoon (I'm retired, you know!) of very careful listening to bitstream co-ax SP/DIF output versus stereo analogue output from the Oppo — recall, I've already set the Oppo to downmix every incoming audio signal to two-channel stereo (which it does jolly well) — has left me wholly unconvinced that I can hear any significant difference at all between the digital and the analogue processing.
Furthermore, the Audiolab pre-amp also has a — previously-ignored — "5.1 bypass" mode that simply routes incoming analogue audio direct to the volume control, and thence straight out to the power amplifier, offering the nearest thing to a simple piece of electric string. Indeed, the relay that clicks gently when I select this mode disables all other audio processing. Magic! I think I've earned an early evening meal before cracking open the next season of "Game of Thrones".
Lest you think...
... it's all play and no work around here, I've also just topped up dear Mama's account with the necessary readies for the next monthly fee from the care home. It's gone up again, to the point where she's paying almost exactly three times the amount I receive as a pension from dear old IBM. Something tells me my own dotage is very unlikely to be spent in such luxury accommodation. The richest irony being that she is, to all intents and purposes, unaware of her surroundings.
An evening of...
... yet further discovery. My one remaining long-term qualm about playing back just audio material via the Oppo (whether from CDs, locally-attached USB drives, or network audio) has been the essentially static display the Oppo puts out, as I'm only too aware of the perils of plasma screen image burn. Turns out there's a — previously-ignored — button on its remote, labelled "Pure Audio". This completely turns off the video processing and output (reducing any potential interference between the video and audio signals). It also dims the power light and turns off the front panel display, turning the Oppo, quite literally, into a black box. Also magic!
I think I have now squeezed all the informational juice I can out of the manual. I hope so! On with the show.