Richard Jernigan -> RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk into a bar... (Oct. 5 2016 21:17:37)
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ORIGINAL: BarkellWH But then I have always considered myself a man of the 19th century. William H. Barkell, Esq. ...but there was no phonograph until the last quarter of the 19th century.... In addition to 1600 or so CDs I have a couple hundred vinyl LPs. But I haven't unpacked them since I moved back to the USA. I have a nice Thorens turntable with an aftermarket Grace arm. I suspect that the cantilever suspension of the Shure V15 cartridge has degenerated considerably with age. They don't make the V15 any more, and cartridges vary so much in sound and tracking performance that I haven't gone to the trouble to pick out a replacement. When CDs first became available I bought a portable Sony player. I traveled a lot. But I wasn't satisfied with the sound, compared to my analog setup at the time. I moved to Palo Alto, then to Santa Barbara, California. In the Santa Barbara area, population 200,000, there were at least three "high end" audio shops. If you have experience with acoustic musical instruments and hang around expensive audio shops, one thing that will strike you is how really terrible some very expensive setups can sound. I started reading Stereophile magazine, still in its smaller format in those days. I concluded that either they were nuts, or among the greatest of deadpan humorists. They spilled gallons of ink over how various CD players sounded different. I had spent a little time working on sonar signal processing, and quite a bit of time on radar signal processing. It should have been possible using digital technology to achieve a very high quality of reproduction. But as a famous philosopher once said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." By and by articles appeared on the various flaws in most manufacturer's equipment in the implementation of CD playback. But before that, I bought a pair of Stax Signature Lambda electrostatic headphones, the best sounding transducers I have heard up until now.Then I went around to various shops and plugged them into the CD players. Guess what? They sounded different. Enough CD players had flooded the market to lower the price of a run-of-the-mill one to a little over $100. None of those sounded good. I found one for about $350 that sounded pretty good, and bought it to take to Kwajalein with me. After a few years at Kwaj I decided to upgrade my whole playback setup. I started carrying around with me a half dozen CDs that sounded good on my Stax headphones, and when I went on vacation to Hong Kong, Singapore, the USA or the UK, I went to the "high end" shops and played the CDs. Again there were a lot of $50K systems that sounded really, really bad, but a few that sounded a little better than what I had. There were a couple of CD players that sounded better than my $350 one, but they wanted $1000-1500 for them, and I didn't think they were that much better. Then I ran across a setup that sounded really good. The digital-to-analog converter clock ran the mechanism that spun the CD, rather than trying to recover a clock from the data on the spinning disk. This corrected one of the major flaws in most CD players. But it cost money. The frequency splitting and shaping for the different loudspeaker drivers was done electronically at the input to a power amplifier channel for each driver, a great improvement over the time honored "passive" networks inside the speaker box itself, fed by a single amplifier. The improvement in sound due to this design option was so evident it surprised me it was not done more often. So I ponied up the cash, had them pack up the stuff and ship it to Kwaj. The pallet with the two speaker cabinets, suitably packed, weighed 440 pounds (200 kilos). But it was worth it, at least to me. It sounded really great. It's the setup I still have more than 20 years later. The same manufacturer has come out with more technological advances, but I haven't bothered to go listen. I'm happy with what I have. When I would go on vacation I would hit Tower Records in San Francisco, the HMV shop in London, CD stores in Bali and Java, etc. and buy enough CDs that sometimes the cashier's phone would ring and my bank would want to talk to me. A poor CD setup often sounds worse than a good analog vinyl rig. A good CD setup sounds better than any vinyl rig I have heard. At age 78 I have three computers in my house, an iPad, an iPhone, a landline phone, a flatbed photo scanner, a slide film scanner, sound recording equipment, a few digital cameras, my film dive camera and several lenses, etc. etc. I surf the web and text people on my smart phone. I use Google Maps in my car. I don't consider myself a tech junkie. I know people who read the magazines, surf the web and have to have the very latest stuff. Not me. I have an iPhone 4s and it does everything I want it to...if the iPhone 7 really is waterproof, that would be nice, but I don't spend nearly as much time on the water as I used to. My one technophobic characteristic is a lack of interest in video games. The graphics have improved immensely, but they still bug me. My son is a connoisseur, and knows Richard Garriott, the local video game gazillionaire. My brother knew Garriott's father, the astronaut, and was involved in qualifying the son physically for his $30-million private Russian ticket to the Space Station. My son is puzzled by my lack of interest in such a vibrant art form. We have plenty of other stuff to talk about though, including passionate shared interests in music. People can't reach me 24/7 because I never answer my land line telephone under any circumstances whatsoever. The ringer is turned off. I check the messages once in a while. If I don't want to be disturbed, I put my smart phone in "Do Not Disturb" mode. If I have it turned on and don't recognize the caller's I.D., I never answer it. Well, maybe once a month I will be feeling a little salty and answer it to harass the unsolicited caller....but I remember answering my landline some time back in the 1960s. The caller said they represented the Eternal Light Light Bulb Company. I asked whether they really thought we would need light bulbs in heaven. They didn't have a snappy comeback, though i thought they must surely have heard that one before. If I could choose my century, it would be right now, or the 18th. In the 18th century, the implications of Newton's prodigious breakthrough were coming to be understood. The Americans were implementing some revolutionary political ideas that looked promising. Many of the more influential American revolutionaries had studied Greece and Rome. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot were in a distant, unimaginable future. Genghis Khan and Attilla the Hun were at a comfortable distance in the past. I love the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I even like 18th century furniture and architecture, though you would never suspect it looking at my house and its "mid-century modern" contents....George Washington was only an inch shorter than I am, and he looked pretty good in his outfits.....[8D] RNJ
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