My Audio Systems: The a/d/s/ Era

 

Audiophiles of a certain age will instantly recognize these as the "new" and "old" logos of Analog and Digital Systems of Wilmington Mass. Before I get into my end of things, indulge me while I get into it's convoluted history a little bit.

Starting all the way back to the 50's and 60's, the area around Boston was the epicenter of the "East Coast Sound". And by the 70's and 80's home of audio manufacturers which in some way had spun off from the mother ship that was Advent were still in the area. That group included companies such as KLH started by Henry Kloss who had been at Advent, AR, and Jensen, as well as other companies either based on the design theories behind the "East Coast Sound" or guided by someone who had worked for those original companies. This second wave that hit the audio scene included Boston Acoustics, Allison, Analog and Digital Systems (ADS), etc.

Bear with me while I go off on a tangent from my digression! In the speaker world (and somewhat the American audio world as well), there are basically two camps; the East Coast and the West Coast..... yeah, like Rap. At the risk of starting a flame war, here goes! Generally speaking, the East Coast "sound" is thought to be smoother, more refined at the cost of efficiency because of acoustical suspension (sealed boxed) designs. Whereas the West Coast "sound" was a more "boom and sizzle" presentation, but more efficient due to the use of ported designs. The West Coast "sound" is associated with JBL (James B. Lansing) and it's off-shoots such as Altec Lansing, Cerwin Vega etc. Not surprisingly, the Japanese makers tended to be more West Coast oriented, whereas the East Coast sound is similar to the "British" makers (eg. B&W, Tannoy, KEF, etc.). That's all I'm going to say without commentary since everyone's hearing and tastes are different. As for me:

I grew up listening to a German Telefunken system belonging to my father. Then later, that was replaced by a system built around a Dual turntable, KLH cassette deck and Jensen speakers. When I started buying equipment of my own, I started with B&W speakers fronting a Rotel stack. Then came the a/d/s/.

It started innocently enough when I came across an a/d/s/ C2/3 Cassette deck sold on clearance. It sounded good and was nicely understated. Around that time, I had taken some bad advice and replaced the Rotel electronics with Adcom. Don't get me wrong; there wasn't anything wrong with the Adcom, but it was a bad marriage between it and the B&W DM500 speakers that I was using at the time. We'll just leave it at that.

Around that time, a/d/s/ stopped it's home electronics importation from Braun leaving those components orphaned. That was just the nudge that shoved me off right off of the edge of cliff and down that proverbial slippery slope! Next thing I knew, the Adcom was gone and I had a house full of a/d/s/ equipment. This included:

• R4 Receiver
• PA4 Amp
• CD3 CD Player
• C2/3 Cassette Deck
• P4 Turntable
• A2 Integrated Amp
• T2 Tuner
• CD4 CD Player
• C2 Cassette Deck
• P2 Turntable
• L1290 Tower Speakers
• L300 Speakers
• L200 Speakers

Now, this took some years to do and a lot of it was less equipment that I seriously listen to, but were part of a "collection" and run as a secondary system in my bedroom. 

In fact, I was close to owning all of these iconic pieces designed by the famed Deiter Rams. Then home theater intervened. By that time, it had been a few years since a/d/s/  had stopped importing this gear from Germany and availability was drying up. That was before the common use of the Internet. Although I loved the way it sounded AND looked, it was just a huge headache to connect/disconnect and haul around when I moved (which was a lot since I had just started in Higher Ed Administration in those days). Doing home theater meant that I had to patch in an external decoder, try and match a center channel and get more speakers and amplification. 

 

So, I said goodbye to Dieter Rams designs and greatly simplifying my systems and moving!


 

COVID-19 and Keeping Busy

So, here we are...... sitting at home, wondering how long we're going to be here before COVID-19 crests and we can all go back to our normal lives. For someone like me, who tends to be a little mentally ADHD anyway, that means keeping my brain busy while I'm at home conducting Virtual Education! That's focusing on working on "shelved" projects.

It's a pretty long list! House/home stuff is actually pretty well managed, due to my highly organized wife..... However, my personal list of projects isn't in as good of shape. Most of it has to do with my hobbies; computing, firearms, reloading, photography/camera, woodworking and electronics..... ohhh the electronics!!! As you guys can tell from my writing or lack there-of on this subject, you can probably deduce how much I've neglected it. This ranges from the complex like upgrading my sound system to better focus on vinyl to repairing equipment that can be fixed and either sold off or gifted to someone who can use it. I will say that I've done well in updating and streamlining my photography stuff, but AV? Yeah... Then COVID-19 happened and I bought some more audio equipment!

 

You might be wondering; how in the heck can buying more help me with having too much equipment? So, here's what happened. First I bought the Rotel RP-855 turntable, a piece I've wanted for years to upgrade the vinyl end of my system, and soon after, I bought the Rotel RSX-1057 receiver (which by the way doesn't even have a Phono stage input). What that did was started me on reevaluating my system(s) as a whole.

I came to the conclusion that my system was set up for my family as it was 10 years ago, when the kids were 6 and 3. Now, they're 16 and 13. 

 

I figured, we no longer need to protect the DVDs from their handling by loading them into a huge Mega changer and they haven't played Wii-U in some time! Although, the new turntable only replaced the old one, the much heavier and by far, biggest of all my components is now gone. Off to live out another life with my brother-in-law who DOES have young children. This has now turned into a "domino effect" where, one of the 2 outboard amps has given up it's job of driving the surround channels to the new receiver.

Alas, all is not all wine and cheese as yet. I will have to admit that I pulled an oldie-but-goodie out of storage and put it into the stack. What is this weird thing and what does it do? It's in fact an AV source selector and Pre-Amp all in one box. It's a relic of the of the old days when audio companies were trying to come up with ways to keep up with the rapidly expanding video market. In the mid-to-late 80's there were just a ridiculous number of sources both audio and video, so here-ya-go in one box. This one is my second, having let the first one go years ago when I got out of the Laserdisc and SuperBetas (feeling old yet?)! I got this one to send signals to my computer with thoughts of archiving old VHS and MiniDV tapes. In any case, I'm going to be using it to do two things that have increasingly been left off of even high-end receivers (such as the RSX-1057), that's the Phono input and of all things,.... the switched outlet! Yup, you remember, people would plugged their other rack components into the main receiver and it would turn all your stuff on and off. In the last 10-15 years, people have increasingly used power-strips. Why do I need this? I have and still us AC "line enhancers" (aka fancy power-strips) and in order for it to turn on the components connected to it, you plugged a control cord into the "switched" outlet of your receiver, so when you turned it on, it in turn, turns on everything else..... slick. This slim little component will do both of these critical things (Phono, switched outlet) for me!

And if you don't think that'll keep me busy enough; this afternoon, I decided to see if I could get an old pair of NAD 20 speakers to work (long story which might get its own post). And as it turns out, they're now working fine and my son is enjoying them in place of the pair of a/d/s/ L300s that I gave him last year.

So, what do you guys think? Successfully keeping myself occupied stuck here at the house!?!

The Story of the "Mid-line" Cellphone

For roughly the last 3 years, I've been using the Motorola (aka Moto) G4, and has been perfectly satisfied. This is really a rather unremarkable phone and therefore it's service shouldn't be of interest in any way. And there-in lies the story......

  

I have a long history of buying Motorola's premium offerings going all the way back to the i1000 on the Nextel network. Sure, there were other devices that ranged from the very interesting Nokia 8100 of Matrix fame and my one and only Apple device; the iPhone 5s. They all served me well, but as phones got increasingly complex, I began to feel that I got nowhere near taking advantage of their capabilities. When their life expectencies were closer to 5 years and contracts were close to 2, that was OK. When those things dropped to half, it became not worth the cost. At roughly the same time, the feature set became such that one didn't need to buy "halo" device (Z4 below) to get all the features one needed. 

There were 2 paths for the makers to put these devices to market. They could go the traditional route and sell them in bulk to the big carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint etc), or sell them directly to the consumer as "unlocked" phones ready to connect with virtually any system. My Moto G4 bought from Costco was one of these. It cost me about $150 on a Black Friday sale. That makes the phone itself cost less than $5 per month (of course, there is the cost of the plan itself). That's cheap! More importantly was that over the course of the 34 months that I used it, I never wanted for anything in terms of features.

So, last week, after my G4 committed suicide by jumping into the pool at practice one day......, I went out and chased down another mid-line phone. The Moto G6 Play. 

To reinforce the concept:

• It has all the features I need and some I don't.
• It has the old Micro-USB charging port. I'm really not ready to buy a bunch of replacement cords, and it charges plenty fast enough for me!
• It has the regular 3.5mm headphone jack! 
• It was cheap. I paid $63 on eBay from a DFW seller who got it to me in 2 days.
• Despite being 2 generations newer, it's interface was comfortably familiar. 

The fact is, even if I'd have gone out and paid full price for it, the price wouldn't have been any higher than what I paid for it's predesessor, the G4. As thing would turn out, I actually ended up paying nothing for it. I won't get into that story today. But I'd have been quite happy to pay $5 a month for it's use over the next 2-3 years.

Workstation Interrupted..... and Then Detoured!!!

This has been what my personal computing world has been like for the last 2 years! In September of 2017, I wrote a blog post on my workstation rebuild project. At that point, I had acquired the motherboard, processor and memory. Everything was pretty much in place to move on to the build itself! Then a number of things happened:

• For my birthday (October) of that year, I got a gun. Subsequently, I've been very involved in all things firearms!
• I started coaching the swim team at my school. We'll just say that it's time consuming, and exhausting and leave it at that....
• Since that time, my children have turned 12&15, then 13&16, which is in and of itself exhausting, but has included things such as teaching my son how to drive, as well as dealing with a teenage daughter...... enough said......
• I found out that the X99 motherboard steadfastly remained dead, despite my best efforts, so it went to Gigabyte warranty depot. Which is why you buy from a quality manufacturer.
• Gigabyte had a glitch and forgot about my board for about 6 months.....
• Gigabyte now has no more of the X99 boards to replace it and we are now going back and forth as to what to do about this situation.....
• MS Windows 7 support is ending, and I've been dealing with ours' as well as clients' machines.

You can see, what that above picture is about now.

After I sent the X99 to Gigabyte, I decided to pull out one of my old computers as a stop-gap measure, expecting that it would do email and some light web surfing for a month or two at worse. 8 months later .....I finally took it off of my desk and put the old warhorse out to pasture. For those who don't recognize it off-hand; it's my old "Tomcat" build. It's an IBM (which should be your first clue), Z61m running a Core2Duo processor with a chipset so old that it has a 3Gb limitation! Which goes to show that for what most people do (email and web-surfing), they don't need the latest and greatest. In any case, although it was slow and occasionally a little annoying to use, I was grateful to have it. On to the next thing.....

....And this is the next thing. An ASUS Rampage III Extreme with an Intel i7-950 processor and 6 sticks of 2Gb Dominator memory that I picked up for $50 about 3 years ago off of Craigslist. It has the X58 chipset and was from the 1st generation of Core CPUs! I'm using it because I'm tired of not being able to use my monitor rig, including the 28" 4K panel. I spent a few hours this last Saturday getting it up and running. I've got to say that for a 2011 motherboard, it runs (Windows10) pretty well, especially compared to the old ThinkPad! 

As of yesterday, Gigabyte and I are in the process of negotiating a mutually agreeable replacement for the X99 board. They asked me for a chipset and I prudently asked for a Z370 board vs. the X299 which would be a direct replacement in the product line. However, after some research, it turned out to have some hardware limitations that would have boxed me into some very specific (read expensive) hardware that I didn't want to get involved with. Much like my new philosophy about my cameras, I've decided to give up on some dreams for a more practical a outcome. Despite the "Z" chipsets being more "consumer" oriented, it will do everything I need it to do. There was just no sense in spending more money on spec that would have been meaningless. I'll explain more when I detail the build in a future post. 

Burn The Ships!

 

Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and forever changed the world...... But it could be argued the things didn't really get going until 1519, when Cortes landed in Mexico and gave the fateful order to "burn the ships"! What does this have to do with me? Well...., awhile ago, I made the decision to give up my full-sized DSLR Nikon gear (APS-C) based around the D300 and bought a Panasonic Lumix GX-7. This last weekend, I burned the ships! About 3 weeks ago, I sold the D300 rig, but a few days ago, I cut my emotional ties.

For some time now, I had been collecting an ad hoc selection of old film 35mm cameras from the heyday of Japanese manufacturers. They ranged from the old and quaint such as Topcon Uni, and Miranda RE to true classics such as my Minolta XE-7 all the way to the hi-tech from last years before digital as represented by a Contax 139 Quartz. The group was so varied that I collected a number of Tamron Adaptall II lenses so I could use the many adapters made for the numerous cameras. Unfortunately, this little hobby, while fun was getting stale the last few years and it was a vast clutter of jumbled and dusty hulks. So, between meeting a guys who bought several lenses on Saturday, and another guy on Sunday who bought everything else; I'm out of the "big/old camera" business. 

It's not as simple as cleaning out, or even just switching gear. There's a lot of emotion associated with those old cameras. In a many of ways, it represents my youth, my most abiding hobby interest, and even some professional aspirations. On the other hand, it's a lot of stuff that sits there and did nothing, but collect dust. And, although, I probably didn't sell it for as much as I could (or should) have, it did bring in some money and to a large extent, was a relief as well! Those ships got burned!

What did I do with the money? I used some of it to replace the cameras and lenses I used. I had previously picked up a Lumix GX7 with a 12-32mm (24-64mm eq) lens. After selling the Nikon D300 gear, I decided to use some of the money to replace the Nikon 18-200 lens with a Lumix 14-140mm. Uh..... I did that by purchasing a GH1 with that lens! And along with it came a FL-360 flash (which I needed), and an Olympus 14-42mm lens, along with misc accessories. Why? The whole thing was about $50 more than what I was going to have to pay for that lens anyway at about $300 total! Those lenses alone routinely run anywhere from $200 to $250. 

After I sold all the old camera gear, I decided to give myself a little reward. That is in the form of one of the "littlest" Lumix lenses around.

The 20mm/f1.7 (40mm eq), considered one of the sharpest for the format. They typically sell for $125 to 175. I paid $145.....

 ....for a 20mm/f1.7 and a Lumix GF-1 attached. Yup, I found it on eBay for $150 after shipping (down from the original listing of $200) with an "OBO". So I offered $130 for it. So, now I have a Lumix micro-4/3rds system. More to come.

  

I've "Switched"!!!

See....., not what you thought, huh? I'm the father of two teenagers, my daughter is almost 13 and all that that implies. OK, so let's move on to the more pleasant topic,..... the almost 16 year old son. He has shown signs of coming out of the middle school to 10th grade funk which was the bane of our existence. But the last few months, he's actually been more useful and quite a bit more pleasant to be around, a switch that has led me to become more involved in his hobbies. In today's world, that quite often involves gaming. He has 2 main interests in that area; PC gaming which he participates via the gaming PC that I built for him a couple of years ago. It's still relatively current and very usable so doesn't need attention at this time. His other gaming interest is the Nintendo platform (which is a relief for my wife and I).

   

From the standpont of straight-up technology, I think that this platform is really interesting. A very successful adaptation of the favorite from my rather brief days of video gaming; the NEC TurboGrafx16.

Or more specifically, the legendary, NEC TurboExpress.

This thing was (technologically speaking) the "Tour de Force" of the mobile gaming world of the late 90s. In a world where the typical handheld gaming device was a monochrome Gameboy, with weak, chopped down games, the TurboExpress had color and played the full-sized NEC TGX16 games! The only problem....., it ate batteries like an 8 year-old does candy! Unfortunately, the NEC console was a distant 3rd in the gaming platform world of that era. I only got involved with it because my favorite arcade game, Galaga was only available on it! 

Fast forward 30 some-odd years, we now have a successful marriage of the power of nVidia hardware with the marketing might of Nintendo, and you get the Switch! A console platform with a mobile form-factor, capable of playing the full games. I've become so intrigued by the concept that I've began researching extending the capabilities of the system. 

A major part of our lives these days, is the amount of time we (Josh and I) spend on a school bus traveling to and from swim events. Sometimes, it's many hours in one sitting. Texas is a big state! What I learned from driving the team around is that they will often play Switch games together to keep the boredom at bay. It's apparent to to any observer that its a struggle for them to play together in "table-top" mode when multiple kids need to crowd around the relatively small 7" screen. The other issue is the struggle to keep the screen stable on a moving bus. The solution?

The Gaems Vanguard Black Edition, "personal gaming environment" for $299 of course! Uhhh, no..... I don't have $300 just to run out and buy something like this, and on top of that, it doesn't resolve the issue of power. Not only does the thing not resolve the issue of powering the gaming platform, it in fact creates another need for AC power in the 19" screen that's built in to the case. So in reality, it's simply a fancy case sized to hold a game system, and a LCD monitor to display it, so really, it doesn't resolve the problem of playing in a mobile environment nor real of portability either. What's then is the solution?

The top image is the Dell Latitude E7240; it's about a 3 year-old ultra portable notebook that's less than 4 pounds, has a 12.5" 1366 x 768 screen built into a nice aluminum case of less than 1 inch. The lower image is a Suaoki D100 26,800mAh power bank with a critical attribute of having an AC plug as well as 1 USB Type-C, and 2 USB 3 "Quick-charge" ports as well. Why is the AC plug "critical", and what does one have to do with the other?

It appears that the Nintendo Switch, despite having a USB-C power/connection port, does not comply with the power draw standards set for that type of port. Sooooo, it's generally accepted as a bad idea to power the device by anything that's not officially sanctioned by Nintendo! Besides that; in order to send a signal to an external screen, one must use a dock which has an HDMI port, so yeah...... So my little project needed to have a source of power that has an AC plug for the adapter, AND a lot of power to drive the screen and the Switch itself. The Latitude was free courtesy of a client who killed one and I was tasked to replace it, leaving me with a laptop with a dead motherboard, but functioning screen. The power bank came about because my wife decided that she should carry our old one and that I was free to buy a replacement of my choosing.... thus leaving me with marching orders, and the freedom to buy the D100! Anything else is required to complete this project?

I did have to order a controller board from China for the screen in the laptop. It was about $20. I also need a case to build it all into as well.

This actually gave me a lot of trouble tracking it down. There are tons of these light weight "hard-shell" cases out there for things like GoPro cameras and external hard drives, but they just aren't big enough. After hours of fruitless searching, it occurred to me that I need to search for a case designed for something bigger, but also commonly carried around, ..... which led me to the drone case. This one by DBPower was $22 on Amazon with free shipping! So, all I'll need to do is to cut some new foam to fit my pieces and figure out a way to attach a carry strap. 

Why? Well..... being a dad to a teenager isn't the easiest thing in the world. And our time with them under our room is limited. Sure, it sounds good to raise them to appreciate what we do, but that isn't always a practical reality. I'm on the back end of my 50s and he just started driving this year. We aren't going to have that many interest in common. I gave up a few things this year to be his swim coach, is taking some more time to show an interest in his hobbies isn't much more. Plus, it's kinda cool! I'll put up another post when I get done.