This is one of those days. Many of us have experienced similar days, I’m sure.
I started my day off with some good coffee. Kettle on. Fresh ground beans of my favorite variety that is easily bought locally. Slow pour into my hodgepodge design of cotton fabric filter plus tea infuser. Then I performed the ritual powering-on of my audio systems. There are of course multiple ridiculous steps, just like the coffee. Preamp (two switches), power amp, speaker selector… No magic smoke. Preamp and power amp in the secondary system. Then fire up the music server. I have to restart squeezelite on two of my four synchronized piCorePlayers after multiple hours of inactivity for whatever reason, so I tapped multiple things with my phone browser to do that. Finally, ready to select some music. What do I feel like today? Kid in a candy store! Random mix of locally saved music felt right for today.
Time to sort out breakfast for my kids. After that’s done, time to casually read diyAudio threads.
After mulling over the myriad unfinished never-ending audio projects I have catalogued in my brain, I decided to do some DSP PEQ tweaking of my speakers. Many “WOOOOoooooiiiiiii” iterations later, I thought I had reached a significant improvement in the low end. That was the goal for this tinkering exercise, so I felt rather accomplished. It sounded pretty good.
Time to futz around in the back yard a bit before the rain comes. The weather has been deliciously autumnal in the mid-Atlantic the last few days. I harvested the waning tomatoes from my container garden and dead-headed some flowers for seed collecting.
With the success of PEQ fiddling, why not see how it sounds in the vinly rig? Sure. Sit back and rela— But what? The right channel is very weak. Oh no. Did my beloved vintage RIAA stage finally go belly-up? After testing all the physical connections and not getting any benefit, I decided to bring the whole vinyl rig out for troubleshooting. It is not a trivial task to disconnect equipment from the main system. Carefully threading cables in a tight corner. I brought it all to the dining room table to see where the problem was. Thankfully I have any number of unused power amps not in rotation to contribute to the effort. Commandeering the entire table with the turntable, multiple preamps, buffer with gain, an ADC, a power amp, and test speakers… It was an operation. should have grabbed a picture of it, but I was trying to be efficient.
To my surprise, everything worked fine. No recurrence of the weak right channel. All components working perfectly. Relief, but perplexing. I switched things around enough to make sure all was well, then hauled it all back to the main system. More futzing with cables and tight spaces.
Finally, all things checked out. Time to sit back and enjoy an album.
Insight, execution, joy, shock, fear, perseverance, vindication, wonder, all in the day of diyAudio.
Enjoy the journey!
I started my day off with some good coffee. Kettle on. Fresh ground beans of my favorite variety that is easily bought locally. Slow pour into my hodgepodge design of cotton fabric filter plus tea infuser. Then I performed the ritual powering-on of my audio systems. There are of course multiple ridiculous steps, just like the coffee. Preamp (two switches), power amp, speaker selector… No magic smoke. Preamp and power amp in the secondary system. Then fire up the music server. I have to restart squeezelite on two of my four synchronized piCorePlayers after multiple hours of inactivity for whatever reason, so I tapped multiple things with my phone browser to do that. Finally, ready to select some music. What do I feel like today? Kid in a candy store! Random mix of locally saved music felt right for today.
Time to sort out breakfast for my kids. After that’s done, time to casually read diyAudio threads.
After mulling over the myriad unfinished never-ending audio projects I have catalogued in my brain, I decided to do some DSP PEQ tweaking of my speakers. Many “WOOOOoooooiiiiiii” iterations later, I thought I had reached a significant improvement in the low end. That was the goal for this tinkering exercise, so I felt rather accomplished. It sounded pretty good.
Time to futz around in the back yard a bit before the rain comes. The weather has been deliciously autumnal in the mid-Atlantic the last few days. I harvested the waning tomatoes from my container garden and dead-headed some flowers for seed collecting.
With the success of PEQ fiddling, why not see how it sounds in the vinly rig? Sure. Sit back and rela— But what? The right channel is very weak. Oh no. Did my beloved vintage RIAA stage finally go belly-up? After testing all the physical connections and not getting any benefit, I decided to bring the whole vinyl rig out for troubleshooting. It is not a trivial task to disconnect equipment from the main system. Carefully threading cables in a tight corner. I brought it all to the dining room table to see where the problem was. Thankfully I have any number of unused power amps not in rotation to contribute to the effort. Commandeering the entire table with the turntable, multiple preamps, buffer with gain, an ADC, a power amp, and test speakers… It was an operation. should have grabbed a picture of it, but I was trying to be efficient.
To my surprise, everything worked fine. No recurrence of the weak right channel. All components working perfectly. Relief, but perplexing. I switched things around enough to make sure all was well, then hauled it all back to the main system. More futzing with cables and tight spaces.
Finally, all things checked out. Time to sit back and enjoy an album.
Insight, execution, joy, shock, fear, perseverance, vindication, wonder, all in the day of diyAudio.
Enjoy the journey!
