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I used to love sitting aisle but lately window has been calling my name. Love seeing cool stuff from the air. Rainier, Shasta, a few of SF and Mt. Hood.

I've got a bunch of photos of high end systems stashed in a folder, and instead I'm gonna post these: The mainland house is now my remote outpost. I still have two NS-1000s stashed there, for a number of reasons (I have 4, I need some speakers in the old house until I demolish it, NS-100s are heavy as all fuck, and I'm not relishing the idea of moving them.) Sadly, my old 1970s Martanz receiver might finally be on the way out. One of its two "Protect" LEDs won't go out when I power it on. It also plays a monophonic signal no matter what I feed it. I think something inside gave up the ghost. The Yamaha receiver I helped my father pick out in 1997 so he'd have a sound system to woo his then-girlfriend (it didn't work out) was nearby, so I swapped it in. I never really liked the sound the Yamaha, it's kind of thin an anemic. It definitely doesn't have the balls to drive the NS-1000s as they were meant to be. With that said, it still works. How many other bits of consumer electronics from over 25 years ago can you point to that work as well now as they did new? The rest of the signal chain is the HeadAmp Pico DAC I bought off some HCer or other an eternity ago and my M1 MBP. Barely visible but of great importance is the USB-C to Mini-USB (vs Micro) cable I bought of bozos.com. I may have mentioned this before, but cables with that particular arrangement of connectors do not grow on trees. Both the Pico DAC and my HeadRoom Balanced Desktop use Mini-USC, so I make it a point to have a few of those cables on hand always. The sound of the above was ...fine. It's not like I had time for critical listening. I watched a couple old movies with my (sainted, octogenarian) mother while we were there. The TV is my friend Dave's 2006 DLP model he dumped on my lap when he skipped town. It will not being following me to the Vineyard, but it still works for now. Speaking NS-1000s... The other set are on the Vineyard. I spent the last two days clearing crap out of the living room, including: 9 boxes of records, four Unisound tower speakers I bought back in 2010 from some wacky site called ThingFling.com (a few HCers might remember them), and innumerable other things including an Herman Miller office chair that I am convinced wants to kill me. My back is not happy with me. I cleaned off the NS-1000s (which are 30 or so years old at this point, the Technics 1200 (ditto) and Outlaw RR2150 (much newer). If one knows anything about NS-1000s, it's that (A) the midrange driver is at least as famous as the speakers themselves, and (B) they have awful spring loaded speaker terminals. Earlier this year I bought a set of terminals specifically for this job: be s Today I dug out some speaker wire from a box in the attic and had it. The first record I put on was a 7" 45 of Yam Yam's Bahama Mama, which is a weird little downtempo ditty that defies description. You'll just have to hear it for yourself. NB: The version of the 7" is a bit different than YouTube rip, but that's life in the world of obscure promo downtempo vinyl. Next I rummaged up "I Spy" by Death in Vegas, which lifts a beat from a Notorious B.I.G. track. Lastly I found one of the four vinyl copies I own of Oliver Lieb's 1994 one-off album The Ambush. Talk about a timeless classic. I actually played all four sides of it and really listened to the system. Some Captain Obvious observations: The R2150 blows the poor Yamaha out of the water. The spot I chose for the 1200 is lousy, and resonance prone. Twelves are big beefy MFing turntables and resistant to vibration, but I could hear some unwanted resonance in the midbass range. The NS-1000s midrange is really something spectacular. The RR2150's phono preamp is very good, but it's hardly audiophile grade. With that said, listening some 90s (and one case, 70s) mastered vinyl through was just compelling. Vinyl is engaging in a way that nothing digital will ever be. I'm sure that 90% of is looking at the turntable spin and handling the actual records. It might be a very psychosomatic effect, but it's still a real one. EDIT: I completely forgot to mention the record in the photo. That's a 70s pressing of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. I played it in the wrong order (part II first) but it still sounded amazing. It's funny how the part everyone knows (the Exorcist bit) is a tiny segment in the beginning. Next week I'm replacing the 1200 with a television set. More on that later.

^ Nice. Enjoy your current eye-prostate agreement as long as possible.

XTC - Skylarking

For those who don't have trick-or-treat plans tomorrow, why not spend it with Paul Lynde, Betty White and KISS? Wikipedia: Christopher Muther of The Boston Globe, in a 2021 retrospective review, described the special as the most "fabulous train wreck of a holiday spectacular ever filmed," "a vision of horror" and a "phantasmagoric, polyester-clad, rhinestone-studded time capsule of bad jokes and disco medleys with a nonsensical storyline(.)" Lynde's singing, dancing and wardrobe and Vilanch's writing were singled out for their poor quality, but the review noted that Lynde's sincerity made the special likable camp and an enjoyable kind of bad instead of an unwatchable mess. A 2009 review at The Bootleg Files, a running column on Film Threat, described the special as "so bizarre and over-the-top in its acid-camp that it is almost impossible to believe anything of its kind could ever be shown on TV(.)" The review praised Lynde as the "queen from hell" and the program's "saving grace," with author Phil Hall expressing surprise that the special—aimed at family audiences—drew no complaints from Christian conservatives despite Lynde's thinly veiled homosexuality and references to Deep Throat, among other innuendo.

Well, they look amazing.

^^ added that back into my queue.... it has been too long - thx Edit -- Well a Thread Search says last year - but still.

The official Biosphere FB account shared this link recently. That eccentric looking fella standing on the rocks looks familiar.

The first time I heard Tubular bells was from an old VHS tape I bought in San Francisco as a kid, about the US space program called, The Space Movie. Many... many 😞... years later, Duggeh posted something about Tubular Bells prompting me to listen to the album for the first time. It's basically the soundtrack of the movie (documentary) and couldn't fit it more perfectly.

OK I want a 15" M3 Pro MacBook Air please. I guess that will come next year.

Yes, this is the biggest part of the announcement that excites Dusty. They should've called it Void Black or something. It's a trick. It's so off brand.

Not just black, Space Black!

Another Wes Anderson inspired breakfast photo.

Yesterday we were in a aerial festival here. It's the Patrulla águila.

That is so truly awful. On many levels.

If you're still in that vein, maybe this is right for you I enjoyed it a lot yesterday.

my orbi is getting glitchy too. replacement is $1500. likes to drop the dns once a week. i'm getting 1194 download and 24 upload. if i get the newest orbi, i can get up to about 1600 download with top xfinity tier. i don't need that yet, and then i would have to upgrade every switch in the house to 2gb or faster, and those are expensive too. also looks like i'm going to get a atsc 3.0 tuner very soon. there is a chicago station now that is broadcasting 4k cartoons. 3 stooges in 4k is da bomb.

The kits are taking off, and I haven’t even shown them my Christmas offerings. In the meantime, I got commercial rights to a ton of 3Dish images printing. They come out pretty great and will be even better when the Thunder Fiber laser I ordered for fun engravings shows up.

Very long term HCers (which most of y'all, TBH) might remember I own a misfit assortment of vintage McIntosh gear. How vintage? 1969. Older than me. For reasons not worth explaining, in 1999 I got two C-22 preamps and one MC-75 amplifier. Two stereo preamps, one monophonic amplifier. Not exactly useful. With that said, I've stubborn held on to them for 24 years and counting. Today I moved them, and the amp nearly killed me. Glamor photo of the boat anchor I took in 2009. One of the pair of C-22s after I had all of the above serviced, 2009. A bunch of the Mac kit and other crap, hanging out in a spare bedroom, 2013. I stuffed the Mac kit, plus a bunch of other electronics, into an upstairs closed before I exited the mainland this past January. It collected quite a bit of dust. The MC75, looking rather grubby. I had a very bad moment getting it down the stairs. I grabbed it from the closet floor, and attempted to stand up. I was not wearing my back brace (100% necessary when lifting things these days.) I could stand up while holding the Mac. My legs said "yeah, that's not happening." Getting old is a real MFer. Eventually I got myself and the amp upright, but at significant cost to my back. After the above photo was taken, I did locate my back brace (stable door and all.) I loaded two pieces of framed artwork into the Fit (not exactly a specious vehicle) and used the MC-75 as a, well, anchor to hold them in place. There it sits. Yes, I straightened the damn 12BH7 once I caught my breath. This is the Fit, mostly packed. In there (besides all the Mac kit) is a Dynaco monoblock (visible behind the lamp), 3 wood clamps, a Technics SL-1200 Mk II, a Symetrix 528E voice processor (direly in need of servicing), a California Labs tube DAC I got from ...one HCer or other (which also needs repair), a Parasound DAC (still running strong, 30 years later), a Tascam 122 Mk III (the greatest cassette deck in history, I will die on this hill) that ALSO needs repair, a shit ton of semi-valuable fabric items used as packing material, my tool chest, and a giant "Ricky Ricardo" style chandelier. My (sainted, octogenarian) mother thinks I'm nucking futs. She's not wrong. My back is killing me.