tkam

Believe it or not, it's more common than you think and I know of several cases where it's done solely to meet local municipality requirements. Most people hear 'data center' and think of these super fancy expensive facilities. 95% of data centers do not match that and are built to the lowest possible cost. Building nice, enterprise grade facilities is very, very expensive. It could have been worse, OVH had an entire one of their data centers burn to the ground because they simply didn't have any fire suppression system: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-ovh-fire/millions-of-websites-offline-after-fire-at-french-cloud-services-firm-idUSKBN2B20NU

What The Hell Happened to Head-Case?!?!? TLDR version: The datacenter that the head-case server is located in sustained a power outage on April 4. When the backup generator kicked on it caught fire and that lead to the fire suppression system (a fucking water based one!) kicking on and causing water damage to equipment. The head-case server was in the 'more affected' area of the datacenter and as such was offline until early in the morning on April 24. For further details on the incident you can see here: https://webnx.com/outage-updates/ You may be wondering why during such a long time the site wasn't simply migrated elsewhere, this is a fair question and the answer is simple. As this is a hobby site the backup process hadn't been properly verified as working in quite a while and the latest verified backup was nearly a year old. Migrating the site and loading it from that last verified backup would have meant losing a years worth of content. This was not a valid option and until I could confirm that the drives in the server were dead I wasn't willing to restore that old of a backup. From what I can tell there has been no data loss but I don't currently have a full report as to what if any hardware needed replacing to get the server back online. Due to that lack of info, I don't trust the server and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some additional downtime due to hardware issues. The Future A fresh backup at the time of this post has been taken and moved off-site. Over the next week or so a new backup process will be put in place and verified. After that is done it's very likely that the site will be moved to a new hosting provider. Further details about any move will be provided at the proper time.

Fugazi - The Argument up next:

Happy Birthday Doug!

Just finished: Up Next:

I don't think it's a question of 'proper' sound stage, of course no headphones can do that. It's fair however within the context of headphones to critique the Utopia's (really any Focal for that matter) for having a smallish sound stage. It's just not a focus of the sound they are going for and that's perfectly fine. They excel in detail and dynamics and are fantastic headphones in those regards.

NIghtcap:

Keeping w/ the different for me theme tonight:

Something a little different for me tonight.....

I believe the Soekris dac1541 is discontinued now and has been replaced by the dac2541. I have the Denafrips Venus II and it's an amazing dac.

Happy Birthday Al!

It's pretty common for dealers to not have stock of something like replacement pads. If you don't want to deal w/ ordering directly from Senn I'd reach out to Justin and he should be able to do it for you.

RIP Marvin Hagler

I've been enjoying the Stevie Nicks playlist on Qobuz tonight.

Happy Birthday Nate!

Not a song, but just came across this album: Sampha - Process

If nothing else it'll be interesting to see what Sennheiser has coming out the next few years. Jude certainly hints at there being something coming out that he seems pretty excited about. An actual successor to the HD800/S would be a good place to start. If they were smart they'd also cut down on the line up, they have way too many products.

Happy Birthday!

RIP Daft Punk - they are splitting up: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/22/entertainment/daft-punk-split-intl-scli/index.html

Happy Birthday old man