Photos Your Room and Computer

your speakers are frankly intimidating... more of a headphone guy myself due to not having a room with decent acustics of my own but DAMM thats a nice setup. Although vinal I couldn't live with... something that always sounds worse than the last time you played it :S ... I would never play it!

 

So long as you look after it properly it doesn't deteriorate. Of course, that makes it a lot more high maintenance than CDs or MP3s, but you get a much nicer sound as a reward. I tend to just go for CDs for albums then try and buy singles on vinyl when I can- haven't actually got a turntable yet though .

<A88>

 

Here's my temporary setup.
I've actually hijacked my GF's kitchen table as its the only space in the flat.
Easy to see why I sold my Stacker case (and its contents) and the 24" monitor.

Still, could be worse.
At least I'm close to the fridge...


Laptop from my sig and 3x external HDDs.
1x1TB, 1x500GB and 1x100GB.

 

i like the way your mousemat is bigger than your computer

 

Oooooh how i hate toshiba laptops..../end rant....
...moving on....

 

is there also an added bonus having the wine opener on the edge of the desk?

 

Heh, this is my 2nd one and I love them.
I'm guessing you've had some bad experiences?

There sure is, but the table is so flimsy that if I use it, there's a good chance my laptop will land on the floor.

lol, never noticed that actually!

 

As A88 says, vinyl wear is so minimal with modern arms and cartridges. It does not sound worse everytime. I would have to play an album a few hundred times before i could even hear a difference.
As i have ranted on many times in the past too, vinyl > cd sound quality wise. No limited frequency extremes, no sampling rate, no compression, etc etc.

 

yeah airchie. Was working with an A122 or 135 or some POS with a celeron m and toshiba didn't support downgrading from vista to xp. Very few drivers. just annoying, i know dell and hp support are better. only reason really. Don't like the way they do their keyboards either.

 

I'm probably gonna taste the pain driver-wise when I try to install linux on this one...

 

I don't know about that... the linux community probably has a few of these out there and guys just like you wanted to run linux on 'em so they coded drivers. Not so much can be said for Building D- Toshiba Driver development....*peers in conference room... spies badminton tournament as they wait for next release of windows..../re-end rant

 

Fear my variously sized screens!!

Stuff in the picture: Left hand monitor is a 17" connected via KVM to two machines which I use for testing one of our client-server products. Centre monitor is a 19" wide connected to the thinkpad on the right which is my dev machine (I develop in IBM Rational Web Developer and MS Visual Studio 2005 amongst other things). Robbie the robot from Forbidden Planet in between the 19" and the laptop. The bit of paper stuck to the 19" is this comic. MX Rev mouse and cheap no-name usb keyboard control all three screens via Synergy.

And yes, the different DPIs of the three different screens DO screw with my eyes sometimes, but as the laptop screen is really only used for email or the occasional bit of console output/vs2005 autos, and my attention doesn't have to switch between the left and centre screens that often, it's not too bad.

Oh yeah, it's my work desk, obviously.

 

Im very obsesive an listen to the same track for upto a week at a time untill I have figured out everything in it... therfore it's not suitible for me.

I don't understand the perception vinal is better as it cannot produce as high or low frequancys as a CD... 20Hz is imposible to cut into a vinal disk as it would require massive groves even with RIAA equalisation. 20Khz is also imposible as the arm cannot track such high frequancies due to its inherent inertia. Cd's can contain frequancies from 20Hz to 20Khz and so have a greater frequancy range than vinal.

I agree that the sample rate should be higher on CD's as there is very little headroom between 1/2 sample frequancy and the maximum frequancy but with carefull design of filters it's sufficiant and with modern digital signals processing filters the sample rate should be sufficaint.

As for compresion the vinal is more compresed (has less dynamic range) due to the maximum slew rate of the arm and the size of the cuts in the disc and has a much low signal to noise ratio. If you mean the quantised nature of Cd's I contest that the differance between each level is so small that some other peice of equpment like your amp will have a greater level of noise than 1/2 the differance between each step and therfore it dosen't actualy matter that it's quantised!

I'm not vinal hater it's just you posted aload of bolocks that people who are on HI-fi forums sprout and seriously they are very very stupid people in the most part.

 

Well where do i start...
Firstly it is VINYL.
Secondly i listen to music as it was made in albums. Therefore i listen to albums. Not tracks obsessivly.
As for frequency limits i think you will find if you actually bothered to try, that vinyl can produce far more than CD. I have test lps with frequency sweeps so you could come around and listen to this magical mythical things that my vinyl could not produce but do!!! For example the resonant frequency of my arm is 7Hz, this was found using the Hifi News test disc with a sweep of 25-5Hz. Which according to yourself is not possible and i obviously made it up.

I do not post ********. I listen and respond. I have taken my vinyl system to the point where from cartridge to phono stage (excluding amps, speakers etc) are around £4K.
I could not find a CD player to reproduce what i hear for less then 6K. That is the practical truth. I have heard and tried. I don't just theorise like yourself.

 

Don't listen to him. This will sound just as good as any vinyl system could, and has an LCD display.

<A88>

 

Bit expensive isn't it?
Does it have a bass boost button?

 

Yes

 

Ok, quite a bit of crap in this room and most of it is hidden. I have the dell xps running the main 24" dell monitor and the 21.1" dell to the left with an 8800 installed in it. The far right monitor is controlled by the 2nd computer (custom) in the cabinet to the right with the glass on it and 3 TB of storage. They are networked together with a program called maxivista that allows them to function as one computer (ie mouse and keyboard move across all 3 monitors).

I'm using the Das Keyboard II and a logitech mx mouse. I have the backup minikeyboard and mouse for the second monitor when I'm going full screen with the main one and need to switch over.

I'm using a killer speaker setup by altec lansing with a second cheap logitech set for the 2nd computer.

All my printers/scanner is contained in the left glass cabinet. And if you look close you can see my new hacked ipone to the right of the monitors.

I also have a pretty insane collection of lego's lol. Actually the walls that you dont see are covered in cabinets full of the large starwars lego's.

 

I've been pestering my flatmate for weeks to do this properly with his fancy tripod thing, but in the end, I did it with my shockingly bad mobile phone camera panorama thingymabobajig.


Clicky to enlarge (duh!)

I (flatmate's girlfriend) did have it nice and tidy (sterilised) but my flatmate has gone away for the night and it quickly returned to squalor. I don't know how it happens. I blame the smelly mess pixies!

 

Simple.The difference in quality is like when someone puts a bit of salted butter (rather than that cheap crap) into your scrambled eggs without you knowing. You don't quite know why it tastes better, but it does.