Category Archives: About Me - Page 7

The Absurdity Of Auctions

Posted by on August 22, 2020 No comments

eBay.  There’s nothing else quite like it.  Which is probably for the best.  Although monopolies are bad, it would actually be worse for everyone if there were multiple auction sites.  It benefits both the buyers and sellers to have consolidation and concentration.

But anyway, I do like auctions, both as a buyer and seller.  As a seller, I prefer to use an auction in cases where a) I don’t really care about the item being sold.  That is, the trash is just as good as selling it.  And b) when I don’t have any idea of what it’s worth.  I’m fine with letting the market decide.

As a buyer, I like auctions because I very rarely lose at them.  And that is where the focus of the absurdity in the title is from.  There are people, still, who do not know how to effectively win an auction.  It’s not that hard.  The only thing that should stop you is someone who is willing to pay more.  And that is the only time I lose, and I am not a sore loser at all in those cases, because I would not pay what the winner paid.

Here’s stage one of bidder dumbness.  Making the first bid and that’s it.  Or making one of the first bids and that’s it.  These happen early in the listing’s lifetime.  The auctions I participate in are for collector-grade CDs, so that’s going to be my references.  Apologies to those who don’t really understand.  So you have a lot of 10 CDs that’s ending in 6 days and you can generally assume each CD would fetch at least $5 individually.  So you can predict the final price is going to be north of $50.  These people who bid $1, $3, $4.45, and nudge the price up are doing themselves no favors.  They are helping the seller, though.  If the number of bids (albeit tiny) gets high enough, the listing is considered hot or popular and gets a little extra promotion.  But the fact they expect they are going to win and never do any follow-up bids is just dumb.

In reality, auctions really are 6 days of waiting and 1 minute of real bidding.  Today I was wondering if there could be a format that could exploit that design.  Maybe I’ll write something up later.  But yeah, everything leading up to that last minute is just play.  The people that really want the item are going to be lurking and will jump in at the end.  And most, if they are smart (like me), will not have made their presence known through "Watching" the listing or making a previous bid.

The second stage of bidder dumbness is not using eBay’s Max bid feature.  Ideally, you should only make one bid on an auction.  You should know exactly how much you are willing to pay and stick to it.  Why people don’t use this confuses me.  Maybe they think there’s a way to make your bid jump to the max right away?  I’ve seen this in live auctions with absentee bids and it infuriates me.  "We have an absentee bid of $10.  Who’ll start the bidding at $11?"  But eBay doesn’t work that way.

Let me explain my technique in opposition to how the other bidders operated.  In this most recent case, I returned to the auction with 15 minutes to go, and the current bid was $60.  So I was correct about the price ending north of $50.  I didn’t visit the listing at all since I found it and I put the listing close time in Outlook to be reminded instead of using eBay’s "Watch" feature.  As an aside, what I do use the Watch feature for is to get a better deal on Buy It Now items.  If you Watch an item, eBay will sometimes send an email to the seller saying someone is watching the item and you should try to close the deal by offering them a special price.  If the seller is motivated, then I get an email saying I can buy the item at this new, lower price, which in most every case, I accept.

Back to the auction.  It’s at $60, 15 mins left, and has 20 bids.  I scan the bids and I see the dumb initial bids that can be ignored.  Looking at the last bidders, there are 2 active, interested bidders that I will have to compete with.  I can see that one started at $40 and was currently the leader at $60.  He had clearly set a Max bid and was automatically outbidding the other person as they increased their bids.  Now, was $60 his actual max bid or was it higher?  No way to tell yet.

As time ticked down, the price changed to $61.  A new bidder has joined in.  This exposed that the previous high bidder’s max was $60 and exposed another dumb bidder move – bidding in round, even numbers.  I’ll explain that when I bid, but time is still ticking.  It’s silent until 20 seconds left to go.  That’s when I make my move.

I place a bid for $86.80.  The most I’m willing to pay for this lot is $85, and the extra $1.80 protects me from anyone who tries to bid (or had a max bid) right at $85, a fairly round, even number.  I’ll explain that here.  First, the new bidder is shown to have a max bid of $65.  I beat him with my max bid.  I’m leading at $66.  The former high bidder jumps in and shows his ignorance.  He makes a bid, which is outbid by my max, then bids again and is outbid again.  The new bidder tries to get in a bid in the final second, but is outbid by my max.  I win the auction.

So let’s review those final seconds.  Both of those bidders were not committed to their max price.  They kept upping it as they went.  This probably really hurt them to lose this auction because they kept making sacrifices to their commitment.  But also from a practical standpoint, every bid they fail to make, they have to make a new bid.  That is valuable time they are losing.  We’re in the final 20 seconds of the auction.  There’s no time to make mistakes like that.  That is why I bid odd amounts.  If I automatically outbid someone by 80 cents, they lose the same amount of time as if I outbid them by $20.  It’s just one extra delay for a small amount of insurance.

And the guy who bid in the last second?  Again, he didn’t have a max bid in mind.  There’s no time to evaluate, "Am I willing to pay more" when you’re down to seconds.  So he bid a max of $65 earlier, then made his last pitch at $77.  That last bid was smart, as the current bid at the time was $74.  If my max had been at $75 (a round number) and I was outbid, I might have rebid by the minimum $1 increment, which he would have automatically outbid and made me lose time.  But it wasn’t to be.  I won the auction at $78, a price under my max of $85 and only $1 more than the other bidder.

So my strategy boils down to only a few points.  Stay quiet, bid late, bid once, bid with enough buffer to delay minimum upbidders, and use an odd bid amount to possibly get one extra delay in.  Go win some shit now.

I Love My Country

Posted by on August 11, 2020 No comments

Yeah, that title is a tough one right now.  But I suppose it’s true.  It’s not that I love the country right now, but I love what the country can be.  Things change, things get worse, but there are still bright spots to focus on.

Anyway, remember a while ago when it was really fashionable to protest something by supporting a business?  Well, that wasn’t really it, but remember when a bunch of people did a bunch of virtue signaling by making a particular business really profitable?  Weird?  Yeah it was.  I’m referring to the religious people spending tons of their money at Chick Fila because of something that Chick Fila was taking heat for.  I’ve forgotten all the details of it.

Who would’ve thought I would have a cause to do a similar thing?  My cause is the US Postal Service.  I did a little griping in my last post about them and while I am inconvenienced by the situation, I understand it’s not their fault directly and they’re being played for pawns.  And when that sort of injustice happens, you have to step in and help out.

Now, just as an aside, I have no problem with trying to make the USPS financially solvent.  That’s something for another discussion.  But, I do have a problem with what has been instituted recently.  And even completely setting aside the conspiracy nature of it all, for all of the supposed business acumen of the people in charge, there could not have been a worse time to implement these changes.

I mean, aside from impacting the next election, which they swear it won’t, but uh huh.  This is going to impact the Christmas shopping/shipping season.  Not to ignore the fact that it’s impacting small businesses right now.  And we know how much the government loves to promote how they love small businesses.  I haven’t heard anything yet about delayed social security checks or medical deliveries, but I suppose that will come soon enough.  No, I’m not a business guy, but even I can see this is a poor decision, especially for someone who just walks in to a job and says, "Here’s what we’re going to do".

First off, new kid on the block should have taken a couple of months to learn about the internal workings of the business and formulate a plan, even if the plan was to fuck everything up.  Then the best time to implement the plan would be at the beginning of the year.  First off, it’s a great timeline marker.  Second, you don’t fuck with the election or holidays. 

But, is there ever a good time to slow mail?  At the beginning of the year, there’s going to be arguments that the mail is being slowed and it will impact tax refund check deliveries.  This is a good opportunity to promote direct deposit of refund checks.  Not only is that faster and better, it will save the IRS money from having to print and mail checks.  But what about the unbanked?  They can’t get direct deposit.  Well, remember that story from a while ago about how the USPS was considering becoming a national bank?  Remember how it was going to raise money for the USPS?  Well, this seems like the perfect time to implement that.

Sorry for the major side story there.  The point of the post was how to support the USPS in the present, not some fantasy future.  The answer came from, of all places, Car and Driver.  Their suggestion, buy toy cars from their online gift shop.  Cars, of course.

This solution made a lot of sense to me.  You can’t just donate money to a business.  That’s weird.  You don’t want to buy up a shitload of stamps just to give them money either.  That’s weird, too.  But buying something from them, where they get the profit, that’s fair.  I get something, you get something.  Actually, they get a bit more, even.

So I went to their website and to their gift store and picked out a nice little car.

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It was only $6.  That’s not too bad.  I’ll chip in $6 to the cause.

Checking out, I kind of chuckled to myself about having the item shipped.  "Whenever it shows up…"  And it wasn’t lost on me that they would be shipping the product.  So hey, they do get some extra.  They get the shipping cost, too.  Then the website calculated the shipping cost for me.

$8.45 shipping on a $6 item.  Good god.  It’s like buying a $2 pen from a homebrew online shopping cart site.  But I do want the USPS to succeed, as much as God wants Chick Fila to succeed, so I made the purchase.  I have a little 2" Jeep coming in the mail sometime.

Godspeed, USPS.

Good To Go

Posted by on June 20, 2020 No comments

As fate would have it, my passport expires this year.  On one hand, who’s going anywhere right now?  On the other hand, who wants to get the fuck out of here right now?

What seems like forever ago, I applied for my passport renewal.  Forever in this case is 4 months ago, to the day.  That would be February, prior to the world hitting the pause button on life.  A month or so into the process, I checked up on the status.  It’s actually kind of nice that you can check the status of your passport application online.  I doubt that feature was around when I first ordered my passport.  As expected, the status was "In progress".

Another nice feature is that you can submit your email to be notified of changes in the status.  Again, things you would take for granted with modern businesses seem completely astonishing when applied to government agencies.  So I submitted an email and waited.  And I kept waiting.  I checked up in another month and the status had not changed, which is consistent with me not getting any emails about a status change.

One thing that was different about the status page when I revisited it was that they said they were on limited staff thanks to COVID and there would be a delay of "several months" in processing applications.  This is fine and not fine.  I’m not going anywhere, but things are getting weird, so what if I did need to go anywhere?  It’s never a good feeling to have an answer of "you can’t", even with your most remote imaginations.  You grow up surrounded with the promises that "you can do anything", until you have a moment where the answer is "no, you can’t" and that’s made even worse by "you could have, but not right now".  Anyway, enough of the dystopia for the moment…

Then about a week ago, I did get an email.  Wow!  It said my application was "in progress".  Oh.  In hindsight, this should have been a good sign, meaning my application has been taken off the pile and into someone’s hands, but I didn’t know this at the time.  I just thought it was more of the same.  I’d been waiting 4 months, what’s another 4?

Today I got another email.  My application status was "approved"!  Yes, finally!  The email stated that when I applied, I chose routine service, so the processing time would be 6-8 weeks.  What?!  But then it said I would get my book around 6/24/2020.  What?  This doesn’t make any sense, but whatever.  I’m getting my passport soon!

I got another email from USPS, with my soon-to-be-in-my-mailbox notifications.  It was already aware of my passport and said it would arrive Monday.  I click on the tracking link and no, it’s going to arrive today – exactly 4 months from the day I mailed the application.

The only regret I have while I was waiting for those months is that I didn’t choose to get both the passport card and book.  I only chose the book.  The reason I want both now is for having a backup.  Of course, being involved in computers, I’m always thinking of backups and redundancy.  The secure plan would be to take both the book and the card on vacation and only travel outside with the card.  Let’s say you’re at a cruise port and you get robbed.  Your wallet is taken with the passport card in it.  In this case, you wouldn’t be able to pass back through security to get to the ship, but you could send someone to get your passport book from your room and recover.

That small regret aside, I mentioned that things are getting weird around here.  It’s actually in the back of my head that depending on how things turn out later this year, my passport might actually be utilized.  It’s a remote chance. but I need the reassurance that if that time comes, "I can".

Stages Part 4.5

Posted by on June 18, 2020 No comments

In previous posts on this subject, I’d been advancing my home stereo towards some goal of having big, energizing, musical sound.  The "final" step in the process was buying tower speakers for the amplifier.  I’ve come up with a step in between.

I was skeptical of the claims made that putting your bookshelf speakers on stands would improve their sound dramatically.  I was proven wrong.  The change was highly noticeable.  So much so, that it made me wonder if I really needed tower speakers.  At the very least, it would delay their purchase for a while.  The improvements got better when I separated the speakers from the stands with silicone buttons and added the floor spikes to the stands.  Both are things that audio fetishists go crazy over.  Not as much the spikes, but to read about the "isolation" and "decoupling" of the speaker from the stand using (only) sorbothane balls or brass spikes gets a little weary.

And I thought I had taken things about as far as I could with what I had.  One of the improvements I got with my changes was improved bass.  I could hear the bass and slightly feel it, too.  And you know, once you get a taste of something good, you want more.  That was going to be taken care of by the tower speakers, when I bought them.  But I wasn’t ready to buy them yet, because I liked what I had.  Well, I guess I wanted to like what I had more, so I had a choice to make.

That choice was whether to add a subwoofer to the system for the extra bass.  I read a lot of articles.  I researched a lot of products.  I reviewed my budget.  In the end, it felt like a "fuck it" decision anyway, so yeah.  Subwoofer it is.

Here’s the catch.  Based on what I’ve been reading, having a subwoofer is just not enough.  A very well-written article by a generally polarizing individual explained the technical reasons for subwoofer use in the 60’s, 70’s, then 80’s and beyond.  And that article, along with other higher-end articles stated pretty simply: you need multiple subwoofers.  At a minimum, you need stereo subs, because although it’s popular to say sub=bass is mono, it really isn’t.  But as long as you’re entertaining the idea of multiple subwoofers, having four is not out of the question.

Now, four subwoofers was not and would not be my plan.  But, while researching products, the subwoofer model that I settled on (due to price) did not have stereo inputs.  That would mean that I would have to buy a cable to merge the left and right channels to go into the sub.  I’m not a fan of that idea; it just seems wrong.  So the evidence is stacking up for getting two subwoofers.  The budget doubles.  So which one (or which two)?

You can get subwoofers with speaker sizes of 8", 10", 12", 15", or even 18".  I start small, looking at 8".  I need two of them.  The more I look at them, the less I am convinced.  My bookshelf speakers already have 6" drivers, and the tower speakers I was looking at for the future have multiple 6" drivers.  Is an 8" really going to provide the depth I should have?  So, I look at the 10".  That’s about as far as I will go.  There’s no way I can reasonable justify having two 12" or larger subs in my little listening room.  I wouldn’t even have room for them.  I’m already looking at compact subs because of space concerns.  But, if the future means I have a larger room for my listening hobby, then the 10" subs will be able to handle that growth.  If I do go with the tower speakers in stage 5, the subs will complement them as well.

So the retail price difference between 8 and 10-inch is $229 vs $344 – $115 dollars to upgrade to the larger sub with the bigger amp.  Because of sale prices, the prices are now $126 and $189 -  a bigger discount on the bigger sub.  Now, the upgrade cost is $63.  Still, I need two.  And after looking back and forth and back and forth at numbers in both my web browser and in MS Money, I reached the "fuck it" point and bought two 10" subwoofers.

Fortunately, the subs do come with cables, but I did need to buy two splitter cables, to send the low-level output from my pre-amp to both my bookshelf speakers and the subs.  And what have I ended up with?

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Also new in this picture is a switched power strip mounted below the amplifier, which turns all four speakers on and off.  Since all the controls for the subs are on the bottom of the units, and I was getting concerned and also annoyed by pushing the power buttons on the speakers each day, a single switch should help everything.

Now, how does it sound?  I started my test with all knobs set to the minimum and put on Rush – Signals as my first test.  I went through a few tweaks, raising the crossover, raising the input level, lowering the crossover, and back and forth between the different possibilities.  The result was nice, but not earth-shattering, nor room-shaking.  I was underwhelmed.

Then I thought maybe my choice of album wasn’t that great, so I put on Edgar Meyer – Dreams Of Flight.  Holy shit.  Now I was shaking the walls, which was actually hilarious to see the cat repeatedly alerting on the sound of the pictures vibrating on the wall.  With that album, I did a few more tweaks and lowered the levels a little.

The next test was Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever.  Being produced by Jeff Lynne, certainly this album would have a lot of things happening everywhere in it.  And I wasn’t disappointed at all from the results.  My expectations were being tempered by reality.  Where I expected kick drums to hit me in the chest, that’s not how (decent) albums are mixed.  But what I wasn’t expecting was the loss of the shrillness.  When I would turn up the stereo before, I sort of had to grit my teeth and suffer the high end to get any power.  With the subs hooked up, It was like the high end was tamed.  I don’t want to say "lost", because I don’t think it sounded any duller, just less piercing.

The last test was Iron Maiden – Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.  I didn’t get the sound I expected, but the sound I got was excellent and very engaging.  My ears weren’t ringing at the end either, which was a blessing.  And it seemed like I was able to go louder than before, probably because I wasn’t getting ice picks in the eardrums.

I’m actually thinking there may not be a stage 5 now…

Stages Part 4

Posted by on May 23, 2020 No comments

In the previous post on this topic, I discussed the stereo buildup to the point where I had a good listening system.  The next transitional step would be to physically prepare it for the tower speakers, which will be stage 5.  I had made another post about the fortunate timing of my speaker stand purchase, which saved me around $50 or almost a third of what I had budgeted.  So the items have come in and are ready for implementation.

The first piece that came in was the stereo rack.  All black glass and chrome, it allowed each component a shelf of its own, but I still kept the amplifier and equalizer together.  Quality-wise, the stand is a big meh.  I didn’t pay a lot for it, so I can’t be disappointed, but I expect at some point, I’m going to be getting a better rack.

The next day, the speaker stands come in.  Heavy steel plates and posts, which are supposedly the key to keeping bass and separation.  No disappointment here.  We’ll have to see how they perform.

I disassembled my setup and moved the current table out of the way for the new pieces.  While behind the system, I did a little wire management for tidiness sake.  This is what it looked like.

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What did it sound like?  Well, I don’t want to get into all the audio snobbery adjectives, but I will say it sounded better.  Significantly better.  Of course, maybe it’s a placebo effect, I’m not going to rule that out, but I tested out two different CDs, with widely differing musical styles and both sounded more impressive to me than I remembered before.  So I will call it a success.

What’s stage 5 again?  Tower speakers.  Well, that can wait for some time now.  I’m going to have to get tired of this new sound, which could be a little while.

Collection Completion And Expansion

Posted by on May 18, 2020 No comments

I want to start off by mentioning that CDs are collectables.  There is one irrefutable reason I can make this claim.  That reason is the irrationality of the pricing of any particular CD.  While it shouldn’t be a surprise that any particular thing can be collectable and priced unreasonably high when it becomes scarce, sometimes, the outrageous prices set a particular expectation when researching and shopping.  In this way, I suspect there are a lot of dealers of collectables who will list items at outrageous prices to get people’s expectations set, then actually sell an item (maybe even as a different vendor) at a price less than that expectation, while still being somewhat unreasonable.

So anyway, this is about the last CD in a series that I need for absolute completion.  I’ve been satisfied with what I’ve had so far because those that I have are all of the retail versions out there.  The one I have been missing is a promo-only copy.  Not only a promo-only copy, which could include retail copies with a "Promo, not for resale" sticker or stamp on it, this is a promo-only version.  Obviously far less available and made in much lower quantity.  All this time, there has been one seller of this disc, offering it for $50 plus shipping.  The guy knows the scarcity.

Very recently, a new seller popped up, selling it for $30.  This guy knows, too.  And he’s looking to make a sale based on the one and only one person who has this CD in his wantlist (me).  And you know what, he almost had me.  I was getting ready to buy it when I decided to do a quick sanity check on eBay.  eBay has never had that CD before, but you never know.  And amazingly, it’s on there now.  And only $10.  It’s an immediate buy for me.  Sure, I just paid a decent amount for a used CD, but it’s been unavailable for years and has had an unflinching price of $50.  And now, my collection is absolutely complete.

Do I have other discs in my collection like that?  Yes I do.  Will I be fortunate enough to reap the benefits of scarcity when I sell?  Collectors don’t sell.  That was a trick question.

So, like I said, that completes the collection.  The IRS NoSpeak series is now complete.  The original CD collection that got me into being a completist was the MCA Master Series, which I’ve posted about many times.  Out of curiosity, I did a search to see how much of that series was available for sale on eBay right then.  That would give me an idea of the scarcity of my collection.

I would say it was maybe 50% available and of those, many were double-digit prices, so that’s actually pretty promising, from a value perspective.  But as I was browsing the results, I didn’t have any category filters set, so I was seeing CDs, cassettes, and vinyl.  But there was another product that was in the results – a promotional poster from the record label for the MCA Master Series. 

Well, now.  There’s a product you don’t see very often.  In fact, I’ve never seen one ever, nor heard of it existing.  And that would be understandable.  Posters are given to record stores and other record label contacts, are hung up until they fade or rip (or the label goes out of business), and are discarded.  No one keeps promo material like that.  But here was a surviving example.

I’ve posted before about my big artwork project of scanning, printing, framing, and hanging all of the MCA Master Series album covers as art in my house.  There should not be any doubt whatsoever that this poster must belong to my collection.  And so it became.  I don’t buy a lot of posters.  I don’t really know how much they go for.  But I got this poster for $16 shipped.  Considering the thing is over 30 years old… I don’t think that’s too bad.  It’s a decent size, also:  28" x 26".  I have a place picked out and expect I’m going to spend the big $$$ on a professional framing job.  Once stores open again, of course.

In all, this has been a spendy weekend.  But, a lot of stuff is changing in my music room.  Now stands for stereo speakers and components, a few new CDs are on the way, and a neat poster to hang in there.

A Long Time To Decide

Posted by on April 30, 2020 No comments

The quarantine finally got to me a couple of days ago and I had to go out for a drive to get some dinner at a place about 90 minutes away.  On that drive, I had a CD by The Good Rats and a song came on, Victory In Space.  This song is somewhat about NASA buying hookers for astronauts, but it’s also the germ of an idea I had for a NaNoWriMo novel.  The story idea – all I had – was about an intergalactic hooker in an erotic comedy genre.  That’s open to just about anything I could think up.  So when I heard that song come on, it got me thinking about the story again.

NaNoWriMo is still 6 months away, so I have plenty of time to commit and begin planning, or just let the idea waste away for another year.  Last night as I was falling asleep, I gave some consideration to the idea.  NaNo doesn’t care what format you write in, as long at it has a word count.  So I started thinking out of the box.  First I considered something like a series of blog entries.  There’s lots of ways I could present that.  First person, like a journal of the hooker; or third person, writing about her.  But blog entries always have this "newer is first" problem that makes reading a story difficult.

While thinking about the navigation aspect of such a story, it led me in a different direction.  Maybe I could write a choose-your-own-adventure story.  Hypertext and links are the perfect medium for presenting a story like that.  However,  a story like that could be a massive undertaking and while it’s literally unlimited in scope and plot, that’s also its downfall as many paths would be unfulfilling.

Considering those issues rekindled yet another memory of mine, where I would imagine I was a movie director.  My magnum opus would be one movie with at least 4 different plot lines in it and each had different endings based on the result of a climax in the second half.  The first half would reuse most of the scenes in each of the plots, but there would be some differences between them, like being shot from a different perspective or in a different place at the same time, showing extra info about the other potential plots.  The goal of the movie would be to cause a bunch of confusion at release time with different reviewers writing about the story and their reviews all conflict with each other as to what happened.

With that in mind, what if I did something similar with my adventure story where as you progress, you might end up in a different plotline depending on when you navigated to the next page?  But who would ever notice something like that?  You’d have to make it known at the beginning to watch out for it, which would just spoil the whole concept.

And all this is just thinking right now.  I’m not even sure I want to commit to another month of writing non-stop.  And if I did, it would be a planned story instead of my usual figure-it-out-as-you-fuck-it-all-up style. So that could slow me down anyway.  We’ll see…

Stages (Parts 1 – 3)

Posted by on April 2, 2020 No comments

Being cooped up in the house with the COVID stay-the-fuck-at-home orders has led me to express my shopping needs in other ways.  The subject at hand is my stereo system.  An earlier post reminded me that I’ve had this goal to recapture the stereo excitement of my youth for quite a few years now.  And that’s not to say progress hasn’t been made – it definitely has.

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It started with a cheap thrift store stereo, a tape deck, and headphones.  Then a CD player was added.  Then another CD player was added.  But still, very little listening was being done.  Then the milestone of having a dedicated room for listening was reached and I cobbled a new and different stereo system together using my powered studio monitors and a new preamplifier to handle inputs and volume.  A dedicated listening chair completed the arrangement.  This setup has worked very well for over a year.

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But I’ve been envisioning the real stereo experience, with a powerful amplifier and full-size speakers to go with it.  However, in these uncertain times, I don’t want to blow a wad of cash all at once, so I’ve planned out a phased approach to get there relatively quickly.

The primary hardware to complete the goal is really only two items: the amplifier and the speakers.  There’s also some ancillary bits as well, including furniture for the hardware.  I’ve kind of been stalled on progress because I didn’t want to buy the amp and the speakers all in one go, but I didn’t want to buy either one and just have it sit unused until I bought the other.  Then, I had a revelation, which came late, but probably at a better time.

If I buy an amplifier, it would be a waste until I bought my speakers, because my existing speakers have built in amplifiers without any way to bypass them.  My revelation made me realize that although the amplification in my speakers can’t be bypassed, the amplifier circuit in the right model of amplifier could be.  That would reduce the amplifier to only preamplifier functions, just like the preamplifier I currently own.

The search was then on for a receiver that had preamp outputs on it.  And the critical decision needed to be made: do I go vintage or modern?  In my original plan, I had current, modern products picked out and a pretty large budget for them.  And now, after experiencing a number of vintage CD players, I’m not sure I need anything more modern than them.  So vintage it is.  And in keeping with my nostalgia, I’m going to choose the Technics brand.  Justly or no, Technics has a bad reputation for their 80’s gear.  There are fans out there as well, but they get shut down often by "the ones who know better".

The model I picked was the SU-V98, which has the required preamp outputs and will also be suitable for my future speakers with 110 watts per channel.  That’s actually pretty respectable as many of the amps I had been looking at were 30-50.  As luck would have it, a listing just popped up on EBay selling one for $70.  Others were priced in the $150 range, so the purchase was made.  Step one complete.

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Now, the last step in the transition will be the purchase of the speakers.  I’ll be able to run everything right the way I have it now, simply substituting my preamp for this new Technics amplifier.  But, it’s not going to be a viable long-term option.  See, my stereo setup is on a long Ikea table.  Ikea stuff isn’t known for its durability and even with only a couple of CD players sitting in the middle of the span, I can see the slightest bit of sagging happening.  Adding a 15lb amp to the table isn’t going to make that any better.  So step two in the mid-term is going to be new furniture.

Replacing the Ikea table will require a new stereo rack and stands for the studio monitors.  In the final stage, the studio monitors and stands will be replaced with tower speakers.  Since the speaker stands are only temporary, I can skimp out on them, but I should get the stereo rack with the goal of having it be suitable for the future.  However, when shopping for speaker stands, there is a clear distinction between "good" and "good enough".  That difference is the size of the mounting plate on top.  In most all affordable stands, that plate is 5"x5".  My speakers are about 8"x10".  Balancing those heavy, expensive speakers on a tiny platform 32 inches off the ground doesn’t sound appealing to me, especially with cats in the house.

That alters my plans a little bit.  It essentially doubles the budget for the speaker stands.  But, to remain positive, the stand quality will be excellent and the speakers are already excellent, so there won’t be any unnatural need to rush to the last step and buy the tower speakers.  There will be time to enjoy and appreciate the configuration as it is. 

And that’s really the plan:  to enjoy the upgrade journey.  Sometimes when you get the end result all at once, you can’t appreciate al the elements involved, because you have no history of change to compare it to.  This is really the best way to grow a stereo system.  Will it ever end?  For a lot of people, it never does.  In fact, I do know one more step I can take after "the last step".  If I find my amplifier doesn’t sound as good as I think it could, the preamp outputs in the SU-V98 can be used for what they were designed for – running an external amplifier.

Album Artwork Project

Posted by on March 27, 2020 No comments

Today, I completed a project that has been an off and on effort for a very long time.  Finally, I have all of my ripped music with high-quality cover artwork.  My definition of high quality starts at 950px, but the ones that I have been augmenting myself are 1500px.  This began many years ago, judging by past blog posts, about 6 years ago.  My first thought was scanning ALL of my CDs.  That was overly ambitious to say the least.  Then the plan was to scan only the MCA Master Series so I could print them and hang them on the wall as art.  That was doable and was completed.  Then the plan became to only scan the covers which had no suitable online version.

And that is what took me years to complete, just because it became somewhat low priority.  If I had artwork at all, that’s pretty good.  But when I started using Plex regularly, I really noticed when my artwork was subpar.  The cover would be all fuzzy and pixelated on my large TV where I was viewing Plex.  So that sort of got me motivated.

The biggest problem was identifying which albums had poor album art.  And for that, I wrote a utility that would scan my Plex database and read all the covers and get their measurements, then create an export file that I could filter and sort to what I needed.  And over time, the list of low-res covers shrank, to the point where I am today.

And while I was creating these better quality scans, I continued to upload them to my Flickr page for anyone to download, but I doubt anyone really finds them there.  So along the way, I tried to find a more popular website where I could share my work.  Fanart.tv seemed to be promising, and I did get some covers approved there, but I ran into a problem with moderators that were either too picky, or didn’t recognize the original artwork and dismissed it as incorrect.  And as I had read in their usage guidelines, you are not to argue with a moderator, just do what they say.  I chose to leave, instead.  I’ve had such trouble finding a community that I can participate in.

Despite that trouble, I’m still pleased with myself.  I’m not one to need a lot of recognition or praise, I just want to contribute.

Failure May Be An Option

Posted by on March 11, 2020 No comments

There’s really a stigma against failure, especially in America.  It is expected that you keep trying until you succeed, regardless of the consequences of doing so.  While my tale of defeat is nothing of consequence, with little to really be lost from non-success, it kind of makes me sad for people who are not given the opportunity to fail.  And further, to even classify the result as failure when it really should not be.

A week or so ago, I replicated a piece of artwork I have in my house, using my CD collection instead of the cassette tapes that were used in the art.  The picture of the CDs turned out pretty good, I thought, and I was inspired to grow it to a massive scale.  Where my original picture had maybe a couple hundred CDs featured in it, I wanted to scale it up to most of my collection, somewhere on the order of 1500+ CDs.

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Over a series of nights, I spent my time placing the CDs in the pattern on the floor.  Keeping the pattern correct and also trying to make sure the CDs varied enough in their grouping was a little arduous.  But, I did persist and came up with a very large, organized mess of CDs.  Then the challenge became how to capture it.

I have a fair collection of photography equipment and so I was able to do some experimentation.  Experimentation was all I could do because I really had no idea how to accomplish the task.  The first attempt was to capture as much as possible in one picture.  I held the camera above the arrangement using a tripod and the self-timed shutter.  This kind of worked except when you would zoom in, you couldn’t read any of the CD spines.  So, in other words, it didn’t work at all.

The real solution would be to take multiple photos and stitch them together.  So, that was my next attempt.  I scanned one row of CDs and took a series of pictures, then took them to the computer to mate them up.  That proved to be very difficult because each picture had to be adjusted to compensate for rotation and zoom and also lighting.  This was proving to be a non-solution as well.  I had a massive number of CDs arranged on my floor and I was running out of ideas to photograph them.

Since the problem with my stitching/panorama concept was consistency, I came up with the idea that I could build a trolly-type of rig to suspend the camera over the arrangement.  This would keep the camera at a constant height and angle where each picture would be the same.  It was a pretty clever idea and made me feel pretty inventive.

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So I went to work assembling the rig and shot the first row of CDs.  I took the pictures to the computer and stitching them was actually pretty simple.  This was promising.  I evaluated the size of the arrangement and determined I would have nine rows of photos to stitch up.  This would take days, certainly.  But that’s ok, as long as I made progress.

I shot the second row of photos and brought them in for stitching.  Suddenly, things weren’t lining up anymore.  The first couple photos worked out, then all of a sudden, the scale didn’t fit any more.  Thinking I must’ve shifted the camera somewhere along the way, I re-shot the row of photos.  Again, at the same place, the photos failed to line up.  I wasn’t sure if it was the first row of photos that were somehow misaligned and causing the second row to not match up, or maybe it was just something that was intrinsic to the photos themselves.  I was noticing there was a slight fish-eye effect from the 35mm lens I was using, so the CDs on the periphery of the photos were skewed from the ones in the center.  As I would line up the images on the outer edges, they would be distorted from the ones trying to be matched in the center.

At this point, I had had my CD collection completely dismantled, on the floor, for a week.  This was causing me a little bit of stress.  I was unable to use my listening room for any listening because the floor was consumed with this arrangement.  I was adding new CDs to my collection, but they were in a separate stack, not integrated yet.  My patience was running low, and my prospects of success were low as well.

The next thing to attempt would be to use my 50mm lens on the camera, which wouldn’t fish-eye as much, but that would take much closer images of the CDs, unless I built the rig even higher up, which I wasn’t too keen to do.  So, I accepted failure and began the process of dismantling and reorganization.

And the point here, accepting failure, is the key.  "Failing", or "giving up", is not a bad thing.  There are plenty of other phrases that exist to make yourself feel better about the situation, like "cutting your losses", and something about "reward vs. effort".  those phrases get closer to the reality of the situation.  Right now, this is not something I want to tackle.  It was a good idea, and one I may revisit in the future with an improved vision and more commitment, but I want a return to stability.  There would be no way I could clear my mind enough to consider any means of improvement with everything all out like that.

In the next iteration, if there is one, I would definitely test out some techniques on smaller arrangements, instead of committing fully to a full collection dissection.  That was days of effort to dismantle and it will be days to reassemble, too.  So until next time, fail on.

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