New Toy Monday

This is something that is usually for Zachary, every month or so on a Monday he gets a new toy and we retire an old one. Today though (as well as Zachary getting one) my new Rotel RTC-850 Pre-Amp arrived. I spent a little bit of time wiring it into the system (to drive my Cygnett Unison iX-5 Speakers) but about 10 times that getting the Harmony Remote to play nice. It was a bit of a random purchase (somehow no one outbid me on ebay) but it does solve the problem of having to run the speakers for the headphone socket of the TV. The sound is noticably different (I wasn't the only one it the house to notice either). It's a great little edition (even if it is some vintage gear) to the setup and I've now pretty much exhausted every upgrade for the setup. Well until I swap out those Cygnett's for some Beolab 5s.

A post while everyone else is sleeping!

I don't get a lot of time for posting at the moment so I thought I'd take this small window while everyone else was sleeping to do a bit of a blog update.

First off to stereo things, after all the vinyl revival I picked up a small addition to my Tivoli setup and added the Tivoli Model Sub to the mix to add a little bit more to the bottom end.

From Stereo makeover

With the little one being much more mobile the whole system has moved up to the top of buffet away from harms reach. Considering it's really only two 3" drivers and one 5" driver the sound is amazingly impressive. I also picked up a Rotel Preamp to update the TV system and bypass the funky processing the TV does to the sound on the way to the speakers, it hasn't arrived yet so no pics for that yet.

Zachary is growing so fast it's a little hard to keep up. He's moved on from crawling to standing up in a matter of days. He's done it so quickly that his cot needs to be lowered.

We had a couple of big outtings on the weekend so I'll post some more photos for both events tonight.

I'm still trying to finish this post I started 2 days ago....

Everyone stayed up to watch the Socceroos match last night the Fire alarm saw to it that a certain someone didn't stay asleep for very long. At least he was enjoying the match.

And at least the boring segments of the match gave me enough time to put the cot base down.

There has been a sad slump in the amout of console gaming I've been doing lately. The new DSi hasn't even had much of an outing.

I know I had a lot of other things to put up here but they are all forgotten now....

A return to vinyl

Some very kind people gave me some new vinyl for my birthday back in April and it's really spured me on to listen to my records a bit more and expand my vinyl collection. The BacktoBlack records also have had a lot to do with it. Being able to buy an album on vinyl and have it on my ipod as well with a few clicks is just brilliant... JB had a bit of a sale this week so the collection has been growing....

I fear this is just the beginning.

A post on the move.

It's been a long time since i've written a post on my way to work. Some of that is due to the fact I walking there more often than getting the bus and some of it is because I've been using the Xperia (it annoyed me so much that i've upgraded back to the Nokia 6110 Nav I had).
The last week and a half has been a bit crazy. Last weekend we seemed to go from one social engagement to another finally ending with my Dad's 60th birthday party and a flight to Singapore. The party was great but went a bit longer than I thought which left me on a tight schedule to pack and get to the flight.
It was my first trip on singapore air and I was very impressed. Even after sleeping through most of the flight. The inflight entertainment is great even in economy with widescreen monitors and hours of on demand content.
I don't have much to say about Singapore itself it was a pretty whirlwind trip. Leaving sunday night at 11pm arriving at the hotel about 7am Monday conference for 2 days back at Singapore airport by 7pm and good Wednesday at 640am. The only sightseeing I managed was a trip to the Long Bar at Raffles for a Singapore Sling and a trip to an electronics tower for some bargaining. The real downside from the trip was the perforated eardrum and infected sinus which knocked me out for the rest of the week (although i seemed to be doing a lot of work, i think it just stopped of from seeing customers). Anyway that's enough for this trip, off to work I go

Sometimes Flying and I don't mix

I had a whirlwind trip to Singapore this week which was all going well until I had to fly home. I had a bit of a blocked sinus which came back to bite me and now I have an infected sinus and a perforated eardrum which is not much fun.

More Vinyl results in new toys

Since I moved my turntable from my normal stereo to the Tivoli I'd been borrowing a phono stage from Tom. Today while I was filling in time waiting for some Claritine to kick in (long story but let's just say the persian cat and I didn't get on) I popped into Video Pro. To my absolute suprised they'd actually started stocking some really nice gear including Cambridge Audio, B&W, Mission and even Rega. The thing that really amazed me was they had a Cambridge Audio Azur 540P Phono stage and even a DACMagic.

After a bit of haggling for the display unit I was the proud owner of my own phono stage. It hasn't had any setup time appart from seeing that it was the exact same dimensions as the Tivoli.

From What's in a Name?

I guess the Tivoli is next on the rewire list after I finally finished hooking the Jamo THX speakers back up.

An afternoon of Jazz

I was a bit inspired by Valavien's trip to the audio club I pulled out some of my old Jazz albums and fired up the Tivoli this afternoon.

For a while I started collecting the Jazz in Paris series, so I dusted a few of my favourites off. My number 1 disc in the set (so far) is 060 Henri Crolla - Notre Ami Django and the Model Two just sings.

It also got my inspiration up to rewire the AV kit with the new Earth Smart Power boards. It took a bit of messing around but I can now cut the power to everything based putting the projector or TV in standby. One of the biggest things that I've noticed is the reduction in heat with the Wii and AppleTV nolonger in there standby modes.

A new chair series

Yesterday I picked up some new chairs for our dining room. We found a steal of a buy for some Kartell Victoria Ghost Chairs. They are a swap out for the BluDot Real Good Chairs that have turned out to be disappointing. We've only had the Blu Dot chairs for 11 months but most of the legs have started bending. We'll scavenge parts from the remaining chairs to get study/desk chairs.

The New

The Old