short-lived ecstasy
UPDATE Luckily, it wasn’t so short-lived after all, the ecstacy continues!
Well… what to say? I just brought the STAX earspeakers back…
But, I can hear you think… Was there a problem? And if there was, haven’t you taken a look at it yourself first?
Well, as a matter of fact I did… Thereby probably losing all credit and such, but still… I guess I’m a warranty-voider by default and this is just a bad day…
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Even when I think of it now, I don’t think I did the wrong thing. Here’s the whole story in short.
Shortly after I got them, I got the feeling the left channel was different from the right. On a lower volume or sort of that it needed to be pumped up. Anyway, first I thought, maybe it’s in my cable or in my amplifier. Well, after quite some hours of trying everything (and some days in between too) I could only draw one conclusion, it’s in the box + earspeakers themselves. Sometimes I needed to nudge the balance a little to the left to be in harmony again, some other times I needed to crank it all the way to the left to get the feeling I had the same amount of pressure from both sides…
So, I thought about going back with these… but I’ve been looking around on the internet and there’s nowhere that parts for this model can be found anywhere. So my idea was, even if they would refund me, would I be happy? Euhm, no, I don’t think so, because I wanted these headphones to be good. So, what else can it be? Well, there’s a little box in between and that’s (sort of) standard electronics, so let’s have a look at that. And I did. Well, even though I didn’t see an obvious error, the soldering could use some resoldering… and then I thought, well, how many hours can this shop put into this, from a service point-of-view? Well, not many, I can tell you. They probably hardly made any money on these, if they even did, so how much time do you want to spend on it? And then I thought, well… I don’t have that problem and I started soldering… and soldering and soldering… I spent no less than 12 hours yesterday on my kitchentable (including breaks and such of course) to resolder each and every contact…
If the fault would’ve been in the soldering, I would’ve gotten it right… but, the fault wasn’t there. So… then I knew I was probably f**ked… I mean, if I hadn’t opened it in the first place, I could’ve brought it back on its 3 month guarantee from the shop (but then, they would be f**ked) Of course, I could’ve stepped into the shop and act like I didn’t know a thing, but that’s not me…
So, I just went back and told the complete story… and left the earspeakers there for now. They looked as much despaired as myself… (and a little bewildered too, I don’t think they ever had a customer who told them with a straight face that he resoldered the equipment he just bought…). I mean, this now probably is an all losers game. The earspeakers stopped functioning like they should. It’s in the electrostatic piece on the left side and there’s nowhere parts for these can be found… *sigh*
to get this straight, the earspeakers now function like they did and that’s still in a borked kind of way (it got worse through time). My soldering didn’t make it better, but also didn’t make it worse. I didn’t break a thing myself actually
Well, they told me that they’d discuss the whole situation. I told them I check back on them later this week. If there’s no solution to this, I don’t want the earspeakers back either. I will probably decide the universe didn’t want me to have these supadupa earspeakers…
to be continued?
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Well, I guess these are the most detailed pics of a STAX SR-5 gold online… when this is over, I can post more… For whoever wants to see them…
Krause lost her... well... *ahem* *^_^*
My favourite rockstar and also a friend, Susanne aka Krause, gave a breathtaking show last week in the local club for the international pop underground, Vera, overhere in Groningen.
if you want to know what’s inside that little package, read on ^_^
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This show has been her official presentation to graduate from the Academy for Pop Culture and yesterday she got the news she made it! So even though she already was a true artist by all means (imho *^_^*), she now officially is one too I guess *^_^*
some pics I made with my phone:
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
my complete set can be found here
more (and better!) pics over on the Vera-website, here
Anyway, people familiar with this site already know her of course. Susanne is the girl I made these Mac Visualizers for (actually, we made them together and I also got them back, in one piece! *^_^*)
direct link to video
...but somehow this whole visualization-thing grew into six 50” plasma displays overnight! ^_^ (and I had nothing to do with it! honest!)
the stage with three massive 50” plasma displays on either side:
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
Her most famous track, without a doubt, is “I lost my tampon” and some time ago it was downloadable from Platex Records but at this moment, that site seems down somehow. But you can download it now from this very site (with her approval of course! ^_^)
Krause – I lost my tampon (MP3, 7.1MB, 3 minutes 5 seconds 320kbps)
There’s not that much to be found in English on her or her music, but here’s an excerpt from a review:
‘I Lost My Tampon’ is a heavy pounding electroclash track whose rhythm and title invoke associations of Cookiemonster’s ‘I Lost my Cookie in the disco’.
link to this review
And as an added bonus, here you can see an excerpt from her show, where she performs this very song:
direct link to video
So now, this ‘package’ and its contents make sense too, right? ^_^
...and if you really want to know what this looked like, click here
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Now she’s graduated, I can only wish her the best of luck. I truly hope (and believe) she’s got it all to make it into a big star *^_^*. If you, as a reader, want to make sure you have the hippest, most unknown song on your iPod, next time you’re on some party and you want to impress, well, whoever it is you want to impress with ‘your taste in things’, make sure you download this track! *^_^*
links:
www.myspace.com/krausefiktion
Krause weet een strakke interdisciplinaire show neer te zetten (review in dutch)
Krause is een dame om in de gaten te houden. (another review in dutch)
related:
Krause at Mediamatic Museumn8 (a photoset on flickr)
Clash ’06 (a photoset on flickr)
Unterwegs mit Krause (a photoset on flickr)
Rockstar Computer Support (a photoset on flickr)
Krause in Vera (a photoset on flickr)
ecstatic about electrostatic earspeakers
click to enlarge
UPDATE it turned out to be a very short-lived ecstasy...
UPDATE 2 although the ecstacy was allowed to continue anyway!
In my hometown, we’ve got a couple middle to high end audio shops and regularly I check upon their second hand gear, which they all put online quite nicely (although I don’t mind making a city-tour on my bike and go past all these shops). I don’t buy something that often (ey! I’m Dutch! ^_^) and I also don’t want to be this free rider, so I’m really glad that these shops now all have an up-to-date inventory of their second hand gear online.
Last friday I was checking up on the inventory of these shops and found a ‘Stax SR 5 & SRD 6’, without a picture. Now I knew that these were headphones, I mean, I know Stax, from quite some years ago. When I attended high school, one of my schoolmates at home had a Stax. Well, not he but his dad had a Stax and back then I was already intrigued by them and on an afternoon, we sneakingly turned on his dads expensive audio-gear, put in a Metallica album (^_^) and played it on these marvelous headphones. Oh man! I never heard anything like it! But in all these years in between, I totally forgot about it too.
Anyway, so I went googling for these specific Stax headphones (or earspeakers as they themselves call them), because even though I knew the brand, I wasn’t into specific models or anything, but these turned out to be quite good! (pdf-link to the original SR-5N)
I decided I would take a look the next day (last saturday) and when they would be in an acceptable state, I would be eager to buy them. (I always already try to make up my mind *before* I talk to a salesman or even walk into a shop ^_^)
So here I found myself, in an audio shop which is way beyond my budget on all the other gear (but a man has to have some dreams, right? ^_^)
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Little did I know that the Stax they had, turned out to be a SR-5 gold edition (original german link)! I mean, I read about the gold edition the night before but I didn’t expect and/or hope that this would be a gold edition. I mean, this shop normally is extremely accurate in their descriptions and next to that, the asking price didn’t seem to steep compared to eBay and such for a normal SR-5 so why would this be a gold edition?
Oh man, the second I saw that it was a gold edition I was already sold. When I told the man in the shop I came for the Stax he said something like “oh nice, I will hook it up for you!” while my thought was more like “well, I can take it with me right away!” but I liked the service and spent some time in a dedicated listening room (I love these kind of shops!). He excused himself for not having a Motörhead CD (...) (he was judging my musical taste by the shirt I was wearing *^_^*).
While he was hooking up the headphones to some nice audio gear, he told that they got the headphones back (after twenty odd years probably) from a guy who, back then, bought a whole set and lately he bought a whole new set and traded in everything he bought before, including these headphones. We both took a good look at it and we both agreed, this guy has never ever spent a minute on these… they’re twenty years old but unused! Even though I was already sold, I was feeling luckier with the minute. Where on earth can you find something like this? So, of course, after spending some time listening (first to Kraftwerk and later on to *ahem* Dire Straits), I bought them. (weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)
Back home I had to find a way of connecting these to my stereo and this needs some explaining I guess. You need to connect these headphones to speaker terminals, not a headphone jack. My stereo’s got two NAD 916 amplifiers which actually are six amplifiers in two boxes (for instance, there’s six powersupplies in them too). On the backside of each of these amplifiers (pdf-link to the manual) you can choose to bridge each amplifier into a monophonic 90 watt amplifier (which I did to five of them, for the five speakers in my livingroom) or have one such a block act as a stereo 30 watt amplifier. The latter seemed ideal for being my amplifier only for these headphones. This way I also could extend the distance by having speakercable run from the amplifier to a table next to where I normally sit, and so I did! Only thing is, I happen to have CAT5 speakercable all around and how could I use something else for these headphones? *^_^*
It turned out I couldn’t and so I spent quite some hours last evening/night in making the cables and integrate the headphones into my setup.
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And so, after quite some hours I had the setup I wanted. These marvelous earspeakers are now on the table next to me and I can listen to everything I normally run through my stereo. My surround processor (one similar to this one) has a nice two-channel mode where it can decode multi channel (AC3 for instance) back to two channels, so it really doesn’t matter what kind of material I want to listen to, I can get it on my headphones like it should.
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And then, after all these hours spent… I needed to take it to the test! (even though I knew what to expect ^_^ )
On the left I try to stay cool while listening, but on the right is more like the way I spent last night into the early morning listening to these headphones. Oh my! it’s hard to describe, but it’s detailed beyond belief without being fatiguing and the same goes for the comfort of the headphones, I now wore them for hours on end and it never irritated me whatsoever. I did occasionally put them off, but only to reassure myself my speakers weren’t playing at the same time on high volume, simply because I couldn’t believe the richness coming out of these! And luckily it also seemed that normal grade material (read: MP3s) instead of, for instance, SACD (which I also don’t have) sound brilliant on these headphones. Of course, on these you can hear a difference and you can hear the flaws but it’s not like watching a highly compressed divx on a high definition television or beamer (which is utterly crap). These headphones are accurate enough to spot any flaw in your source, but it’s not irritating in any way. Luckily, because I didn’t feel like having only a couple of CDs which sound right on these headphones.
To me, it’s like these headphones are able to bring the emotion in the music up front, no matter how deeply it is hidden or covered up because of a bad recording/bad source whatever. I’m truly totally amazed on what these headphones do to me while I’m listening to tracks I’ve known for years (or so I thought), really, I am.
To be totally honest, I even went more like this *^_^*
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So, do I need to write up a verdict? I guess I can’t say anything more than what Stereoplay already wrote back in 1985...
“Zum Thema SR5 Gold bleibt nur zu sagen: Glücklich, wer xxx Mark für einen neuen Kopfhörer ausgeben kann. Er bekommt Absolute Spitzenklasse”
(“About SR5 gold remains to say only: Lucky is he, who can spend an x amount of money on a new headphone. He gets absolute top class”)
And I guess I feel even more lucky (and fortunate) because I found this SR-5 gold at a second hand price twenty years later, in a totally immaculate condition and as far as I can tell, these earspeakers haven’t lost any of their magic in these twenty years.
click to enlarge
Now if you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna put in another CD. *^_^*
the iNoPhone trilogy
Well, with only a couple of days to go … to what actually?
Anyway, this weekend, I finished my collection of iNoPhones! Don’t ask why, I guess I felt like knocking myself out ^_^
click to go to the projectpage
iNoPhone. A guided tour. (the project page)
DIY trackback
MAKE:blog
NOTCOT
Core77
Wired
added some statistics
Well, with all the changes to this site last weekend, some subtle, some a little less subtle, I hope we (that’s me and you, the visitor) can get this site into next gear.
One of the more subtle changes is that I removed the links in the navigation and replaced it with stats
Since I don’t do ads, why make a fuzz about the statistics, right? ^_^
click to go to the stats
next to that:
statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. ~Aaron Levenstein
Anyway, here they are!
Mind you, for this page, I installed some extra stats-packages and the data just starts to roll in (before you start thinking “oh my, I thought this site did better than that!”)
It’s not much yet, maybe I’ll add more later. (a serverload applet would be nice)
a new logo!
After more than a year since the last makeover, I thought it was time to refresh things over here.
The last couple of months I have been making up my mind where to take this. As you could read earlier on, that means no more ads and to make that decision even more pure, I also removed all the unnecessary logos and such. So, no more blogroll-buttons (which wasn’t a blogroll, but well…), no technorati-counter and feedburner-feed-counter anymore, I mean, I’m passed the 500 links in technorati (which makes this an A-list blog) and past the 1000 subscriptions in feedburner. That’s more than I ever expected, so those are no goals anymore, time to move on! ^_^
To add to all this, I asked a friend of mine, Iris to design a new logo for me, which is quite a daunting task I guess! Well, after I’ve seen her work and the way she works, I’m very glad I left that to her, I’m no logo-designer, that’s for sure! *^_^*
Anyway, here it is!
You could see it as a little man with wings. Then, when you try to look at it in three dimensions, it’s an open ball with balls rolling to your side. That stands for open source, my way of giving information and my belief all tech should be open. Then you could also look at the wings as eyes, which is a nice follow-up since the previous logo was a skull (and if you really want an explanation, then they’re Bates’ eyes (watching the premises) and not mine!) ^_~ As a coincedence (this was not meant by the designer) there’s the number eight which on it’s own means a whole lot of good things. And as a last one (also not meant), you could see it as a Pac Man, eating its way up… ^_^
...and if you’re not sure if you see this page how it should be, this is how it looks overhere. If you get things mixed up, hit reload (or shift-reload, ctrl-reload or such) to see if it changes. If somehow your favicon won’t change, click this, hit reload and go back. Same goes for all the bullets, if they’re still pink, click this, hit reload and go back.
We still have issues with the green… somehow it’s still not 100% right, but I’ll change that along the way… *sigh* designing, what a lovely job! ^_^
Please tell me what you think, any feedback is appreciated!
MacPaint
MacPaint as some of us know it… (I’m getting old! ^_^)
click to enlarge
Quite regularly, I get questions on what kind of paint I’ve used on Macs and iPods but somehow I had been a little reluctant in answering those. Thing is, I’m a lousy painter! Really, I am… ^_^
It all once started when I modded this Mac SE and I needed something like seven layers of paint to get it right (and to be honest, right after, I wasn’t quite satisfied with the result). Now, after four years of use, I’m quite happy with it, and satisfied with how it all turned out, but the paintjob could’ve been done better, I’m sure.
After that, I’ve been painting my iBook and later on, I also painted another one pink. Now those two are something else. I really can’t recommend the paint I chose for that. In both projects at one point or another, stuff went horribly wrong (which has been the reason I hardly showed the pink iBook on this page) and personally I wouldn’t do something like this again with this fluorescent paint.
on the left, my own iBook, on the right, Susanne / Krause‘s pink iBook
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And then, I even have been painting white Macs …
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white! ^_^
And even though I’m pleased with that result, I can’t really recommend that either… ^_~
So, after quite some practice(...), is there anything I can advise? Well, somehow I thought, after all of the cans of paint I’ve been buying the last couple of years, I got lucky with one of them… It’s called ‘Rally Black’ and I’ve been using it on several gear (not only Macs) and it’s totally foolproof. No matter how you spray, it dries up perfectly matte black.
iPod mini in Rally Black
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...but I was still reluctant to give this as advice and/or an answer to all the Mac Paint questions, simply because I didn’t know/think anyone could find the exact same lucky can I found, also because I bought it from some discount store which didn’t sell this can after I bought it
...but, yesterday I’ve been paying a visit to another discount store in my town and what did I find? Two extra cans from another brand called ‘Rallye Lack’ (instead of Rally Black). Weeeeeell, that’s close enough eh? ^_^
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So here’s your answer if you’re not a painter, just like me and still like to paint a Mac (or something else of course)... paint it black and use Rallye Lack! ^_^
(I’m not in any way endorsed or connected to the manufacturer of this paint!)
*^_^*
IM ON UR COUCH...
...even though I’m busy sorting everything out, especially on the legal side of things about the Slurpr, I guess Bates has made up her mind… *^_^*
click to enlarge
BTW, the publicity around the Slurpr really has taken off… for instance, check this…
that’s a national newspaper (also free!) overhere…
(not to mention Norwegian and Spanish newspapers, although that’s on their sites, I don’t think that was in print)
try to get a hold of this… little more than a week ago, this showed up with no results...
geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez… *^_^*
related:
Can Has Cheezburger Flickr Pool
I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
one year uptime and then some...
Well… the last couple of days were quite hectic! I left Groningen last thursday for Amsterdam. Friday I attended The Next Web, at a certain point I even got on stage myself! Unfortunately, I don’t have pics of myself up on stage with the Slurpr (if someone has, please let me know), even worse, I don’t know where I left the memory stick of my camera with all the pics from the conference at this moment. I changed memory sticks somewhere down the road in the last couple of days. Hopefully it turns up somewhere and only then I’ll be able to complete my set on flickr, until then I only got some pics from my phone, and I give you:
The Slurpr Management team!
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
(that’s Boris (on the right) and myself ^_^ ) (I never knew he had such a lovely sister btw *^_^*)
Yesterday I had a stag day/night of one of my best friends, so I guess you can guess how I feel at the moment… *^_~*
And now I’m collecting energy for the coming week…
Oh, before I forget. My webserver just went past one year uptime! (yes, all these Digg frontpages, Slashdot and a whole lot more were handled on a single boot!)
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I managed to collect almost identical hardware for geektechnique server number two, so in a short while I guess this will be the highest powered personal blog in the world, don’t you think? ^_^
A-list?!
Well, with all this madness going on, first the iPods and now the Slurpr...
this one site reckons me/this site as an A-list blog(ger)...
With 500 links in the last 180 days, Technorati places geektechnique.org in the very high authority group.
That makes you a A-List Blogger!
Well, I’m gonna enjoy that for as long as it lasts! *^_~*
