Young HiFi dot com

It seems that as of late I can’t write anything at normal hours, either I write a post early in the morning or late at night. It’s kinda crazy. Anyway, things are starting to heat-up at college (got a test on linear algebra on Monday and discrete mathematics on Wednesday), so I’ll be pretty much occupied with hitting the books on the weekend, so I can’t promise anything about my posting frequency in the nearest future. That being said, let’s get down to tonight’s business…

I promised that I’ll write a few words about my new speakers so here it goes:

The JBL L-100T’s hooked up with the Sansui 9090DB sound great, especially if you’re into rock and other genres that feed on raw power and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean that they’re your straight and simple, off the block “ALL-BASS/NO-CLASS” heavy loudspeakers that techno music enthusiasts praise so much these days. The high and midrange are also top-notch, especially the titanium tweeter (that’s what the T stands for in the name). They also seem to have a lot of detail in them. I say that they “seem” to have it, because as for the sound resolution and detail, I can only estimate as of now, because my only source of sound is my computer’s soundcard (an old SoundBlaster Live! Platinum), connected with a not-so-expensive 10 meter long cable… and this really can’t qualify as a quality music source, at least not in my opinion. So I decided that until I get my hands on a decent CD player or turntable hooked up with the system, I’ll leave my review as it is now and come back to it later. I simply feel that my speaker-receiver combo gives as much as it can, but it still can’t spread out it’s wings, because of the source.

On a side note: Actually, some people (especially Hi-Fi newcomers) make the mistake of putting most of their money in the amplifier and speaker sections of their system and leave the rest of the money pile for the source-devices. It kinda should be the other way around, because even the greatest loudspeakers and amps will sound like crap if they’re fed with sound coming from a crappy source. So my word of advice is: the source device should be at least on par with the other components of your Hi-Fi system, quality wise.

Another advice: If you plan to use your SoundBlaster Live! or Audigy series soundcard as a music source and connect it to your amplifier, use the rear-speaker channel output, because it’s of higher quality than the front-speaker one. I know it sounds weird, but the signal really has much less noise in it. If I remember right, it all goes down to the cards having a separate DAC for the front and rear speaker outputs, and Creative (the makers of the SB cards) paired a higher quality one with the rear output. If you don’t believe me, try for yourself. The difference is quite perceivable and you don’t need any high class equipment to hear it.

As for the other part of this post’s title, I’ve got a slight spending dilemma on my hands. I can’t decide on what should I save up money for now. I’ve got 2 ideas: a CD player or photo camera. The CD player would go as the new main source of music in my system, as mentioned above. The photo camera would mostly be for the benefit of the blog, because I (and probably you too) seriously think that my website is really in need of some photos, especially my guide posts. I’ve often written that this lack of “visual attachments” really starts to limit me and the post content’s quality in general.

Luckily, one of my roommates also had a similar problem. He started thinking about either investing in a camera or in new speakers for his computer. You could say that I slightly “poked him” in the right direction, by saying that now he already has a pair of speakers, but he doesn’t have anything to take photos with, so he decided for the camera. He spent a few days on the net and reading photography magazines, while being on the hunt for a good camera that would be available within his budget. He settled on a Samsung (I don’t know the model) and ordered it from the net (ironically enough, the seller is located in my home town). My plan is that when he gets it, I’ll try it out and then if I’ll like it, I’ll buy the same model. I really don’t want to start learning loads of stuff about photography as I’ve learned about audio stuff through trial and error and internet researching methods. I simply want something not too costly ($200 max.) that will make good photos which I can share with other people (like you for example, my faithful readers).

That’s all for now. From the blog’s stats I see that there are more and more readers subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, which is a good thing, as now I know that there are some folks out there who probably think that my site has some potential and is worthy of coming back to, which really is a high praise for me personally. As for the blog’s top content, my vinyl collecting guides take the top 4 places with almost no competition, so I guess that I’ll finally have to start thinking about a new guide series… Goodnight y’all .

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