Young HiFi dot com

This college term has been a pretty tough one. I seriously didn’t expect this. Tests, projects, revisions and everything and even if there was a rather “free day”, I was so pumped-out after spending 6-8 hours on campus that I could only crash down on my trusty bed. Funny enough though, my term hasn’t ended entirely yet, I still have one exam ahead of me, scheduled on Tuesday. After that, it’s summer holiday time! And no, I’m not planning any long-time vacations, I’ll be spending most of my time at home with my family, which of course doesn’t mean that I won’t have any time to write on the blog. Expect the old “once or twice a week” posting routine to come back. Continue Reading »

As promised, it’s finally time that I start writing a new audio guide series. The previous one was about collecting vinyl records, now it’s time for the record players, i.e. turntables.

Every turntable consists of a base, a motor, a platter with a spindle, signal cables, a tonearm and a cartridge with a needle. They can also be full of additional useful mechanisms and control functions. There are also different methods of operating a turntable. The components of a turntable also require maintenance and sometimes even replacement. The goal behind this guide series is to showcase and explain all the different aspects of owning, using and keeping our turntable (and at the same time our vinyl records) in best shape.

In this part I’ll focus on explaining all the different types of turntables and turntable drives…
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Back when I wrote my previous post, I thought that the forum idea would come after the personal log one. After giving it a lot of thought, I decided that the forum is more important…
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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…
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Last time was a “bedtime” post, so this time it’ll be a “good morning” post! It’s kinda weird actually, it’s still dark outside and I rarely get out of bed at such an hour if I don’t have anything planned for the morning, even more so on a Saturday!

This week I finally got a pair of loudspeakers for my receiver. I’ve also done some cable huntin’ in Warsaw. Thought it would be easy in such a big city. I never thought that I’d start to despise the city street planning afterwards…
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My friend Robert Benson (he runs the www.collectingvinylrecords.com website), has sent me an interesting link yesterday.

It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:

It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.

Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.

Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…
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Now this news is suprising, funny & pretty extraordinary. Apparently, some serious HiFi enthusiasts praise the old 1st generation Sony Playstation gaming console as a high quality CD player !

The people who tried to experiment a little with the console say that the CD transports may not be worth much, but it turns out that Sony put a pretty high-class DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) in the launch-edition (the very first model) of the old Playstation…
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OK, this won’t exactly be a “part 2″ of my previous post, that’s why I call it a supplement. I simply thought about some things related to the subject, which I forgot to write about. I won’t lie to you, this will mostly be another set of vintage audio gear benefits… simply couldn’t think of any downsides which I haven’t already mentioned before. Let’s continue…
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So, you probably have heard of vintage wine, vintage salami and so forth. In the High Fidelity world exists also a “vintage” term, most commonly known as vintage HiFi. So, what does it mean ? Well, as the “vintage” word implies, it generally means older HiFi equipment, be it turntables, amplifiers and other audio gear and in some cases even old TV sets and VCR’s also count.

Vintage video ain’t exactly my region of interest (well maybe except LD’s, but as far as I know people don’t put the “vintage” tag on this technology yet), so I’ll mostly stick to the vintage audio part of old HiFi…
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I know for a fact that not many people acknowledge this fact, but for me and many others the answer is YES! Sound quality DOES in most cases also depend on the factor of where was the record manufactured. And by using the term “record” I don’t mean only LP’s and vinyl singles. It’s the same with CD’s, cassettes, LD’s (LD = LaserDisc) and probably also SACD’s and (nowadays pretty rare) pre-recorded tape reels. I don’t know if this is also a fact for video cassettes (either VHS, SVHS, Beta or other standards), DVD’s or the (supposedly deemed “dead”) DVD-A’s…
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