February 2025 – Tao and Zen

Friday, February 28th 2025…I never would have guessed…

So, I put in my Energy replacement (v.1989) tweeter yesterday and I noticed 2 things. First, the replacement tweeter (v.2020) that was in my other speaker has better sound and fidelity, second was it was louder so it’s more efficient! That’s why it sounds so much better. The downside to replacement tweeters (v.2020) is 2-fold, first is that the original tweeters (v.1989) have different connections, so the stock connectors won’t work, and second the wires are so short coming from the crossover that I have to be careful replacing the connectors, oh and did I mention that also there is no marked polarity on the old tweeter- wtf? Maybe I’ll ride with the new/old tweeter (v.1989) until it craps out, send the pair in for rebuild in the meantime. When it craps out, I will replace it with the new replacement (v.2020).

Oh, and either my left channel on my amp is failing, the cable is failing, or my receiver’s left channel is failing – ugh! It’s not the wiring – at least I know that. It’s always something.

-Rat

Thursday, February 27th 2025…Can’t wait!…

So, when I get home today, I am going to do 2 things – first, replace my Energy 22 Reference tweeter (I just got an extra one used via eBay) and second, pack up my other tweeters and get them ready to ship off to the guy who will recondition them. And while I’m doing that listen to some music. I need to treadmill it and sling some weights around – I have MEPS to get! (flipping MyZone). I am also doing a class centered on electronic circuits – it’s funny how much stuff I forgot. Also, it’s kind of interesting using this software called Tinkercad that can do some of the circuit analysis – it’s all virtual! It kind of floors me – yeah, I know that I should expect things like this, but I remember doing all this stuff by hand – meaning with pencil and paper. My original electronics teacher from COD was an engineer at Bell Labs and was on one of the teams that worked on a part the development of the integrated semiconductor. He was probably in his 70s at that time. He had some interesting tales.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 26th 2025… Well, I’ll be…..

Just when I thought I wasn’t going to find an M52, I find one – new, vintage 2012 and in a box nonetheless! Whoda thunk? I’m happily going through and burning my CDs to the Vault2i. I have a crap load. Now I’m beginning to wonder, do I have enough to contemplate getting rid of some Apple products and pick up Roon? Supposedly, you are supposed to have over 5k of songs in order for it to pay off. I’m kind of happy with BluOS and do I really need or want to stream to my iPhone? I’ve lived with being able to stream to any device within the confines of my house. Do I really want or need another 15$ per month service? Do you ever get rid of a subscription – I really need to think on this? Hmmm…

On a separate audio note, I subscribed to “Audioholics” which is an audio blog site.

-Rat

Monday, February 24th 2025…I’m bummin’…

I was thinking that it wouldn’t be so difficult to find a NAD M52 digital music vault for my M50 digital music player. Crap was I wrong. For the past 3 years, it seems you would trip over them (per hifishark history). This year, they all reside in Germany, and no one wants to ship to the US. Save that guy on Reverb who wants to charge what it would have costed new. BFD, he replaced a drive – so what (it’s a flipping RAID array). Maybe I’ll try reformatting my RAID array again and see if I can get it to connect. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Yesterday, I fired up the baby advents again – I forgot how nice they sound. Also, today I got a replacement tweeter for the Energy’s (below). Hopefully I won’t be sending this one for reconditioning any time soon. I have 2 pair now to send.

-Rat

Saturday, February 22nd 2025…I’m a burnin’ fool…

I am reburning all my CDs in my collection to the Vault2i, so I can catalog and stream them. I had burned them all to iTunes about 20 years ago, and just recently (within the last year or so) I burned them to an external drive that I had attached to my NAD M50. Needless to say, it got corrupted somehow, so now I am starting over again but on a newer platform. On another note, I found out that my tweeter that i ordered for the Klipsch’s is stuck at some post office distribut6ion center somewhere out near Fox Valley. Also, as it turns out, I have a lot of country music these days – amazing. They must be from my wife or my bro. The only country that I can remember having was Charlie Daniels Band and Garth Brooks. It will be interesting (either confirm or deny) when I start hitting (burning) my old CDs again. I am not going the country route without kicking and screaming.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 19th 2025…”It’s hump day! W00t, W00t!..”

I must say – I’m super excited that I finally found a guy to fix my Energy 22 tweeters! I have been looking for a couple of years. I was bummed that the audio guy closed up shop in Tinley Park right before COVID hit. He replaced a tweeter or 2 on the Energy’s. I’ll have to get them packaged up (the new guy does them by the pair) and ship them. For the price, he said that you’d get new voice coils, gaskets, and ferrofluid. How cool is that? Hopefully I’d be good for another 20 years (conservatively).

I brought my Bluesound Vault2i streamer upstairs and paired it with my Pioneer Elite SC-07 receiver and some simple (RF-15) Klipsch speakers. I’m still down a speaker (waiting on a replacement tweeter) and haven’t hooked up the sub yet. But at least I can listen to music now and it’s not muffled (no tweeters) while working and burning CDs. I think what I like about it is that it utilizes Bluesound for the metadata (data about the CDs) and doesn’t need Roon or some other subscription service. Although it also doesn’t serve music to anything outside your network, it can pretty much serve music to anything within your network. I am still waiting on a NAD M52 for my M50. I had an external hard drive serving as a content device, but it was short lived – about long enough to burn around 100 CD’s before it went FUBAR. Think of it as another streamer that Bluesound shares and can serve up music in the basement. Yeah, I can also serve it from the office, off the vault.

– Rat

Monday, February 17th, 2025 – UMB

What makes someone who they are? Do you mean besides your parents? Your friends, that’s who. My mom always said, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you what you’re made of…” At some point in your life, your friends really start to have an impact on you and what you like. You begin to share experiences, and those shared experiences begin to shape the person that you become and create the bonds of friendship. For me, one of those things that I liked to do when we (my small sphere of friends) were in Junior High school (what you may think of as middle school) was play board games. Not the crappy, run of the mill, board games. Ones that boys like – ones that make you have to think and aren’t common. Like Stratego or Risk (yeah, I know they are still somewhat common)! Then, when we hit 8th grade, we’d race home after school and bust out the board games and play until dinner time. Yeah, nerds in training. Now, Jack and I lived about a block away from each other, and my buddy Bob, lived a block further than me. Bob never raced home since I think he went to chess club after school and besides, his mom made him take the bus. But Jack and I always made a race out of getting home first and see who could call who first. Come freshman year in high school, we graduated to more difficult board games that made you use your imagination and creativity like Tactics-II, Fight in the Skies, and Third Reich. These games of course, were pre-computer because although around that same year, my buddy Jack got a TRS-80, and we started to learn the “BASIC” language and its rudimentary computer graphics commands and my interest in electronics and computers was born. I’ll talk about the other various games that I have in the next adventure…

-Mark

Thursday, February 13th 2025…Slow and steady wins the race…

So, I got the new tweeter in the Klipsch yesterday! Voila, treble…. kinda’ nice. I went and ordered a replacement tweeter for the other speaker, thinking that it’s the same problem. Probably a surge or excessive volume blew it out. The crossover looked pristine anyway. I also purchased some new tweeters for the Energy’s 22 Reference’s. They were notorious for blowing out (melting the voice coils) the tweeters after the ferrofluid liquid (used for cooling) dries up in the tweeter domes. They are still my favorite sounding speakers though, and while I do have a few speakers to compare them to. That said, I would love to own a pair of Klipsch Heresy or some Pioneer HFM-150’s. I was very close on an auction for a pair of 1500’s, but I wasn’t thinking about my bid and lost the auction :(.

I have a pair of Energy 22 Reference’s, Magnapan MG-IIIb’s, Walsh Ohm2’s, Klipsch RF-15’s paired with a Klipsch 12in Sub, a pair of Baby Advent’s, a pair of Bose 601’s, a bunch of Mirage Nano-Sat’s, a Mirage 10sub, and a wireless Klipsch 12in Sub.

I still miss my Pioneer Elite DSS 3’s – they served me faithfully through my college days and took a beating 😛

-Rat

Friday, February 7th 2025…and thus, Uncle Mark’s Basement (UMB) was born…

My brother gave me an interesting idea. Backstory… so we would have the family over for dinner around the holidays and my basement which has been a focal point due to me collecting interesting things and consequently, interests to other guys. My nephews would go downstairs and play darts, listen to music and fart around with the things that they would run across. It’s my man cave with all things that interest or are reflections of me. As a guy, it has taken years (a lifetime) to find some of this crap. My daughter calls me “the man of 1000 hobbies”. See my home page if you really want to know what interests me. The main floor of the house is a muted/toned down interpretation of me – lol. This idea/concept resides in every red-blooded male. While we may grow and become adults, we are still 10-year-olds in our heads.

Anyway, I will attach another site to this site via a subdomain. Where I can go through some of the things that you may find in my basement- that would speak to me, and consequently maybe interest the 10-year-old in you.

-Rat

Thursday, February 6th 2025…”Bring out your dead…”

For some reason, that was the first thing I thought of when I typed the date… vintage “Monte Python & The Holy Grail”. Any-hoo, an audio update is that while I rewired (bi-amp’d) the speakers – which didn’t work (still no sound from the tweeters). I purchased another tweeter and crossover off eBay. I will replace the tweeter first to see if the tweeter is fried. Or, if the tweeter is still not working, I will replace the crossover. We shall see how things go and if I still need a new replacement tweeter or crossover. I didn’t think the crossover was still necessary when bi-amping a speaker. Afterall, if the sounds are really coming from the same place (amplifier) and it amplifies the same streams of music wouldn’t it be at different frequencies? Wouldn’t it be easiest letting the preamp divide up the frequencies?

-Rat