friday, saturday and sunday have been a continuation of this. i was up in the afternoon on friday and took a shower in the evening, then had round two of the salad for my saturday meal, this time with some onion bread (just a few pieces left). i've decided to build my bedroom first, and work outwards from there, which means getting furniture and speaker systems in place. how i organize the furniture depends a lot on how i organize the speakers.

i initially tried to drive my 110 watt celestion dittons (one of which has a broken tweeter that i haven't fixed yet but will fix very soon one way or another) with a nad 3020e i've had boxed for years. i got a bit of a shock from this nad years ago, you see, which i realize now is probably because i tried to overdrive it, and it scared me. when my dad gave me this nad around 2008ish, it was supposed to be as a pa for my pod because it was a clean path. i had asked him to keep an eye out at garage sales for very clean stereo amps with unobstructed signal paths that wouldn't fuck up the pod (he had a good knowledge of vintage stereo equipment and could (and often did) pick the gem amplifier out of the pile of rubble left to a widow that was trying to pay for the funeral, which is something that is maybe tinged with some irony today), and this is what he found for me: a mint nad 3020e for cheap (the cleanest amp he knew) and some celestion dittons, also cheap, which i later learned is because a tweeter was blown in one of them. he suggested the celestions because they're "guitar amp speakers", which has some truth to it - celestion is the company that made the speakers used in marshall equipment. thanks, dad.

this didn't quite work, though. the nad is only 20 w, so i'd have to amplify it. the point was that i didn't want to amp an amp sim because then it's not an amp sim, it's an amp. if i put a sim of a roland cube or a vox ac30 through a 250 w fender bass amp (i have one of those), i'm listening to two amps and defeating the point. you need to amp the pod clean. a lot of people didn't understand that, and it's frankly challenging and expensive to build a system that can do this right, which is why line 6 doesn't exist anymore. the pod is great for recording direct in, but it is almost impossible to reproduce live because you have to amp the amp sim.

i have made use of the celestions, but i haven't needed this third amp, which is only 20 watts. only 20 watts? a lot of people swear that's enough. if you're in a sound proof basement and using brand new speakers at 10 watts max because your wife is yelling at you to keep it down, maybe it is. however, the nad can't drive my celestions and can't drive my kefs - not at the volumes i listen to, not in the spaces i'm listening to them in and not with the music i listen to. it can't do dynamics. it can't do spectrums. it's not good for classical music, for electronic music or for jazz. it has no headroom. it would do 70s butt rock at car radio volumes relatively well. it might be good for some 50 watt yamahas i have, which are 6 ohm and seem very loud, in comparison to regular speakers. it might be good as a tv amp; i'm hoping my chromebook sounds good through i. i need to test it.

i nonetheless tried it out. test one was connecting the nad to the celestions.

the cure's head on the door sounded pretty good at low volume. an outtake record by skinny puppy / lpd side project the tear garden was ok but sounded a little flat. a hey rosetta album called plan your escape sounded very compressed and dolbied, but that was probably the master. this is the kind of album that sounds good through a nad; this setup would sound good if you're mostly or solely listening to over compressed and over dolbied masters at low volumes. sure. however, i didn't think this was what i wanted.

i also wanted to set up a pair of satellite speakers in here (maybe the yamahas and maybe something else) and the nad can't do that because it only has one speaker out. well, it's 20 watts. i'd have to get a splitter on a 20 watt amp. eh.

over night, i did some research on kijiji and ebay for used satellite speakers and found a few things, but haven't made any decisions yet. i'm going to want to pull the celestions down off the shelves in this room because it has more space in it. in the previous space, i was going to get 90% reflections, anyways, so it didn't matter. in this space, the speakers can work better so i should take them down to ear level, which is directed right at my pillow. i'm then going to want to take the smaller speakers and place them facing me from the typing computer desk in front of the bed. this is a "backwards surround" setup. i'm looking at some full range 30, 40 and 50 watt speakers by companies like denon, yamaha, sony and pioneer that were initially intended as surround speakers, or for midrange type ghetto blasters.

eventually, i fell asleep, a little after the sun came up.