Sunday, June 15, 2025

isn't a military parade just a big air show? don't americans love their air shows?

here i am! rock me like a hurricane!

they played that one, right?

i'm not very invested in this, one way or another. is it supposed to scare china? is that it?

whatever.
today, i woke up a little earlier and tried again with the four way system, this time with the windows open. that is real life and both introduces noises and reduces reflections. i also pulled the celestions a little bit closer to me and a little away from the wall.

with the initial four-way setup, the ssris record sounded better with the celestions closer, which is because it turned down the yamahas. i decided to move to a different record, so i pulled a similarly self-produced record by another canadian rock band from the same time period; the record is ball by a band called spiral beach, which no longer exists. i saw spiral beach play a handful of times in ottawa at venues like zaphod's and at festivals like the blues and folk fest. i picked this up used in a small independently run record shop in a doomed mall in the west end of ottawa proper, called carlingwood, that i do not believe exists anymore either (the guy might even be dead). this record is a little more compressed than the ssri record and it was immediately obvious.

running the spiral beach record through the four-way sounded ok, but now the yamahas sounded a little tinny and loudspeakery due to the higher compression, which makes sense. this record sounds better through just the celestions, although i will try again with an 8 ohm speaker as a secondary. i'm probably looking at pioneer cs-x5s for cheap, which are full range surround sound speakers and i think should work well in a reverse surround setup like i'm designing here. the reverse surround is really introducing some nearfield studio monitors right in front of me, while i the bulk of the sound continues to come from behind me, which i'm used to in my bedroom. of course, if i lie down in my bed and put my head on my pillow, it's not reversed anymore, it'd normal surround; it's only reversed when i sit up in bed and am typing. i'll have to test. if not, i have some cheap low watt full range decent quality utility speakers.

i then switched back to the ssris record with just the celestions in their new speaker placement and while i am noticing the absence of the boost in midrange volume from the missing yamahas, it is demonstrating the limitation of the source - which is good.

i'm going to test a few more records with this celestion setup this afternoon and then test the nad with the yamahas tonight.
on saturday, i again woke up around noon. i had a guy that wanted to sell me a sewing machine desk for $20 and drop it off for me. great; done. this desk will fit perfectly in the closet, and i will be able to move the chair back and forth between the sewing machine and the writing desk. i took a shower, i ate the rest of the apples (they were getting a little sweet), which was i think 6, and then ate an entire package of apple sauce just to be ridiculous about it, along with a small amount of jam left in the container. i wanted to make some coffee and sit down and test the speakers while doing this write up, but i had difficulty getting going.

i pulled an ssri record out of a box called effeminate godzilla-sized wind chimes and tried it through the nad, expecting it to give it a bit of a work out. this is the first and last record that the nad failed on, as it was a pretty spectacular fail. this is a largely self-produced record by a couple of kids from bc in the late 00s that has the unusual quality of citing cardiacs as an influence. i picked it up after seeing them play at the old zaphod's beeblebrox in downtown ottawa. if you know cardiacs, you know why i picked this as a speaker workout test; the record has prominent synths, guitars, bass and drums that fill out the spectrum, contains detailed arrangements and production and features multi-part harmonies and complex counterpoint melodies through much of it. i know my jvc could make this record sound good through these celestions (the kefs are better). the nad made it sound like it was put through a compressor-limiter that squished the sound right to death, and this is the kind of record to use to demonstrate this kind of difference, because it wasn't engineered for loudness, and isn't designed for radio and wasn't crushed to death in a pro studio. you should be able to hear the edges on the square-waves on the bass sequencer that opens the record, for example. the nad just completely killed it.

here is the trick to this - most people would prefer the sound of the nad and think it sounds "more correct", including most expensive professional engineers and producers, because they've been trained to listen to over compressed music. and they're wrong. the nad actually sounds terrible.

so, i quickly dismantled that and set up the yamaha cr-320 instead, which quickly returned the record to a more open, less compressed sound - which is how it was actually mastered and engineered and what it actually sounds like. you might disagree, you might prefer the nad, but the mathematical reality is that you're wrong.

i then set up the 6 ohm, 50 watt yamaha ns-e55s, which is what i had connected to this yamaha cr-320 in the last apartment, as secondary speakers and tried the ssri record through a few placements and a few combinations. 

- all four speakers on top of the shelf
- just the yamahas
- just the celestions
- with the celestions down a little, and the yamahas in the shelf
- just the celestions, to the side of the shelves.

the yamahas are full range speakers and their lower resistance makes them louder than the celestions when wired through the same amp in parallel, despite being 50 watts and the celestions being 110 watts. i didn't think to stop to do the math, but i shouldn't have done this at all, as this old amp shouldn't be running at lower than 4 ohms ever and 1/8 + 1/6 ~ 3.5. i don't think any damage has been done, and it could probably handle that in real life at low volume for quite a while before exploding, but i don't want to do that again. this amp is very old - it's older than i am. i can run these 6 ohm speakers by themselves, but not in parallel with 8 ohm speakers, pretty much ever.

what i learned is that i wouldn't want to do that anyways as there's not a way for me to turn the yamahas down and i don't want them to overpower the celestions or the kefs or whatever else they're connected in parallel to. these are secondary speakers, not primary speakers.

however, i also decided that the celestions do sound better when paired with a full range speaker that has more defined mids, letting the celestions work more for their mid lows. i just want to turn them down a little and can't.

before the end of the night, then, i had decided the yamahas would not be being used as a part of any audio system, but would be used for the kitchen tv system. i would need to buy some new 8 ohm full range satellite speakers in the 30-50w range and experiment a little. 

i made some ad-hoc nachos early in the morning with a box of crackers i got from the food bank as a sub for the doritos, and without the salsa at all, as i will be having the salsa separate in a large bowl this afternoon. i was in bed slightly earlier. 
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.
my thursday meal was after i woke up, which was afternoonish, and was the salad i skipped out on, initially. i did not alter this except to add some dill and drop the soy.

- 50 grams of kale stalks (chopped like celery)
- a handful of fresh dill, chopped
- one large (not that large) diced fresh tomato
- one huge red pepper
- one smallish beet
- one large carrot
- 50 g of broccoli
- one avocado
- 2 large or 4 small cloves of garlic, chopped
- one tbsp of cumin
- one tbsp of nutritional yeast
- one tbsp of paprika
- one tbsp of hemp seeds
- one tbsp of sunflower seeds
- one tbsp of oregano
- one tbsp of thyme
- one tbsp of basil
- one tbsp of cayenne
- ten slices of medium cheese
- frank's
- ceasar 
- pepper

- with a glass of fortified, sugar-free soy milk (i use natura).

i did some cleaning when i woke up but, as mentioned, spent the night exfoliating. around 22:00, i stopped to make some bacon to clear the stench out. there are again drug addicts in the building, but i think this management company is going to be more assertive in stopping them. the bacon was a part of my "catchup meal", which was my friday meal, and which consisted of the parts of the previous meals i skipped over, mostly in two parts.

1) 100 g of broccoli with cheese sauce. the cheese sauce was old cheddar, an unusually large amount of nutritional yeast (skipped from the eggs - good source of b-12), frank's and hemp seeds. these items had all been skipped in may.
2) 2 leftover fried eggs on onion rye with bacon, yeast and medium cheddar cheese. again, these items had been skipped over.

a little later on, i had a big bag of $1.50 dill pickle chips and four guava, then spent the morning researching cheap furniture options on kijiji before falling asleeep early in the morning. my general schedule in the summer is i sleep in the morning because it's a little cooler and wake up when it warms up. there's two salsa bowls (now three) still connected to the catchup, and two (now one) glasses of grapefruit-orange. i also have my coffee maker working again. so, thursday was spent alternating between washing myself, washing the apartment, typing, googling and eating.