Jen and I bought ourselves a new hi-fi on Friday. I won't bore you with the details, but, suffice to say, it is totally awesome. So awesome, in fact, that the chap who sold it to us won't let us install it ourselves. He insists on coming to the house to fit it in person. We would do it wrong, apparently. Very Spinal. The kit is now on order and should be here in about a week. I am ridiculously excited.
Get this, though: our new hi-fi doesn't include a CD player. CDs are very Twentieth Century, apparently. We did intend to buy a CD player, because our current one was bought in 1987 and physically shudders when you open the drawer. But when we heard a comparison between the (very high quality) CD player we hoped to buy, and the new-fangled Digital Stream (DS) player we also hoped to buy, the DS player won hands down. We realised that we would never listen to a CD player again, so why buy one? Then, the wiley chap in the hi-fi shop pointed out that, if we combined the money we had budgeted for the CD and DS players, we could get an even better DS player, which would sound an order of magnitude better again. Which it did. So we did.
Then there was the not-so-small matter of the speakers and cables, and a RAID Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive to hold all of our soon-to-be-digitised music. For any of my geeky colleagues who happen to be reading this, the answer to the question you will no doubt be asking me on Monday is 6TB. That's right, six terabitesbytes. No doubt you'll be able to get that much on a data stick by a week next Tuesday, but, at the moment, it sounds like an awful lot. The chap in the shop reckoned about 5,000 uncompressed CDs worth. That should do us for a while.
Oh, and if any ladies happen to be reading this, in answer to the question you will no doubt be asking, the new hi-fi is black. None more black.
Like I said, I am very excited.
By way of a mini celebration, therefore, here is John Fogery singing Born on the Bayou:
(If I were you, I'd expect a few more music-related posts on Gruts in the near future.)
Your geeky colleagues may point out it is terabytes for storage or terabits for data transfer : terabites could be death by midges? I have been out-geeked by the whole package. Well Done !
Oh, how embarrassing! I've only been working it ITfor 23 years!
You've got your tickets for Wembley already, right?
No, but I did record the Radio 2 special yesterday.
It all 'sounds' lovely (which DS player did they sting you for?), but have you had a hearing check-up lately? It's just about your age that deafness starts to set in and it could all be a waste of money. I have so many CDs and several great ways of playing them but they all sound less than I remember since I started to lose my hearing. I'm sure everybody just said AHHHH!, but of course I missed it.....BTW what are 'cloth ears'?
My wife runs the IT dept for Aviva in Southampton & she didn't understand a word of it. Maybe it's an anorak thing?
ps. If John Fogerty was Welsh, he might sing 'Born on the boyo!'
Or if he was Swedish, Bjorn on the Bayou...
Nite Owl, if John Fogerty was Welsh, he would probably sing 'Born Rhonda Boyo'.
Does this mean you're ditching your 78's ?
Ditched my 78s in '78. Never looked back.
By another unspooky coincidence I was just doing you a compilation CD, which includes Creedence Clearwater's astonishingly brilliant version of 'I heard it through the grapevine'.And I guess you still can play (or digitise) itvia the computer, since your advanced technologyappears unable to do that sort of thing. I once had a hi-fi that could play everything from 78's to 33's to 45's to tapes to CD's. The joy ofmulti-music-media diversityseems to befast disappearingunder the dictatorial whim of techo-companies keen to forcethe entire music-listening public to not onlyupgrade their hardware, but throw away theirrecord/tape/CD collections, and start again, or find a way of making digi-conversions (for which most people have neither the time nor inclination). I wouldn't mind iffolkcould still also buy a decent tape machine or replacement styluses and even 78 needles ontheir high street.
And analogue sound still craps on digital, and always will. (AsHitchen would probably be first to confirm)
I remember Viz doing a thing on CDs when they were still a novelty and explaining that digital storage was better because it was twice as loud as the original music. It makes you think.
I got over that problem by buying an amp that went up to 20. Now all my stuff is twice as loud.
20 is impressive - when 11 was considered loud by Spinal Tap.Did "Hello Cleveland..." on arrival at the Gare du Nord bu Eurostar; it fell flat as a crepe...
Zimscribe, believe it or not, so did I.
Not sure how high my new amp goes, but it's definitely at least 60. HOLY CRAP!!
Man, I remember back in the dark ages I was on the board of directors of the state supercomputer center and we were just beginning to consider the prospect of a one-terabyte storage system -- we called the "terrible Tera." Now you've got 6 of 'em at home!
Have you got it yet Richard? I'm waiting to hear just how awesome it is. I've just got a new speaker system for my PC which cost more than the PC itself (shhh... don't tell the missus), but from what you say it sounds like I've a long way to go.
It arrived yesterday. Didn't you hear it? Away from home this evening - will post about it soon.