postjack

thanks all! had a wonderful weekend. nice dinner out with melody on Saturday, watched the fight with a bunch of friends that night. for the actual birthday melody asked what i wanted and i said i wanted to setup my new receiver (yamaha 2060) and play civ vi all day. i did and it was awesome.

Just a lil' bit of an upgrade there.

All good questions. The HOA is $500/month, which startled me at first, but after crunching the numbers it's actually reasonable. The HOA covers water, termite policy, and of course maintenance of the grounds and the building's exterior/roof. After calculating what I'm currently paying for water, termite policy, lawncare, and homeowners insurance (the portion that covers the domicile, not personal possessions), the extra per month is about $108. I view that $108 as the money I'd be putting aside anyway for eventual repairs on the home's exterior. The HOA board I am curious about. I intend to ask my dad about it this weekend. Not sure what if any exposure he's had to them. But if we do end up living there I fully intend to be active on the board if possible. I'm also curious if I could get my hands on their financial statements to check the financial health of the HOA, see what there cash reserves are, that kind of stuff. I imagine it's fine given the part of town it's in and how long these townhouses have been there, but I'd like to know for sure.

Welcome @Cattler! Welcome to head-case. Hope everything is chill with you. Do you meditate regularly? I think its pretty cool to do so. I look forward to it now. For a fun and easy tex-mex meal, cut up some chicken breast into cubes and saute in the pan with salt and pepper. They'll cook quick. Then cut up an avocado or two, add salsa and tortilla chips of your choice and VOILA, you have a tasty and reasonably healthy dinner. Works great for leftovers except for avocados which turn into a goddamn horror show 20 minutes after you cut them open. What is the deal with that? @Cattler lets get to work on an avocado that stays good for longer. Thanks for your time.

Good point about the firewalls. And my dad did say we could come over and stay for a weekend when they are out of town just to see how we liked it. Very unique opportunity. I could then bring the speakers over and try them out, having said that they are those big ass SVS Ultra Towers, and I'd need to bring my big ass XPA-2 power amp, so it'd be a hassle, but worth it to determine if we'd bother neighbors at adequate listening volumes. I did ask my parents if they ever get any noise complaints or if their neighbors ever make too much noise and he said no. Regarding neighbors, all the tenants are senior citizens. They seem perfectly lovely when I go over there to pick up mail or packages or walk my parents dog. It's a small facility, just ten townhouses, so the parking is adequate. You make an excellent point about the A/C, I hadn't considered that, and certainly a factor in the South. I'll have to ask my dad, but I'm pretty sure the upstairs and downstairs have separate temperature control (he asked me to "go upstairs and turn down the temperature" once when I was driving by and they weren't home). But this is a good thing to check out. The third floor is just a storage closet and an unfinished room which they use as an exercise room, we'd use it for the same. And yeah this is such an ideal situation in terms of access to information, since I can go over there whenever I want and get honest answers from my parents about it. We trust each other, so no need for a realtor. The reasons they want out are pretty much not applicable to our situation. They don't want to walk up and down stairs, the lack of windows on the sides of the townhouse drives my mom crazy, and my mom feels like she doesn't have privacy (talking to neighbors when coming and going etc.) Thanks guys for giving me stuff to think and inquire about.

Good Morning Head Case! Figured I'd tap into the collective experience of all you fine people to see if anyone has any thoughts on this. Melody and I are considering selling our 2 bedroom/1 bathroom 1200 sq. ft. house and purchasing a 2 bedroom/2.5 bathroom 2500 sq. ft. townhouse. Here are the facts: -My parents are currently living in this townhouse, and are looking to move, so I'd be buying it from them. I have no idea how much they'd sell it for, we haven't gotten that far, but I know we'd be able to get it for well under market, which is really why we are even considering it. Added bonus is buying from my Dad will be easy. -It's in a great part of Mobile, arguably the best. We could not afford a home in this area under normal circumstances. Super safe, lots of sidewalks, walkable/bikable to many places. It's close to grocery stores, rec centers, parks, all the stuff we care about. -Plenty of room for us, and we don't anticipate having any kids. -I've crunched the numbers on the monthly HOA fee, and it's reasonable. I think the expenses it covers makes it worth it, although I know the fee will likely increase in the future. -Not having to keep up a yard or the home's exterior is a big plus. -The most obvious downside is we have a massively powerful home theater with a subwoofer that shakes the whole goddamn house. We love it and I know if we are in a townhouse listening at high volumes/high bass can no longer happen. Anyway I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience living in a townhouse? Good points/bad points? Thanks.

My vinyl purchases have slowed down considerably, I buy maybe several records a year. Some inexpensive, but mostly I buy high dollar / rare records. I say buy, but I've also been trading in large quantities of records I no longer listen to. I am popular at my local record store because I bring them a bunch of records pressed in the past ten years or so that they can easily sell for $10-15 a pop, and in return I take the records on the top shelf they have a hard time selling. I'm strangely lucky to have a really amazing record store down here in Mobile, AL. The guy who runs it has been involved in music for decades and really knows his shit, he is always finding rare records that blow my mind. I recently got an original pressing of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures". Like no shit, I literally own Factus 1 now. Zero reason to own it for sound quality, since pretty much all the reissues sound great, but man it is cool to own this. I also finally picked up the original pressing of "Ten" he's had sitting up there for years, after a particularly large trade-in. The only new releases I buy anymore regularly are the Third Man Vault subscription releases, which are always interesting and beautiful and sound great. But when I did buy new Elusive Disc was my favorite online store.

So I traded in my Radiohead In Rainbows 2x45RPM and my deluxe box of The Smiths Complete for the above at my local record shop. Sex Pistols - Bollocks original pressing promo Radiohead - OKC original pressing Run DMC original pressing Pearl Jam - Ten original pressing (sealed) Pretty excited about the trade. That Smiths box was beautiful but it was fucking enormous and whenever I want to listen to The Smiths I reach for my original pressings instead of the remasters. And I don't like In Rainbows. Everyone loves it, I never got it. I actually like King of Limbs better than In Rainbows. I've been staring at that Ten original pressing sit on the high shelf at the shop for over a year. Of the above I've only listened to the Run DMC, and it sounds fucking awesome. Super clean, not a pop or click to be found. Which makes me worry I'm about to embark on a journey of buying as many clean 1980s hip-hop original pressings as I can find.

oh yes that's exactly what I'm going to do, rereading my post it sounded like I was having second thoughts based on the HD800S announcement. I've got the HD650 on my amazon wishlist, just kind of waiting till the price feels right.

Funny this comes out right when I'm thinking about picking up the HD650 again. Maybe its nostalgia, but i want to hear the technics 1200 > singlepower supra > HD650. Used to be my setup but with a PPX3 instead of a supra. Vinyl + HD650 regardless of amp was always kind of a special combination.

someone please send me a carton of this head-case milk (assuming its non-alcoholic milk). Welcome ‌@FreeSky! I hope you are achieving satisfaction in your quest for headphones. Listen up: you can save a LOT of money on glasses buy ordering from Zenni Optical. The hardest part is getting your pupillary distance correct, which is something your eye doctor usually doesn't provide. You could of course just ask them for it like a human being, or you could do what I did and measure them yourself like a crazy person. Eventually I got it right and I have an awesome pair of glasses I paid like $50 for, pretty sweet. alternately you could have someone shoot lasers into your eyes to fix them but that sounds crazy to me. no lasers in postjack's eyes! no ma'am no sir.

man I have been so slack! apologies all. Work has been busy and afterwards all I do is watch Rick and Morty or Mr robot. I'll step up my welcoming game.

Calzone!

I've pretty much shifted back over to google play music. i do think tidal sounds better but technical issues with the android app are driving me away. particularly I can rarely resume a track after pausing. It will either start the track over or the whole app crashes. Crashing is certainly less then it used to be overall, so points to them for improvement, but for listening at work, where I do 95% of my streaming, google play is just more usable. And do I really need the higher fidelity when I'm listening to Kendrick Lamar and messing around with a spreadsheet?

Also you should buy like 4 subwoofers so shit gets loud as hell boom boom hell yeah

I ran a 3.1 system with my old denon (same as marantz pretty much) receiver for years, I don't think you should have any problem running a 3.0 system. Come to think I definitely turned off my sub one night and ran my bookshelves full range just to see how they would sound, so that was a 3.0 system and it worked fine. Borrowing reks' audyssey mic is a good idea, it will do all the work for you. It should set the speakers to large automatically, if it doesn't you can change it. EDIT: or you could just set your speaker distances (or just leave them at zero) then adjust the volume on the center channel until you're happy, and set the speakers to large, and you should be good to go. audyssey is cool though. If you don't like the effect audyssey eq has on your sound you can turn it off, but it will still retain volume/speaker distance etc, meaning the stuff you want. batpig's denon to english dictionary is a great source of info if you want to learn more: http://batpigworld.com/wp/?page_id=55

I say use whatever tubes are prettiest. i choose to listen with my eyes. I still taste with my mouth though. had some cookies tonight.

at a glance that ipad pro looks badass.

As an aside, really enjoying all the Big Sound articles. Really really cool project. I like the way you are handling the blind testing aspects, by not embarrassing anyone but just assuring the reader that yes, blind testing between components is REALLY hard. I'm in a place right now where I think, yes, differences between sources and amps aren't as drastic as maybe I once thought they were, but also there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a kick ass amp in front of me when listening to tunes. If it brings me joy, then its improving my music listening experience.

Acually it will probably mostly be chicken. But if it ends up being porcine I assure you it will be planar!

@charliebrewer welcome to headcase! i hope you are having an awesome day. what are your labor day plans? always good to have a long weekend right? i'm pretty excited myself. i'll be spending the weekend on Mobile bay with my family eating various grilled meats and reading charles stross (atrocity archives, my first time delving into the laundry world).

bringing this down to a practical level its funny how I sometimes catch myself forming an internal narrative of an experience while I'm experiencing it. This happens most often at live music, I'm having this amazing time and I find myself in my head forming the narrative of how I'll tell my friends about this afterwards, so I stop living in the moment and instead start living in the future moment when I'll be talking about this present moment. I have to give mysellf a mental slap to bring myself back to the present and just experience what is happening all around me. I thought of this when I read what you are saying regarding the journey becoming the appraisal of the journey, and that definitely isn't what I want. I just want the journey. But even the preceding statements sure have a lot of "I's" and "wants" in them if ego dissolution is the goal. Fuck it, I'm having fun though. And my bacon be flat as hell.

I use the large bifold wallet from saddleback leather wait nevermind it is enormous and thick. great wallet though.

sweet looking stack you got there. is the rack purchased or DIY?

Sweet, thanks for the tips!