Dusty Chalk

It expires at the exact least opportune moment.

I like that. You buy room treatments before you finish buying furniture.

I would rank a good cleaning machine very highly, amongst "tweaks", almost to the point of necessity (a cleaning "something" would be necessity -- machine just makes it easy).

Your intuition is correct. The design would normally be entirely different, going from reflex load to sealed. It's still worth trying, you won't blow anything up doing that. PS I just bought a pre. There's a good chance it'll show up on Saturday.

No, you did not. Thanks for getting me on Nate's bad side. Nate -- if I had a clue they were already spoken for by you, I never would have said anything. I'm sure I can get them from Lane Mart when I'm ready.

Once you go black, you never go back. Unless, of course, Apple forces you to.

Exactly.

Next time don't use compressed air.

Are we talking integrated, or power amp? Musical Fidelity XT100 (if you can find one)? May I be the first to say: DON'T DEW ET! And if you do, and after you compare the two, and decide to stay that way, sell me your active quads. I want to put together a surround system in the office. Say, winter/spring 2010?

What gift would you get a giant ceramic dildo, and would it know what to do with it?

Literal FOTM?

nOrh -- yeah, that's the one. PS x3 on "that stand sucks". I thought it was a prototype, or a home DIY stand, when I first saw the pic.

I wouldn't send them to Mike -- he might think he bought them, and then turn around and sell them. [/kidding]

I don't know how much I can set up by Sunday, but I'll try so that Colin can at least hear what I'm talking about in a controlled environment. Don't know whether or not we'll feel up to a DBT -- I'd rather set it up with Grawk at the controls of downsampling the files from 24/96, so I'll see what I can do in terms of getting him the files. I can do it myself, but we're limited to whatever the Masterlink does, which I suspect is simple truncation. Although the theory -- grawk's, my understanding -- should go that if the bits are below the level of human hearing, then dither shouldn't matter, but I'll save that card for later.

"Proper" -- good luck with that. Yeah, you get two things that look a lot like the original signal -- especially with a sine wave -- but music is much more complex than that. You can hear the difference much more than you can see the difference.

I was using positive numbers, so my 96db == your 0db. The first image shows the same sample rate with 2 different bit depths (differing by 1 bit). Look at the scales. The second image shows a bit depth of 1.5 bits (it's a bad example, because they're using 1 bit for sign, which is wasted when the other value is zero) vs. a bit depth of ~5 (32=2^5). It's the best I could come up with, with 5 seconds of googling. Incorrect in two ways -- it's not represented with a single value, it's represented with multiple values; and #2 if you sampled at 24 bits, you'll get different more accurate values. Look, for example, at the second image again. It's exaggerated for effect. He didn't change the sample rate, it's just that you only have one value between the time slices, so it's not changing. It looks coarse because that's what you get at lower resolutions. The first time slice where the amplitude of the signal goes down below +0.5 is when the sampled version changes to zero. I understand about the stairsteps, but I think the second image is a good example of how starting with more accurate data will produce more accurate results. At least, it does in my mind's eye.

Other choices. But yeah, stereo is good.

I didn't understand that statement then, and I don't understand it now. It (the additional 8 bits of resolution) adds values between every pair of 16-bit values, therefore adding resolution at every point in the scale. "0db" and "96db" &c. is the overall amplitude of the envelope following the signal, not the actual amplitude of a signal. A full strength (even a simple sine wave) signal can utilize every value between 0 and 2^16.

I don't think it's the same manufacturer, but there was this huge FOTM over on audio asylum (I think) back in the early oughts, of a very similar speaker. I thought they were "Swan", but doing a bit of googling, it looks like I'm wrong. If anyone else knows, wouldn't mind being reminded.

Well, if you're going to repeat yourself, I'm going to repeat myself, too -- you're talking about dynamic range, there's also resolution, which you're not addressing at all.

Pick one: (a) There isn't. ( There could, but He gave all of us freedom and free will, to fuck up as you so please. © Cosmic Jokester is laughing at your distress. Next question?

Quoted for bad omen. Good luck with that, man. PS We have legal counsel, if you want to try to find your way out of that "binding contract". EDIT: Seriously -- The BHSE has yet to be out-done, as far as I'm concerned. I haven't heard a BA, but all reports are that it is top notch, and you may, indeed, be done. For amps. Now you're on to sources.

Well, isn't that what you want to do, in this case? The whole point in bass reflex is that the backwave off the driver comes around and interacts with the front wave, so you try to do it in such a way that it either negatively interacts with the natural hump in the driver's frequency response, or positively interacts in the region where it's weaker (this latter being the usual case). A round port (I believe) means it's tuned to a specific frequency; a slit means it's tuned to a range of frequencies (someone who knows the science better should correct me if I'm wrong about that). So short answer: something dense -- either closed cell foam or felt. Felt is easily obtained (and cheaply, I might add) at most craft stores; I don't know where you'd get dense foam, other than paying through the nose for it at a music store. (I'm not saying you can't -- I just don't know.) You can also try varying the amount of the slit that you cover up. I.E. only stuff 50% of it, 25%, 75%, etc. Yes, I know, then we're back to how much of the backwave you let through -- but you have more control over it this way. Definitely don't use the small speaker setting, that'll ramp up the bass. You might try some of the setting that HeadphoneAddict tried. I'm a bung believer -- I use the bungs in my Special 25's, then corner load them. And then listen to them in the nearfield. It's a pretty exquisite experience. Other people might call it bass heavy. Heck, even I'd call it bass heavy, but it's tight, not loose. I don't have a decent preamp, but if either you (Justin) or Colin want to bring a preamp, I can demonstrate. (Just warn me, so I can set them up beforehand.)

Does anyone know what the actual values are for the different EQ's on the iPod? I found a definitive list, but not their meanings.

Aerius -- is your monitor calibrated? It looks like it's about to hail in that one. How low was the ceiling that day? You're assuming that your camera introduces no colorations of its own (the A-to-D), so unless your monitor is calibrated, even you don't know how accurate the picture is to reality. The only thing you can say with certainty is that the entire system -- A-to-D-to-A -- most accurately represents reality.