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Nerd

Oh my goddess.

I watch entirely too many vintage audio videos on YouTube. They give me too many ideas.

A recent video reminded me of the very first—and probably best sounding if nearly forgotten—pair of high-end headphones I ever owned..

The backstory—something that is for some reason forever burned in my memory—revolves around auditioning a pair of electrostatic Stax Lambda Pro headphones in a LaBelle’s Catalog Showroom in the late 70s. I even remember the record I listened to. Okay that’s a lie. I don’t remember exactly. It was either The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann or The Mysterious Film World of Bernard Herrmann. It was a Bernard Hermann LP in any case.

I fell in love.

Electrostatic anything was pretty rare back then (a set of Magnapans, the most sought after loudspeakers in the world at that time, could easily you back the price of a luxury sports car), so at $450 ($1620 in today’s dollars), the price tag attached to those Stax headphones was also…prohibitive…on a high school student’s income.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t lust after them.

But you know, sometimes the universe smiles upon you, and I soon learned (even though LaBelle’s didn’t carry them) that Stax also produced a much more affordable set of electret “earspeakers” as they were called, at about a quarter the cost. (Essentially one type needs a separate AC power supply to function, and the other is self-powered, even though both require a separate box hooked to the speaker outputs on your receiver/amplifier. Beyond that, the principle of how they function is very similar.*)

While my original pair of SR-44’s were stolen out of the trunk of my car back in 1989 (don’t ask what they were doing in there), over the years I’ve done a cursory search on Ebay now and then and was always disappointed to see them selling for an outrageous amount of money—or at least more than I was willing to spend. I’d all but forgotten about them until I saw them on a YouTube video a couple weeks ago and so I went searching again.

There were several available in varying condition. All were supposedly functional, but several looked as if they’d been through hell and back (much like a lot of the Technics 1200 turntables you see for sale). But then I ran across one that looked nearly new. The seller confirmed that everything was working, so I put in a bid, never expecting to actually win the auction.

Well, I did. They arrived yesterday.

Okay, keeping in mind that my high frequency sensitivity is shit compared to what it was when I first owned these cans back in 1979, they still sound amazingly good. Amazingly.

 

*Please correct me if I’m mistaken on this. I’m sorta working from memory here and we all know how unreliable that is.

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Bad Reputation

From Blobby:

Oh honey. No.

Just…..no!

Deb Brix is trying salvage what is left of her reputation as an actual doctor. But as Pat Benatar once sang, it’s a little too little, it’s a little too late. (now try and get that song out of your head!)

The picture here – and multiple others like it – seem to be saying, “I told lies that were thissssss big.”

And she did. Huge ones. And to what end?

To hear her tell it, had she been allowed to talk, at least 100,000 lives could have been saved from Covid.

Honey – you were “allowed” to talk. You weren’t allowed to speak in the role you opted to take. The one you knew was a farce. You opted to be silent for your own gain.

Brix could have gone out in a fucking blaze of glory had she stood up in one of those White House sessions and lambasted the president and his team about their lack of performance, their lies, the misguided “science” behind everything they said.

But she kept your pie hole shut.

Sure, BLOTUS would have canned her sorry ass after speaking the truth. And oddly she wouldn’t have to worry about not being heard. Every new org in the country (save Fox) would have clamored to get interviews with her.

So, her Apology Tour ’21 falls flat. She’s more guilty on this than BLOTUS. That AMA should strip her of her license.

 

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I’ve been doing this so long I remember the Receiver Wars of the 1970s!

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And Still No 5G Antennas!

But this second dose knocked me on my ass. I was fine all afternoon and evening, but I started noticing some soreness when I went to bed. When I woke yesterday morning I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I went downstairs and fed the kiddos and then came back to bed, where I slept for the next 9 hours. My fever peaked at 102, but taking a hot shower and actually getting out of bed knocked it down to just under 100, where it remained for the remainder of the evening.

I’m not feeling great today, but at least I’m somewhat functional. Everyone tells me I should be totally back to normal by this afternoon.

And still no sign of those goddamn antennas! I feel cheated!

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“Life’s Too Short to Drive a Boring Car…

…so drive a MINI.”

It’s been a little over a year since I replaced Anderson, my aging 2006 MINI Cooper with Rabbit, a 2016 MINI Cooper Countryman. During that time—and despite COVID—we’ve had a good relationship. I have a few gripes with the car, but no real regrets over the purchase.

First off, since discovering Sport Mode, I absolutely love driving this car. With Sport Mode engaged, it seems the car shifts exactly when I would with a manual gearbox and that gives me unbridled joy. I gave up a manual transmission when I traded in Anderson, and it was a decision wrought with misgivings based on my (one) previous fully automatic vehicle. But I have to say, even without Sport Mode engaged, I haven’t really missed the third pedal all that much.  In a perfect world, yes…I’d still be driving stick, but it wasn’t an option at the time. As I mentioned a few posts back, Anderson was starting to nickel and dime me to death, and watching the timer tick down until a second clutch replacement would be needed, something had to give sooner rather than later. I didn’t want to take on the huge financial burden of a new car—and at the time MINI wasn’t producing any vehicles with a stick shift anyway, so I knew a used one would be the way I’d have to go if I wanted to keep it affordable and fun.

I also knew I wanted the Countryman for the simple reason it was becoming a pain getting in and out of the low-to-the-road 2-door MINI hatchback and the Countryman rode a few inches higher.

I found a vehicle on CarMax that matched my transmission, color, and price requirements. Unfortunately it was located in Las Vegas. They’d ship it down to Phoenix for a $100 fee that would be refunded if I purchased the vehicle, so it wasn’t an unreasonable expense. I realized however this was a bit of a gamble if I didn’t want the car, but with apparently no vehicles that matched my want list available locally, I was willing to at least set the wheels in motion.

The morning that we decided to drive out west to get this rolling, I made the mistake of checking out Yelp reviews on the dealership it would be shipped to before we left, and it left such a bad taste in my mouth I started looking elsewhere. (Little did I realize that Yelp reviews of auto dealerships are uniformly horrific because buying a car is a horrific experience no matter how good it may be.)

It didn’t take me long to find similar cars—albeit all with a six-speed automatics—at several local dealers. We hit the nearest dealer for a test drive to determine if I could in fact make the switch to an automatic without regretting it, and four hours later I drove Rabbit off the lot. Yes, Virginia. Four hours. As I said, a horrific experience.

But it was worth it. It was love, although aspects of the “new” car did take some getting used to. Things had changed in the ten years which had passed between the time Anderson and Rabbit rolled off their respective assembly lines.

Over the past year, however, I’ve grown accustomed to Rabbit’s quirks. There are four things that to this day drive me nuts, but I thought they were just me. Turns out they aren’t. I was surprised to learn that I wasn’t the only one to find these obvious flaws so annoying:

While he has a 2015 model and I don’t have the reverse gear issue this guy does because mine is an automatic, the other four things he mentions do resonate—especially the lack of Bluetooth Audio (apparently correctable through a firmware update) and the position of the passenger side rearview mirror.

I also regret losing the xenon headlights I had on Anderson.

Because it’s a string of DNA and a skill set I do not possess and a gut-wrenching fear of fucking something up that I can’t fix, I’m not one who ever mods his cars—but I do love watching the MINI videos on YouTube that show you all the things you can do (like replacing the halogen headlights with xenon or putting in the Union Jack tail lights). If nothing else, as tempting as attempting the mods in these videos may be, they remind me of how I can and probably would fuck things up royally if I tried doing any of them myself.

They also remind me of how insanely much I love driving this brand…

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