Kevin Bresnahan

I had a strange audio problem with my PC last week. I installed a new monitor and to get the best picture, I hooked it up with an HDMI cable. Then I lost my audio. Initially, I didn't make the connection that new monitor=no audio. Why should I? There were no speakers in the monitor, right? Well, it turns out that Windows 7 installed an HDMI driver that includes an audio driver (because HDMI *can* carry audio) and that audio driver took control of my sound card. Weirdest thing. I had to disable the HDMI audio driver to get my speakers to work again.

From the studies I have read, three minutes is too long. These studies show that people cannot remember exactly what they heard 30 seconds ago, never mind three minutes ago. Also, do not discount the psychological aspect of the swap. You bought the interconnect and installed it because you wanted to improve your audio playback. It is entirely possible that you heard an improvement because you wanted to hear one. I know I have had this happen to me many times. I find that I almost always prefer my latest purchase over what was there before. I can't remember the last time I bought something, installed it and brought it back because I didn't like how it sounded. And once again, please don't get me wrong - I use higher quality interconnects in most places in my system. I am not advocating using cheap RCA phono interconnects. What I don't think is necessary is buying uber-expensive interconnects. Hey, at least this thread isn't about A/C wall sockets.

How long did it take you to swap the cables? If it was more than a minute or two, you can't remember what you heard (exactly) with the old interconnect. Human's "hearing memory" has been documented to be very poor if there is more than a few seconds between like sounds. If you can't A/B in seconds, you will have trouble distinguishing the differences.

Another for Monoprice. Good quality, inexpensive, and no bullshit. I just recently bought 3 or 4 of monoprice.com's premium RCA phono cables and they've worked well. I always recommend monoprice.com for HDMI cables. They have the best prices. However, I think Blue Jean Cables are the place to go if you want to step up in quality. I bought some of their speaker wires and they are very well made.

Jim - a weed whacker draws a lot of current. If the cord somehow restricts that current (i.e. higher resistance), then the voltage at the end of the circuit (the weed whacker) drops and when that happens, the motor slows down. RCA phono cables deliver very little current at very low voltages. You could never overdrive this cable. Lon & I have disagreed over this for years and I'm cool with the way he talks about it. There are others over on the Steve Hoffman forums who defend ludicrous statements with remarks about how my hearing must be faulty, all backed by Hoffman himself, who does hawk some serious "snake oil" audio products - like the famous "audio coat rack" at $1000 a pair. It's because of Hoffman's defense of these snake oil salesmen over there, I have been hanging out less & less. Just the other day, he told and electrical engineer that he might phuck better then him, but he probably hears better than him. Nice, huh?

I don't believe that RCA cables can improve the sound coming out of your speakers. However, I do believe that a bad or poorly-made cable can degrade that sound. As mentioned earlier, cheap cables usually fail at the connector and cause all kinds of problems from hum to crackle. I've yet to hear a failing RCA cable roll off the highs or lows. I believe that if the cable you are using produces good sounding music, you're all set. If you want change over to well-made, but inexpensive cables, I highly recommend Blue Jean Cable. BTW, I am not advocating using cheap cables. I use higher end cables myself. Having said that, I think anyone that pays hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an RCA interconnect is wasting their hard-earned money. Kevin

This thread got me to thinking that there were several more titles that I'd like to have in my CD rack before they all dry up so I ordered: Valery Ponomarev: Means Of Identification Ralph Moore: Round Trip Buddy Tate/Al Grey: Just Jazz Valery Ponomarev: Live At Sweet Basil Rob Schneiderman: Dark Blue Dick Katz: The Line Forms Here Claudio Roditi: Double Standards Andres Boiarsky: Into The Light I'm looking forward to hearing them. Kevin

As I said in this thread, I saw Gary Smulyan at a local club recently, and he told me that Reservoir Music is out of business. I got the impression that this was going to hurt Gary a bit on the financial side of things. After, you can get royalties from a company that's gone "belly up". Sad. I have some great CDs in my collection from them. Every one of the Nick Brognola dates is worth hearing, with "On A Different Level" being near "desert island" status. They are clearing out all of their stock for $10. Buy 'em while you can. Kevin

The title says it all. I've decided to use a Pro-Ject Debut TT I've had laying around unused for a while. When I last used it, it ran a little fast so I want to run it through a Speed Box II. I can wait for a 10% coupon from one of the usual on-line retailers, but I figured if someone had one laying around, I'd take it off their hands. Offering $120 including shipping (no preference for shipper). Thanks, Kevin

Last week, a guy passed me going about 75 mph down the left lane of Route 495. He was staring at his iPhone. I figured he was using some sort of GPS app. As it happened, I got into the left lane behind this guy just as traffic came to a complete stop. Me being in an SUV, I was higher up than the guy so I was able to see what he was watching on his iPhone. It was a movie! Wait a minute... lots of flesh tones... lots of body parts bobbing... the guy is watching a porn movie!! I had my passenger's window down and so did the guy next to me so I yell over to him, "Hey, check it out, the guy in front of me is watching a porn movie while driving". The guy says, "No way!" and pulls forward to look into the guy's car. He drops back, shaking his head "yes" and we had a great laugh together. The thing I don't get is that his other hand was still on the steering wheel...

Just finished: Steely Dan - Katy Lied Now playing: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - self-titled debut. Record Store Day white vinyl. This sounds phenomenal! If you're a Petty fan, grab these two new vinyl reissues.

I was just playing that last week. Up now: "An Introduction To Syd Barrett". He was one weird dude.

I have the 33 1/3 rpm version of "Rumours". I think it's one of the best sounding versions of this LP that I've heard. The DVD-Audio disc may beat it simply due to the surround mix, but for stereo, they are very close. I absolutely refuse to buy 45 rpm versions of 33 1/3 rpm LPs. The supposed improvement is not worth having to get up every 10 minutes. Personally, I think 45 rpm LPs are a money grab. Double the price for a single LP - only way to justify it.

Or it took him a while to sober up enough to play cohesively.

Lon - I am currently bike-less. I sold my Victory Cross Country a few weeks back and at this point, I am not certain that I'll get another bike. Several things have conspired against me riding. First was a bout of dizziness/numbness I experienced late last summer. It's gone now which leads me to believe that it was partially due to riding. Second was my wife undergoing two spinal surgeries on her neck, which has lead to the doctors telling her she can no longer ride. Lastly, I have started getting very scared out there. I see so many fools driving while texting on their phones, completely oblivious to their surroundings, that I just expect it is a matter of time before one of them kills me. I may still rent a bike for a weekend or two this summer, but I have to get over this fear of idiots. Kevin PS: Yesterday on my ride home, I saw a guy watching a porn movie on his iPhone as we were driving on the highway. How did I know? Well, the traffic slowed and came to a stop. I was behind him. My jaw just dropped. I figured he was using his phone for directions. But after a few seconds, I could see what it was. Weirdly, his other hand was on the steering wheel.

First up tonight was Dexter Gordon's "Tangerine" on a nice green label original. I followed that up with a Rainbow copy of Jimmy Smith's "Confirmation". Now I'm finishing up the night's listening with Philly Joe Jones's "Dameronia". A nice night of Jazz vinyl.

I was just thinking about something that might be happening here... If you're using Internet Explorer to browse the web, click on Tools->Internet Options. Click the Security tab. See if the security level got changed to something higher than "Medium" or maybe even Custom. If it did, it might have upped the protection levels to block sights with outdated security certificates. Some Windows Updates do this by default. Change it back to Medium and see if this works.

There's a pretty good chance that you're running out of memory. Because you only have 500 MB of system RAM, it is using quite a bit of your hard drive for running programs. Back in the days of your PC, I found that if you got down to less than 2 GB of hard drive space remaining, all kinds of problems start up. Find out how much space is left on your hard drive. To do this, click the right mouse button as you hover over the "Start" button. In the pop up menu, click "Explore". On the left side, there should be a little plus sign + next to "My Computer". Click it. You should see any number of hard drive partitions under "My Computer". I'm hoping there is just one and it's labeled C:. Hover over C: (it should turn blue) and click the right mouse button. Click Properties. Check how much space is left. Also click the Tools tab, and click "Defragment Now" to see how fragmented it is. Some things I would do... Go to www.download.com and download/install CCleaner. This tool will free up space where you might never think to look. I usually run this every few weeks. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete and bring up the Task Manager. Check the Processes tab and see how many processes are running. Remember that every one of those running processes are taking up precious memory. If there are a lot of them that you recognize as junk programs, you can stop them from running at Start-up, but it involves editing your registry, not for the faint at heart. Let me know if you need to do this. EDIT: Let us know what model PC you have. I may have some old RAM sticks laying around that might fit. Also, you need to know if you have any open memory slots.

http://store.acousticsounds.com/d/41134/Sam_Noto-Noto-Riety-Preowned_Vinyl_Record I've bought from Acoustic Sounds before and had no problems. Kevin

Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" has finally been reissued on vinyl. Over on the Steve Hoffman forums, they've been anticipating this reissue for several years after Hoffman described how difficult it was for him to find the best tape versions of each song. Apparently, there were a lot of pressing variations with different endings spliced onto "Gold Dust Woman" and changes in fade ups and downs. Hoffman said that when we heard this LP it would be revelatory. Anyway, I grabbed a 33 rpm (available 45 rpm too) copy on Record Store Day and I have to say, the hype was worth it. It sounds incredible... except for one thing. To my ears, the song "Dreams" sounds just a half beat faster than usual. I've probably listened to this album a couple hundred times by now. It's one of my wife's favorite albums. I have it on LP, CD and DVD-Audio. I compared the CD and DVD-A to the LP and the LP sounds better than ever, but the beat on "Dreams" is just a bit faster than usual. I thought I should ask the mastering engineer if he found out that the master tape was a bit fast. Maybe this was what we were supposed to hear? But I can't ask this over there. It seems that this cannot be discussed. I asked in this thread and Steve Hoffman's initial response (now scrubbed away) was "Stop being silly". I responded to this and that was scrubbed away too. This morning, someone else posted, "Yeah, I hear it too, but maybe the other editions had it slowed." That post has since been edited (with no indcation of an edit) to say, "Thanks Steve! I can't wait to hear it". So I guess if I want to discuss this, I have to do it here. Did anyone else buy this LP? If you did, do you hear "Dreams" being faster or am I crazy? BTW, "both" is a valid answer. Kevin

Unless you were a bass player. Then, all your recordings sounded like you were playing a loud bumblebee.

I saw him once and it was a great time. I never thought that it would be my one & only chance to see him. RIP Billy.

I've sold on CL but only bought on Audiogon. CL is free, Audiogon is not free. My worst experience was a purchase I made on eBay. The seller forgot to tell me that his cats had used the speaker grills as a scratching post. Be careful if you choose CL. There are so many scammers there that it's getting hard to tell them from the real buyers. They have gotten more & more sophisticated in their approach. You can't even trust a banker's check any more. They are making fake banker's checks. I think if I sold locally on CL, I'd insist on cash. BTW, you could offer them up here first. I have bought and sold several pieces of gear from the forums I visit. I just recently sold a DVD/SACD/DVD-A player here on Organissimo. Kevin

Last night, I caught a group of local masters led by tenor sax Arnie Krakowsky at a small club called The Sahara Jazz Club in Methuen, MA. It was a set of Al & Zoot tunes with guitarist John Wilkins playing the role of "Al". It was a great time. I do wonder how they make any money with a paltry $5 cover though.

According to http://thenewschronicle.com/threeyearold-boy-killed-falling-roller-coaster/0404012907/, the boy may have tried to climb out of his seat while the coaster was moving. BTW, it was a little kiddie roller coaster. My daughters used to love those things.