DOOD.CA: Guy Stuff

For the last little bit I have been running a Pro-Ject (or Project?) Perspective turntable. Previous to that I was running a Pro-Ject Debut II, right before the Debut III TT came out. I’ve been going through a number of different cartridges, including the Sumiko Pearl, Sumiko Blue Point Evo III, Grado Labs Prestige Gold, and the Ortofon Contrapunkt B.

I find Ortofon cartridges in general too bass-shy, and thin-sounding, and the Contrapunkt was no different… I had hoped for better bass but it didn’t come through, fantastic in the middle though. The Sumiko Pearl was just a bit too bland for my liking, and the Blue Point Evo III was extremely finnicky and hard to get set up right. It sounded fantastic when I did though! I ended up breaking the Evo III accidently and purchased a Grado Labs Prestige Gold. What a cartridge!

The Grado Prestige Gold matched up with the Perspective so well, that I thought I was listening to a much more expensive cartridge. It had a life to it that I’ve never heard from other carts, and it made me want to try out the higher end line of Grado cartidges like the Sonata or Master, but perhaps an upgrade in turntable would be in order to pair with those.

I really enjoyed the pairing of the Grado/Pro-Ject, and liked it substantially more than other combinations I heard such as the Blue Note Piccolo and Sumiko Evo and the Audio Note AN-TT Two combined with their entry level cartridge which name escapes me at the moment.

I listen to mostly jazz and classical with a dash of pop and rock on my turntable, so these are the types of music that excel. Thanks again and happy listening!

I’ve been adding sound diffusion panels to my stereo system, and have been having fantastic results. I am still manufacturing them in my garage with a chop saw and hand sanding everything. The mitre joints are proving to be difficult, however. Also am using flush-mount wall hangers to hang them, but no weight rating is given on the wall hangs, though they should be able to handle the weight.

In the photo you can see my Lite DAC62 and my Linar Pre-2, and the Monster Power Center 3500MKII used in my main system. I am extremely happy with the performance of the Pre-2, but the digital read out is so small that I cannot see it from my listening position. This is prompting me to look into getting a SimAudio Moon P-5 or something like that. I am also considering moving into the PS Audio GCP-200. I had the previous PS Audio PCA-2 and loved the features, but was slightly disappointed with the sound performance. We’ll see how that goes.

At any rate, the Sound panels are doing a fantastic job of livening up my room that was previously a bit too dead with all the sound absorbtion panels that I had installed. Check out the old school picture here:

In that picture is a fellow audiophile at one of our shootouts admiring his handiwork on a Ah! New Tjoeb(sp?) CD player. You will see the old Acoustic panels i had installed before. Also note the Audio Note AN/K SPe speakers in Walnut finish. Very nice looking pair. Also was using a chinese made tube preamp, Audio Experience Symphonies. Made in Hong Kong, and of very good quality, but unable to handle the low input impedance of my Odyssey Extreme Monoblock amps.

So you may soon see these diffusion panels on ebay if I decide to start (semi)mass producing them, who knows! They sound fantastic, and I got the idea from seeing the panels used in the local Port Theatre.

Lately I’ve been running Maclipse on a new iMac running the new dual core pentium chips, and 2 gigs of ram. Figured that if my windows machine running the same config could do it, the Mac could do it better, right? nope. The mac has TONS of problems with Memory. Its running Eclipse 3.2.2 right now, and I’ve gotten it to be somewhat stable finally. The site that I am using for subversion and cvs is huge, we’re talking about 30,000+ files.. .maybe more.

I found two variables that can be changed:
1. go to Maclipse in the applications folder, right-click and “Show package contents”
2. go to Contents > double-click info.java.plist – then open up root and VMoptions.
3. replace -Xmx256m with -Xmx512m or even higher to -Xmx1024m

That one did not help me much, so i adjusted the MaxPerm in the ini file.

1. Show package contents again
2. go to Contents > Resources > Java
3. double-click eclipse.ini

This is what my file looks like:

-vmargs
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Xbootclasspath/p:../../../plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.debug_3.2.0.v20060329b/jdi.jar
-Xms512m
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.noFocusRing

Now that’s working really well for me now, but i still have a problem when i do a “open resource” and enter an asterisk in there… but if anyone has some ideas on this, please feel free to share.

I’ve decided to retire my old site and convert it to a WordPress Blog… dood.ca has been blogified! Some new projects going on for me include a new site on Breitling watches and a new watch blog. I am working at a large hosting provider now working internally on a design team.

I’ll be posting all sorts of articles in here from trips and events to happenings in the workplace. I’ve got a new 20″ iMac at work that I will be learning all sorts of new things about.