We had this in my house growing up
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The market for a "nice stereo" kind of died, didn't it?
Audiophiles get ridiculously high end gear that is intentionally fiddly. Like fully manual turntables where to change the speed you have to move the actual belt to a different pulley. Or you get a sound bar for your TV.
Boom boxes aren't a thing anymore. Like, is that a symptom of a dying society?
wrote last edited by [email protected]intentionally fiddly. Like fully manual turntables
To be fair, the whole act of playing music on LP's and 45's is just... fiddly. Sleeves, cleaning the vinyl, occasionally replacing the needle, and flipping the album over after 20-30 minutes. It's like reading a book - you dedicate time to fuss with all this stuff. So, futzing with the turntable itself is kind of like a "while I'm already here" sort of thing.
Boom boxes aren’t a thing anymore. Like, is that a symptom of a dying society?
Maybe just a changing one. Boomboxes were the combination of conspicuous consumption (yet down-market-ish), ready to party on the go (aspirationally), and building space for yourself with music (loud, annoying). The form-factor was also a product of its time: all the parts couldn't be miniaturized any further than what you typically got. Portable bluetooth speakers do most of that work these days, while letting your phone do the heavy lifting of playing media, and the battery life is WAY better. If that was available back in 1984, everyone would have used that instead.
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When you write your book, do not confuse 'craftsmanship' with the modern materials, design needs, and modern aesthetics. Craftsmanship is merely the act of building something. It might be good or bad or somewhere in between.
One thing that often annoys me about woodworkers who enjoy cabinetry or furniture, is that they are often trying to copy old designs and ideas. I have a Son in Law that is really skilled at woodworking and he just copies things. Like Norm going to a museum to study an old piece of furniture, it's very often about copying something old and not about trying your own new ideas. Maybe you fail, maybe you don't. Now, I do understand that there are only so many ways you can design and build a kitchen cabinet or coffee table. But I'm not sure Norm ever had an original idea. He just copied things and encouraged others to copy him.
I think you're on the same track that I am. It feels to me that the craft of woodworking is kind of stagnant and mostly in a state of reinactment at this point.
Woodworking is a very old craft, we've had a long time to establish what works and what doesn't through trial and error. And yet. The village carpenter in the year 1800 would have made furniture that did what the customer needed it to do, a writing desk was well suited to the task of writing as it existed at the time, with a place for the ink well and such. Sometime in the 20th century, furniture design ossified, and now we get "It's a low cabinet that's 3 feet wide" for a TV stand or "It's a table" for a computer desk.
There was an episode of the New Yankee Workshop where Norm built a computer desk. His approach was to make it look like any old two pillar desk with very large drawers that slid out, housing the PC tower itself on one side and a printer or scanner on the other, with the monitor and speakers plunked on the desktop. I've seen the exact same approach from commercial flat pack furniture, with desks designed to look like old fashioned paperwork desks, dining room cabinets or even armoires.
I will say, Norm would build a "new antique" using more modern methods (correcting for the show being made in the 90s). He was fond of power tools, biscuit joinery, made significant use of plywood and other manufactured materials, but his design work is rather...conservative.
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I was 4 years old, listening to a record on headphones connected to this rig. Leaned too far back, and caught the 1/4 inch input jack on the headphones right in my fucking eyeball.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That EQ is worth its weight in gold.
And I would literally kill somebody for that record player and by literally killing I mean figuratively so not really at all.
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Did you have to hide from the T Rex on your way to school?
I kid. I started out buying records and cassettes, but 8 tracks were "outdated" by the time I was a kid. Though our huge old school "console"* could play 8 tracks and when I was 13 I found my mom's box of old tapes. She had Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Queen etc. It was quite the musical education.
- A console was a giant piece of furniture only slightly smaller than a coffin that had a radio, record player, and speakers built in. It's what got replaced by the "sleek, modern" units like the one in OPs picture.
We had one of the giant console things but it was just a radio tuner and turntable. The radio tuner had short wave in addition to Am and FM which was pretty cool at the time. One of my uncle's was more into hifi back then had a reel to reel machine which was rare then and really rare now.
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We had one of the giant console things but it was just a radio tuner and turntable. The radio tuner had short wave in addition to Am and FM which was pretty cool at the time. One of my uncle's was more into hifi back then had a reel to reel machine which was rare then and really rare now.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The radio tuner had short wave in addition to Am and FM which was pretty cool at the time.
Hell, I still think that is pretty damn cool.
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they must still do that? i have a denon receiver thats maybe 7 years old that turns when you change volume
wrote last edited by [email protected]My Onkyo solved it by removing the marking on the volume knob.
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Not sure what the problem is with that approach, I'm looking for a kitchen cabinet, not a personal expression of the artist's lived experience as a trans-disabled Iberian who grew up as the only rich kid in the holler in the Appalachians, just build me a kitchen cabinet.
It's not about the "Artisan's lived experience." It's about designing and building those cabinets to fit modern day needs. Like that computer desk that doesn't quite fit your setup. Or not being able to get that air fryer or food processor on that shelf because it's literally 1/2"/12mm too tall. Unless you custom build everything, more often than not, those older designs are difficult to smoothly integrate into how we live today.
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Heck yes
Well, I started with a lowly single Dell 2950 back in the day. I was working for VMware at the time, so naturally, I used that.
Since then I upgraded to a c6100 with an R710, and I'm not even sure how I got where I am right now, but I have an R630, R330, FX2s with 3x FC630 nodes and an FD332 (currently empty), and a powervault somethingorother for storage which I desperately want to upgrade.
I finally decided on disks to buy for my FD332, I'm going with Intel DC S4500 (used) at 1.92GB. I have yet to purchase one, and the FD332 can take 16(?) disks.... I'm going SATA SSD for this and moving away from the RAID 6 I'm using on the powervault (this model is basically a slightly modified R510, with 22.5" disks in the back for the OS, and 123.5" in the front for storage). The current primary storage for my VMs (still on VMware) is 64TB WD Red plus, and I have additional storage of 68TB WD Red plus for media content (large files mostly, 90%+ read).
I have over 30 virtual machines, currently all on one FC630, for all kinds of self hosted stuff. I've noticed that they are starting to run incredibly slow, especially after upgrading from the c6100 nodes over to the FC630, so I picked up the FD332 to build a new storage array for the OS data, which will be all flash.
I decided on all flash early on in my thought process, but struggled with deciding what drive I should buy. I want all of the drives to at least be the same make/model for consistency. I finally landed on the Intel DC S4500, because the performance is quite good, and the endurance is 1DWPD, so in the used market, they should have a lot of life left. I picked 1.92 TB because of my space requirements, if I do some version of raid 6, I'll lose at least two drives. Raid 60 would be four drives. So all of my data needs to live on the 12-14 that remain, and it should comfortably fit on 20TB with some room to grow.
I'm currently evaluating alternatives to VMware. I looked at OpenStack for a bit but found it to be too restrictive for my homelab. I'm currently looking at xcp-ng, which shows promise but the GUI is clunky and there's still a nontrivial number of things that you need to drop to the CLI to do. I'll probably be looking at proxmox next.
I'm not in a hurry to populate the new storage because I'm planning on setting it up on whatever hypervisor I pick to move to after VMware, and I haven't made that choice yet. Once I do, the new storage will need to be in place before I make the leap. I will basically export the VMs from VMware, then import them to the new hypervisor, placing them on the "new" Flash storage as I go.
Among my VMs, I have a full Windows active directory set up, with exchange, and a dedicated MS SQL server. I had a remote desktop server for a while, and I maintain a small handful of gaming server VMs. There's more but I don't want to detail every system I run.
Current standard spec is 2* Intel Xeon E5-2618L v4, with 256GB RAM, and 2* 480G Intel DC S4500 drives for the bare metal OS. I have 2 of 3 fc630 nodes all specc'd out, or very close to being all specc'd out (the VMware node is using a set of Samsung SSDs for it's OS, since I hadn't decided on the S4500 yet, and I had them laying around... This will be replaced when I move away from VMware and need to reformat the node).
The R630 is almost the same but was built before the FC630s, and only has 128G of RAM; it is using an 8 drive RAID 6 array of Corsair 500G SSDs.
The powervault is my oldest server and has a pair of 300ish GB spinning disks for OS, as well as the two six drive WD Red plus arrays for my main storage.All of this is connected to a Cisco catalyst 4948. The FX2s is 10Gbit linked, while everything else has a number of 1GbE ports, some aggregated, some are just multi-link/multi-path for iSCSI.
I have two main gateways, the one that serves the servers is a sonicwall firewall. I used sonicwall a lot at work when I bought it, I've since changed jobs, but it's still a decent piece of gear, so it stays. I also have a full ubiquiti network running the main access for the people at home, so they won't be disturbed by my activities. It includes a UDM Pro, an enterprise 48 Poe switch, and a handful of U6 Pro access points with one U6 mesh to fill in a gap. Four ubiquiti access points in total. On my lab side I have a Cisco wlc 2504 wireless controller with a pair of 2802i access points, powered by a 48 port catalyst 3750x PoE which is 10G linked to the 4948.
I have a Cisco 2911 router I've been meaning to get set up as a phone server. I have a collection of 7940/7960G phones from Cisco and I recently acquired a couple 8841 phones to use with it as well.My current project is to update my exchange server from 2010 to 2019.
Physically, almost everything is in a 42RU rack in my basement. It's a complete mess right now. I need to finish doing in-wall ethernet runs before I can clean it up, and get some new patch cables to tidy up the wiring. I also need to physically relocate some servers as my FX2s is currently on a table since the c6100 was taking up too much space in the rack when I got it, and has since been decommissioned. I'm kind of waiting to decom the powervault before I start racking everything properly. Idk.
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That was the stack my dad had in the 80s! I can distinctively remember the dial layout on the amp, the feeling of the switches when they changed position on my fingers and the heft of the volume dial in the middle.
I don't know what happened to them; i'm a little bit sad about that now.
Later on he built his own amp. He never had a formal education in electronics, but he taught himself quite a lot, including fixing TV's with bad solder spots.
My dad had a 70's twin tape deck stereo when I was a kid, it had balance sliders on it for recording tape to tape... which we found out was perfect for copying computer games that more modern stereos struggled with. It was a counter top system rather than a tower and probably at least close to 1m wide. I remember him replacing it at the end of the 80's with some weird little stereo that could play both sides of an LP without turning it over.
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The scary part is people are conditioned to like 0 dynamic range now. Dynamics scare them.
Thank goodness we have old recordings where the sound actually mattered and engineers took it seriously!
Have you ever heard of the 'loudness wars' of the end of the 90's.
As CD players became standard in cars, they decided the best way to counter road noise, was the max out the levels on new releases... which created a horrible sound... but worse still, then then applied this to re-releases of older albums too.
I had originals (still do) of a lot of 90's bands, especially grunge, metal and indie bands... and I was round a friends once and they played an album I had and it sounded awful. So I went and got my copy from the car and played it on their system and the difference was ridiculous.
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Have you ever heard of the 'loudness wars' of the end of the 90's.
As CD players became standard in cars, they decided the best way to counter road noise, was the max out the levels on new releases... which created a horrible sound... but worse still, then then applied this to re-releases of older albums too.
I had originals (still do) of a lot of 90's bands, especially grunge, metal and indie bands... and I was round a friends once and they played an album I had and it sounded awful. So I went and got my copy from the car and played it on their system and the difference was ridiculous.
Of course, im well versed in it! Been recording and mixing for 15 years.
I hate squashed dynamic range. But it's sad the young generation cant even hear it or they PREFER 2 db of DR. Luckily we still have old school mixers and masterers but once they die off we will see a huge quality decline.
