by Michael

An audiophile remodeling in-progress

As we continue to become settled in our happy high-end audio dramatic comedy of a life here – we are making a few changes and additions. We put up background curtains in front of the mirrored fireplace, and added more padding under the carpets, to reduce the liveliness of the room a little bit and improve overall aesthetics [if not livability, that is the only working full-length mirror in the house! :-)].

 

The before

 

The After

We also setup a 3×3 Harmonic Resolution VXR rack [which we videoed, step-by-step. Should be up on YouTube in a few weeks] but when we got to where it was time for us to start putting back the platforms (shelves) on the rack, we realized that we were going have to take it all apart to take down the Acapella Campanile 2 speakers and take them to the California Audio Show in a few days – so maybe we should take the rack back apart again, now, and wait until after the show to install it in its prime position (the rack is about 650 lbs. We weren’t able to just move it out of the way… Neli may be strong enough [seriously]… but I have a few more hours to put in at the gym.)

All I can say is…Damn but we are getting good at putting up and tearing down VXR equipment racks :-/

 

3×3 HRS VXR rack with silver posts

I wanted an all silver rack. Neli wanted an all black rack. We think this black rack with silver posts should look pretty awesome too. Whew! Another messy divorce avoided here in the Bay Area.

in Acapella / California / HRS / News 2 comments
 by Michael

Back from Munich

[pictured: Hermann Winters of Acapella and Neli of Audio Federation in the Acapella showroom]

But on the way back I caught an “airplane cold”. Bad enough that Neli enforced a 10 foot distance between the diseased one and herself until she left to jet down to Houston [where she gets to compare the Acapella Sphaeron Excalibur speakers we just heard in Germany with the smaller but similar looking Triolon Excalibur speakers, among other tasks like setting up an HRS rack and in general being the life of the party].

So now I sit here staring at 2600 photos and 70 videos and about the same number of 24 bit 96kHz recordings of Munich High-end 2019, Audio Note and Acapella factories, and try figure out how to get these up on the internet in a some kind of organized manner.

First I need to add more memory to my 16GB DELL, because video editing takes mucho memory, and Lightroom in any case likes to grab all the memory and open every single photo it can find on my disk not free any memory for like a day(!) anyway. And before that I want to thoroughly backup the DELL, but memory sticks / thumb drives were so slow, so had to get a nice cheap 2TB drive. Etc. Etc. Etc. can’t wait for AI to get here so computers can take care of their own damn selves.

And can’t wait until the show video+photo post-processing pipeline is all worked out. Steep learning-curve alert for this audiophile.

I want our videos to be quite different than AVShowrooms’s approach – and it may take some time to get them just right.  AVShowrooms has a professional “friendly reviewer” approach that works well for them, but I want to go more for an OMFG “extreme enthusiasts visit Wonderland” kind of approach.

Stay tuned 🙂

 

in Munich 2019 / News 0 comments