Vidar photo is a stock image kindly provided by Schiit Audio.

FedEx beat its delivery promise to bring Vidar to Camp Dismal 2 days early. So we had an unboxing and installation, both fairly trivial and got to have a first listen playing the Thile-Mehldau eponymous duet record and Judy Collins In My Life record. The Judy Collins record features her beautiful voice singing Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and other songs with an electric backing. Vidar pairs nicely with my Dhalquist DQ-10s and has been a perfect gentleman since arrival.

Last week my beloved Great American Sound Ampzilla amplifier overheated. The lounge began to smell of hot linen. At first, I thought my sense of smell had gone wonky again. My sinus allergies can cause strange smells from time to time. So I took some antihistamine and started the air-con fan to filter out any particulate that might be about. A half hour later, the smell was still about unabated so I started checking for overheated electrical things in the lounge. I found Ampzilla with a high case temperature and no air flow up the chimney. Very odd since the fan is a Rotron Boxer powered off the line. What to do, have Ampzilla refurbished or purchase a modern replacement? More after the break.

I started this piece in response to an inquiry from younger friend Matt who is considering purchase of a nice audio system. Said friend is a professional software engineer currently at FaceBook, moves with some frequency, who has varied musical interests having played trumpet in high school bands, and guitar and bass off and on, and has fairly eclectic musical interests.

I don’t know if he will trade equipment as frequently as he trades jobs. I’m guessing simplicity is important, durability to withstand moves, durability to withstand loud playback, and non-fatiguing reproduction of the various metal genres. This may mean rolling off the high end in playback processing to loose some of the distortion harmonics.

My financial advisor is also interested, initially as a headphones listener but maybe as a speaker listener. He has a largish home and could probably find a room to use as a listening space. He’s currently an iPhone streaming user who has outgrown ear buds and would like to move up to headphones. He’s married with children so spousal acceptance and resistance to acts of children are factors. The children are at an age where they can be introduced to music listening.

Read on to learn more about building a high performance audio system able to play a broad spectrum of musical genre and styles. The material after the break reflects my experience from 50 years in the hobby, my evolving taste as a music fan, and directions in the modern component audio system industry.

This is the first of a series of articles about contemporary digital recording practice in a volunteer church service recording context. The advent of digital mixers and digital audio workstations has completely changed this game allowing a patient amateur to make a clean pleasing service recording for distribution to shut-in and traveling members.

Those wishing to learn more about copyright in house of worship program production are advised to see reference 1 for a complete discussion. Copyright law specifically exempts houses of worship from royalty payments for material performed or presented as part of a worship service proper. Houses of worship are required to pay royalties for non-worship use of copyrighted material not in the public domain. For this reason, we distribute service recordings to members on physical media and include only material copyright by the church or our speaker in our weekly sermon podcast that is publicly available.

After the break, we’ll talk about track capture off of a digital mixer. Although not hard, each mixer has its quirks and limitations so our intent here is to alert you to typical challenges and limitations rather than to provide switchology for a specific mixer or mixer family.

Much written about personal audio is written to separate the established audiophile from a few dollars to buy a new gadget. This article is written for a student using Spotify or iTunes with headphones on an existing laptop.How can you begin a personal audio system and what are your migration paths going forward.