Category: Tech

If This is Sunday, It Must be Denmark

Thorens TD-166 Mk II turntable (1983) with Ortofon Super OM 20 cartridge.

Phono cartridge brands I have known and (mostly) loved, in the order I first experienced each of them: Pickering, Shure, Ortofon, Audio Technica, Stanton, Grado, Micro-Acoustics, and Sony. That’s a very short list, compared to many vinyl other enthusiasts!

The Sony XL-MC1 is my only moving coil cartridge. The electret transducer in my Micro-Acoustics 3002 is perhaps the most advanced technology ever implemented for phono reproduction, with the exception of the ELP laser turntable.

There are numerous other makers of phono cartridges today, especially with high-end models, but from within that list only Ortofon, Audio-Technica, and Grado remain.

My all-around favorite in sound and tracking ability is Ortofon of Denmark, with the Super OM 20 being my best cartridge. Mounted and aligned in my well-maintained Thorens TD-166 MKII turntable, it is certainly the best tracking cartridge I am using. Ortofon continues its video series on what makes quality phono cartridges work the way they do.

Happiness Is…

Happiness is accomplishing a known goal. That’s a Scientology definition, a tidbit I picked up the summer in college when living on Cape Cod. The Falmouth public library had a large collection of Scientology books. No, I’m not a Scientologist.

That happened to be the Jaws movie summer. Seeing it in Falmouth was funny, because people who were extras in the movie, and their relatives, were in the audience. They weren’t shy about letting everybody know when they, or someone they knew, appeared on the screen.

But I digress. The happiness context here is this. Just as I brought this installation of WordPress back from near death, and got my Sony 300-disc CD changer working again, last weekend I worked on my Logitech Media Server network until it had been returned to full functionality. The solution was to get the Squeezebox Radios off their native WiFi implementations by using Ethernet-to-WiFi adapters.

It’s been suggested to me the radios were dropping off the network because of interference from a WiFi 6 signal somewhere within range. Even if that’s what happened, there’s no explanation why the adapters don’t have the problem. Also it was suspiciously coincidental with changes that I noticed had been made to the mysqueezebox cloud service that required an update to the LMS software running in the house.

Anyway, I’m happy now that everything is working again. There’s an Android app for controlling the network players that I started using this morning. Why hadn’t I looked for it before? Because I tried one a long time ago on the first generation of the Roku streaming player, and it was terrible. I assumed they would all be awful, but I sure was wrong about that. Squeezer is an excellent app, and it’s free.

Next up? Seeing if I can put LMS on the Raspberry Pi 3 that tastewar gave me.

Logitechnical

We be back, baby!* Thanks to a workaround, the Logitech Squeezebox Radio has returned to full and uninterrupted service in the bedroom. So my bedside Logitech UE4000 headphones have a hole to plug into again. 😉

I squeezed that Squeezebox until the devil dwelling within came out of hiding. The plot twist was it was lurking in Wi-Fi. I sent the details of the troubleshooting process to tastewar. I’ll spare you, unless you’re feeling particularly masochistic. What a way to spend a weekend!

* The radio’s player type is baby.

Bedside Mannerisms

So……….. what are my options for a bedroom table radio? My Pixel 4a phone has a headphone jack. I could connect that to the Logitech Squeezebox Radio’s auxiliary input.

The radio has excellent sound, and it even has a tweeter. But right now I’m feeling quite sour about Logitech, and the idea of all those buttons doing nothing bothers me. If I’m going to use my phone, I’d rather press one of my baby Oontz Curve Bluetooth speakers into service.