Andrew at Parlogram talks about one of the most significant Pop records of all time. Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.
It was a record that everyone of all ages loved hearing. This video of “Downtown” was made by somebody who knows his Sixties-era mono-mix 45 rpm singles. He played it with a mono Ortofon cartridge.
Andrew demonstrates the difference a quality, lateral-tracking mono cartridge can make for purists of original, mono-mix Sixties records.
Can you hear me chortling with giddy glee? SiriusXM support has been added to the Lyrion Music Network.
This has been a topic of chat for a while on the community forum, and now, here it is. Even without an official SXM API to work with. Shout it out loud, these Lyrion guys are AWESOME!
The right side of my face is numb from today’s dental work. When I got home, that discomfort didn’t stop me from isolating the culprit that tripped the circuit breaker.
It was an old surge protector that burned out, doing its job one last time. I salute you, good and faithful Tripp-Lite Isotel Ultra!
… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.
That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.
Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.
The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?
Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!
Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.
For something that was intended to be simple, Bluetooth audio presents some difficult challenges. The one device I have that doesn’t give me trouble with Bluetooth audio is a lowly Amazon Fire HD10 tablet I bought a few years ago for $75.
Windows has never displayed the Bluetooth audio codec that it negotiates with another device, let alone provide an option to select a preference. My Sony Bluetooth speaker supports AAC and aptX, in addition to the required SBC codec. Windows 10 supported Qualcomm’s aptX audio, but Windows 11 doesn’t.
When playing videos, my Dell laptop PC with a Qualcomm arm64 processor has a significant audio sync problem with my Sony Bluetooth speaker. Because Windows 11 doesn’t support aptX, I have to assume it’s resorting to AAC. That must have also been happening with the Lenovo laptop that has since been moved downstairs. I don’t know why its Intel i7 x64 architecture doesn’t have the Bluetooth AAC sync problem.
I put a cheap Bluetooth adapter on the aux port of the Sony speaker. It supports only SBC, and there was no sync problem. I would have continued using the adapter, but Windows has a nasty habit of disconnecting connections that are idle. The Sony speaker has a switch in back that keeps its side of the connection open, even when there’s no audio stream. Occasionally it fails, probably due to Windows refusing reconnection, but it usually works.
So, what I wanted was the ability to select SBC and, ideally, Qualcomm aptX within Windows 11. It’s ironic aptX doesn’t work, considering the laptop is running a Qualcomm Snapdragon Plus processor.
Bluetooth Goodies to the rescue.
https://www.bluetoothgoodies.com/a2dp/
I asked about support for arm64 and added an e-mail address to their mailing list. I must not have been the only one asking about Windows on arm64, because soon afterward there was a beta version of a driver to try. While I was in the process of confirming it did what I wanted it to do, a WiFi problem came up. I’m not certain it was related, but I removed the driver anyway, by returning to a system restore point I had set.
Later, Bluetooth Goodies said a release version of the driver was available. I installed it and, so far, it’s been okay. The connection is using aptX, and there is no audio sync mismatch. If nothing comes up before the end of the trial period I’ll buy a license.
