Super T amp

Yesterday I received my Super T amp from the US. Of course, I tried it out in the evening to see if it holds up to what all those raving reviews say. So I connected this amp to my old cheap speakers and – was quite disappointed. Now I don’t think that this is the fault of the amp. This poor little device only powers out a maximum of 15W (probably only 5-7W cleanly), so you can’t connect any speaker to it. My old speakers are particulary bad because they have a very inefficient subwoofer that needs some more Watts to respond at all. So the sound was relatively squeaky. According to what I read on the internet, this amp needs quite efficient speakers, anything >88db on 1Watt and 1meter should be ok. So I ordered a pair of Axiom M3 speakers. They do 92db, this should be more than enough, and they got a lot of great reviews too. I hope they will arrive before christmas.

However, beyond the speaker problems, the amp offered a level of richness in the details that was really impressive for the price of ~$150. I was able to hear details that I never mentioned before. It’s like you can hear the fingers touching the strings even. I guess this is not always for the good, for example when you have a badly produced or badly played recording, this amp will not be as forgiving as other amps in this price class. This is just as pointless as watching a crap movie on high definition TV. I am really looking forward to the new speakers now and will write up my experiences then.

Nyquist go home!

Today I received (after some annoyance with the duty office) a very nice LP (Neil Young: Broken Arrow). I already knew the CD version, but the LP version has a very nice bonus track. When I put on the LP I was flabbergasted by the drastic audible difference in fidelity that the LP offers compared to the CD. This LP offeres a _lot_ more depth and liveliness than the CD. If anybody ever wants to argue with me again about this, please come here and compare for yourself. I admit, this is not exactly a scientific study, there’s still a possibility that the CD is mastered very badly or that my CD player is shit compared to my turntable. I still find it very surprising, especially since my hifi is everything but high-end audiophile (and my ears aren’t either). I’m curious how this compares with my new amp (Super-T, yay), when it arrives.

OpenJDK in Eclipse

I have taken some time to setup an Eclise project for working with OpenJDK. I didn’t really get warm with NetBeans still and Eclipse has a couple of features that I wouldn’t want to miss when working with Java source code. You can download the Eclipse project settings here. Unpack it in your OpenJDK root directory and import the project. Most likely you have to tweak some parts of the build path, most obviously you have to change the path to your binary plugs. Please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions for improvements. I couldn’t solve two compiler errors, I believe this is a bug in ecj related to annotations. Update: I boiled the compiler problem down to a small testcase and filed a bugreport.

Things I did during the last weeks

Ported Jamaica/OpenJDK to VxWorks. Lost some roof tiles. Bought a flour mill. Moved forward with Mercurial transition of Jamaica. Went to a great concert. Played electric and acoustic guitar. Implemented java.lang.management for Jamaica. Decided that meat is no good for me. Bought a sofa. Found new school for Jonah. Talked to an old friend that I haven’t seen for years. Slept too little. And all that other stuff that I don’t remember anymore 😉