While working I’ve been listening to music on my Mac on my ER4s. Which is nice, but I don’t like wearing headphones all day. I didn’t want to go out and buy a set of high-end ‘PC speakers’, although something like the Fujitsu TEN might be fun for an afternoon. And anyway, since I bought my B1s, I’ve had a pair of decent speakers spare — either a pair of Neutron 3s, or Dynaudio Contour 1.1s, depending on which I keep as rears on my main system.

So I decided to build an amp instead. Looked briefly at a few cheap tube kits, and decided I didn’t want the hassle or sheer bulk of something with a huge transformer — or the risk of the cats getting their paws somewhere high voltage!

After some research, I’ve ended up intrigued by the whole chipamp movement — the promise being ‘around 10W of high-end sound for under a couple of hundred dollars and some DIY’. Wanting a nice enclosure, I ended up ordering a Charlize Tripath module and one of Art Taylor’s custom cases. Put it all together one morning a couple of weeks ago, powered from an external power supply.

How does it sound? Well, it’s low power, so efficient speakers help. I’ve never really liked the Neutrons much anyway, and they sound boxy on the Charlize. The Dynaudios sound as good as they ever did (which is pretty good for their size) — and it’s them that have stayed hooked up to the Mac. But the real test for my little chipamp was the B1s, driven from either my homebuilt FLAC jukebox or by my Arcam FMJ DV27. And the truth is that it actually sounds quite amazing, for size and price! I need to spend more time going through my music, but — especially for recordings of vocals and acoustic strings and percussion — it does as well, to my ears, as my Bryston – and possibly better (!) when it comes to depth and positioning. The percussion on No Lonely Nights, from Keith Jarrett’s Rarum, in particular, sounds astonishing. Likewise Cat Power’s Metal Heart, off Moon Pix.

Big, dense, heavily studio-processed recordings don’t fare so well, muddying up a bit. But. This is from an amp the size of a CD case, that cost me maybe £150 to build. I could live with it, happily, as long as I had a great pair of speakers to hook it up to. Impressed.

This component is unique in that it is the only vacuum tube driven surround sound processor in the world, utilizing Dolby Pro Logic II, created by the legendary Jim Fosgate.

No shit.

I’ve been reading a lot about early surround recently. Fosgate most definitely has bragging rights as The Man. Not only did he develop the coolest decoders, he went on to design Dolby Pro Logic II and now makes crazy stuff like the 5-channel tube pre-amp shown above. Respect.

All of which is preamble to mentioning that I’ve just installed the Pro Logic II upgrade to the AV32R. It’s at least interesting and kind of fun — the surround channels are much more discrete than with Tag’s matrix system, which I’ve used a lot, so it will take a little while to get used to. And I think I need to recalibrate the speakers for it. Off to the shop for a new battery for the SPL meter…

Recently won a Tag McLaren AV32R on eBay. Admittedly there’s very little official technical support for these now, and given that mine is the single processor model, there aren’t really a whole lot of upgrade options, even should I find someone to install them for me. And the VFD display, being a VFD display, is a bit tired. But it’s all about the sound, and the sound is excellent.

I’ve been most surprised to find that I’m actually using their proprietary DSP when listening to music, as most DSP programs for spatialising stereo just turn the music to mush. The AV32’s gets the balance just about right — using the centre channel to firm up the soundstage, while adding just a whisper of depth from the surrounds. Originally I’d intended to just use the AV32 for multichannel content, and continue as before, feeding my music direct over balanced XLR from my music player to the Bryston. At the moment I’m routing through the Meridian 518 into the AV32 — the sound is just too much fun. Maybe I’ll get bored of it. Doesn’t matter. Cat Power’s The Greatest is luminous, with real space around the rhythm section. And that’s what it’s about.

You can never have too many recipes for a cheap, easy-to-administer mail server. Especially if it’s based on a modern code-base, includes aggressive anti-spam and anti-virus tools, and has a webby interface for (multiple) domain and account administration. The system outlined at web-cyradm.org is well on its way to serving as a good reference install for small-to-medium sites. To simplify installation for those who are more interested in evaluating the system than in the mechanics of its building, we’ve written up a set of notes for its installation on Debian Sarge, using ‘off-the-shelf’ packages for everything but the core Cyrus services. The notes are hugely indebted to the HOWTO on the web-cyradm site, and should be read in conjunction with the HOWTO, rather than instead of it.