Label drinkers revisited

Photography

Nothing changes.

I wrote about Label Drinkers some 16 years ago.

It’s sort of comforting to report that little has changed, and those purported experts have only grown in number since then.

An amusing article in the Washington Post reminded me of my old column.

It seems that a fraudster selling vinyl records under the MoFi label has been cleaning up selling ‘pure analog’ records for egregious sums when, in fact, the source material for these pressings is digital. Encomiums to this fraudster who lit on some of the most prolific and spendthrift Label Drinkers on the planet.


MoFi fraudster at work.

‘Audiophiles’, you should understand, think nothing of spending fortunes on analog gear – turntables, cartridges, etc. – and will listen to nothing but scratchy old vinyl disks, thewhile preaching to all and sundry that only analog can deliver pure sound. This, of course, is utter rot and not a single blind listening test has them identify good digital from best analog at a statistically meaningful rate. Go ahead, Google away. Not a single set of data exist which indicates they can actually tell the difference unless, that is, their precious vinyl is scratched in which case even I would ace the test.

Now before I point you to the wonderfully funny newspaper hit piece, let me illustrate for you the idiocy of these fools, who truly prove that there is one born every minute. Here are two examples of Audiophile Label Drinkers’ essentials – the ubiquitous turntable and cartridge:


$200k plus and still no sound.

And here’s the article. Enjoy:

And just as a reminder, the camera in your iPhone puts the one in the $10,000 Leica M11 to shame. The $100,000 Tesla is pure garbage, with the worst build quality and reliability of any vehicle. And only a fool buys a Patek Philippe (I sold mine – gulp!) – unreliable garbage with the worst customer repair service imaginable.

Claes Oldenburg

Photographs

Pop Art twit.

Had the cast of Monty Python ventured into public sculpture they would first have to have invented Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish Pop Art icon who just passed away, aged 93.

Oldenburg’s thing was large scale reproductions of everyday things – toothbrushes, shuttlecocks and so on – placed in public spaces, and his work is never less than supremely silly.

But with that silliness there is a certain ineffable joy that things so insanely inane should grace public thoroughfares. One’s first reaction of shock turns, as often as not, to a smile at how this supreme fake ‘artist’ fooled the powers that be and got rich in the process.

Here’s my take on ‘Cupid’s Span’ of 2002, found along San Francisco’s Embarcadero:


Click the image to go to the Smithsonian obituary.
Panasonic G1, kit zoom, taken on May 1, 2011.

Seph Lawless

Photographers

A fine Urban photographer.

Urban, or urban exploration, photography has been profiled here before. One notable instance is the work of Jonathan Haeber, a photographer who would search out abandoned sites – homes, factories, the Catskills – and document their sad demise.

A fine practitioner in this genre is the pseudonymously named Seph Lawless whose site contains many fine examples of his urban work.


Click the image to go to the website.

Yje use of light, especially in some of the high contrast images, is especially noteworthy. The series on abandoned malls illustrates the nature of America well. When something better comes along – Amazon – abandon what you have and let it rot. A sense of caring for the spirit of place is not an American thing.

Sofabaton U1 universal remote

Ramblings

A smart universal remote.

I explained how to add surround sound to a two channel sound system here. The only snag I have encountered is that the small Fosi two channel amplifier I procured to drive the rear surround sound speakers failed after a few months of service. The maker – Fosi Audio – proved to be a thief, refusing to honor the warranty. So be warned – do not buy the Fosi brand unless you want to be ripped off.

Anyway, there I was, feeling sorry for myself, when it struck me I had an old Sony two channel receiver hidden away in the garage in the corner that the black beetles call home. I whipped it out, plugged the rear speakers in and voila, rear channel sound was restored. After a bit of digging I determined that this old Sony could be used with an IR remote and it was the work of moments to find one on eBay. $12 later it was mine. And it’s nice having a remote for the rear speakers because you really want to set the volume on these from your usual listening position, as engineers are wildly inconsistent on the relative volume accorded the rear channel.

But the snag is that I was now in Remote Chaos.


A gaggle of remotes.

Reading from left to right, these control the top notch Parasound two channel front amplifier, the LG 4K OLED TV, that old Sony receiver resurrected from the garage, the Roku Express 4K streaming puck and the Mac Pro mouse, where all our movies are stored. The ridiculous thing is that no one remote permits the functions of another to be added, and despite the plethora of buttons – I count 117 plus the mouse – only one or two buttons on any one remote are ever used.

So it was time to think about adding a universal remote, though memories of earlier efforts with past devices, ones from RCA and Logitech, recalled only bad experiences.

Enter the quirkily named Sofabaton U1 universal remote.


The Sofabaton U1 with a cell phone. The scroll wheel is circled.
Click the image to go to Amazon.

Priced at an attractive $50 the device uses two (included) AA batteries and any Android or iOS cellphone or tablet to program. First, you download the Sofabaton app from the AppStore. There’s a substantial database of saved devices, accessed when you enter the manufacturer and device names (sadly there’s no scrollable list) and, if your devices are there, adding them to the Sofabaton, which can accommodate up to 15, is simplicity itself.

If your device is not in the database, you can use an existing remote to program it, and such was the need for the relatively obscure Parasound amplifier remote where the only buttons I programmed were power, volume, mute and two input options. You place the Sofabaton opposite and 3″ from your existing remote, choose the button to program on your iOS or Android device, and hold the corresponding button on the remote until the app tells you the button is programmed. No problemo.

All the other remotes were in the Sofabaton database.

The Sofabaton is an IR/line of sight device, and mercifully that old Sony rear channel amp, nestled on a shelf behind one of the Martin Logan electrostatic speakers, can be seen through the transparent speaker!


Transparent speakers rule.

The universal remote can also control one Bluetooth device, not a requirement in my case. If your devices use RF then you need the Sofabaton X1 universal remote, costlier, but a handy solution.

Cross-assigning keys: This is not in the instructions. Say you have programmed the TV scroll wheel setting on the Sofabaton using the stock codes in the database. Your volume keys, as an example, will control the TV speakers’ volume. But that is not what is wanted as an external amplifier is used with external speakers. Sure, you can switch the scroll wheel to the Amplifier setting and change the volume there, but it would be far better to have the TV scroll wheel setting volume buttons operate the amplifier and not the internal TV volume adjuster. You can do this. Go to the TV setup on your cell phone and choose the Up Volume key on the display. Then touch ‘Learn from Original Remote’ but when it comes to pointing a remote at the Sofabaton use the remote for your amplifier, not the one for your TV. I have done this in the TV setting for Volume Up, Volume Down and Mute. Now, without changing devices with the scroll wheel, I can change the volume setting on the external amplifier while remaining in the TV scroll wheel setting.

Note that ‘learning mode’, where an original remote is used to ‘teach’ the SofaBaton IR codes, is not perfect. Sometimes you need two or three goes to get the code to take, something which is clearly indicated on the cell phone’s display. In some cases I had to vigorously pump the button on the original remote before the SofaBaton played ball. But with a little persistence all was well.

Here’s an illustration of how this is done. I first programmed the Roku Express 4K keys using the stock data in the Sofabaton database. I then used the indicated remotes to override programming of selected keys with the happy result that all functions for the Roku are accessible without any scroll wheel selection – front and rear speaker volumes and muting, TV sources and sound sources:


Cross-assigned remote buttons.
This takes far longer to illustrate than to do.

Here is the programming screen on an iPhone for the above settings:


Green designates the stock database download for the Roku Express 4K.
Blue shows keys overriden with separate device remotes.
Orange is a Macro key to invoke the TV source display.

Snags? The battery cover is hellish to remove – I used a nickel and still managed to marginally scar the two opening slots. And there’s no way to program the mouse, despite the Bluetooth functionality, as the Sofabaton has no ball wheel.

Macros? These are series of steps – like ‘turn on the TV/turn on the front amplifier/turn on the rear amplifier’ – and are easily programmed with the requisite 0.5 second delay between each so as to allow sluggish devices to keep up. As for IR beam angle, my devices subtend maybe 45 degrees of angle from my seated position and pointing the Sofabaton at the middle of that angle saw no issues with response. In other words, the broadcast IR beam is wide.

The scroll wheel at the top of the device (see the first image, above) display the device chosen on the small LCD screen whose activation is motion sensitive. Pick up the remote and it comes alive. Leave it alone and it turns off after some 20 seconds of inactivity.

Look and feel? Except for the issue with the overtight battery door, feel and finish are excellent. The audible feedback from the keys is welcome, and the matt keys are set off against a very attractive glossy black fascia. It remains to be seen whether this will disclose a lot of scratches, but it looks great. The overall feel is that of a quality tool and the fit in the hand is superior to that of any of the now obsoleted separate remote controls. The English in the minimalist instruction book is truly ghastly, but the programming process with a cell phone is so simple that it does not matter.

And the pleasant result of all this magic?


The remote population now.
The OLED display is illuminated.

Reliability? Unknown as the device is new to me. I fancy the battery door clips will need some work with a fine file to ease removal. The buttons are not backlit but give off a satisfying ‘click’ when used.

The home entertainment center – technology should be enjoyed …. and invisible:


No mess.

Shelves that slide

Cooking

A key storage bugaboo resolved.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

To say that shelf storage in the typical kitchen is sub-optimal is an understatement. It is atrocious. It’s not enough that storage in the pantry and kitchen is commonly deep, add those low kitchen cupboards and you can bet that those items on the lower levels in the back will quickly be forgotten about or lost. And reaching in for the items at the rear to extricate them means removing those in front to make room, simultaneously incurring a slipped disc or two. A disaster.

Check your local Yellow Pages for ‘Shelves that slide’ and you will likely find a local vendor who will drop by, measure up and in a few short weeks you have sliding storage. That technology makes the lowest, rearmost items readily visible when the shelf is slid out and easily removed vertically without the need to displace hardware in the front:


Pots and pans. The shelves slide
out much further than illustrated here.

In the pantry the benefits are similarly great.


In the pantry.

I stopped complaining about kitchen storage once I had these fitted throughout the below-counter cupboards a few years back. They are very heavy duty, come with plastic door protectors and run on ball bearings. Heirloom tools, in other words. They became so addictive that, more recently, I called the maker back to similarly equip the pantry. Installation is non-invasive for your existing shelves remain in place.

As the second image above shows, the new shelves are far more resistant to bending than the original “builder standard” ones. They are made from plywood which is very resistant to sag, compared with the poorly specified particle board originally used.