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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 2 July 2006 (Day View)

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02.07.2006 – Sunday 2 July – Audio & Gardening

Morning

• There’s something of an audiophile in me. I’ve just spent the past few hours—while I wasn’t showering, doing some laundry, or eating breakfast—playing around with my soundcard. I’m using a SoundBlaster Live! running kX Drivers, which transform an otherwise fairly ordinary soundcard into an impressive audio solution. I’m running audio and video from my computer into the lounge room so I can play music and movies there, but with a normal soundcard setup, it’s impossible to separate various audio sources. I couldn’t play a movie in the lounge room while listening to music here—and there was no way to stop all the annoying little noises various things make, from coming through. An email arriving would make a noise halfway through a movie, for example.
  The SoundBlaster cards themselves have quite an impressive audio processor, but the drivers they ship with essentially disable most of its capabilities. But with the kX drivers, I’m able to leverage the professional audio processor they’ve used at the heart of the SoundBlaster Live! series of soundcards, giving me full ASIO support, several other inputs and outputs, and the ability to load my own microcode into the processor. I currently have one physical output going to my headphones and computer speakers, and a separate line going to the TV and speakers in the living room, through a six-channel mixer. This allows me to send an audio source to the lounge room without affecting what I’m hearing here at my computer, and vice versa. I’ve even split off the low frequency channel from surround encoded DVD’s, and am amplifying it separately and mixing it back in, to more accurately match the performance of the speakers in the lounge room. I’ve then set up my music-, DVD- and movie-playing programs so that they by default output sound on a different channel to the rest of Windows sound, allowing me to easily mix and match audio input and outputs.
  That’s all been setup for a while. Today I’ve been playing around with amplifier simulations—they provide a whole new realm of listening sensations to my existing music. A Steve Vai instrumental sounds drastically different, and impressively realistic, played through a simulated vintage tube amp, or a single bridge pickup heavy metal amp.

Afternoon

• Ned garden. Ned dig. Ned remove remains of mess evil garden men make when they pull half garden out. Ned bus to town. Ned buy seeds. Ned buy fertiliser. Ned buy coir peat block. Ned expand coir peat block. Ned fertilise. Ned sow. Ned water. Ned have purple feet from berries.

Comment by Mum – Thursday 6 July 2006, 7:28 PM

  Ned a good fella with a hoe, trowel and righteous angst