The (upstairs) reading room audio system

Note: Following the upheavals of the new central heating system, and my decision to "relocate" much of my new life from the study down to the back half of the living room, I have now assembled a simple little audio system in what was Christa's study, but which is now a comfy little reading room adjacent to the books warehouse.

[last updated: 2 November 2011]

The living room audio system is shown here.

The Sure electronics stereo amplifier is a delightfully tiny, very cool-running (hence the green) Class D stereo amp with precisely one analogue audio input, one volume control, and an on/off switch. This is pretty much all you should ever need in a stereo audio amp. (Or, as Quad used to put it, a wire with linear signal gain.)

Having used my custom-made analogue audio/video switchbox for a decade before 'upgrading' to a full-blown digital A/V amplifier¹ in 1998, I now find my Sony minidisc recorder also makes a very useful digital audio switchbox.² As you can see, it takes a co-ax digital audio feed from the NAD CD player, an optical digital audio feed from the Sony Freeview box that I use purely as a digital³ radio, and an analogue audio feed from the HP MPC Ubuntu 11.10 PC (for Internet radio, for podcasts, videos, and for all the various networked MP3 files knocking around).

And if all else palls, the minidisc recorder can play minidiscs, too :-)

I was sufficiently dischuffed with A/V amp #1 I even mentioned it to Carol a short while before I sold it back to Julian Richer's people for half price:

And is it possible that I have so far failed to mention that I went Dolby Digital some little while ago in the middle of losing my original (David-designed) switchbox to the vagaries of hi-fi EEPROM micro-processor rot (its programmer, my chum Colin, having died in the meantime of a most unexpected heart attack a couple of years ago) and have been struggling to put the basic system back together with two overall criteria: lose the faint mains hum that now seems to be present on some of the video connections, and make it all controllable by my tame set of naive users while still meeting my apparently over-demanding criteria for switching flexibility? Some of the hard-wired choices that our Korean chums have made in the Dolby Digital unit beggar belief, and certainly surpass my understanding...

DCM in an email to Carol, June 1998

Footnotes

¹  I dipped an initial toe in the water with a £450 box from Richer Sounds (the Korean brand has mercifully been expunged from my long-term memory — as was the unit itself from the system, within a couple of months). I've hated audible mains hum ever since being introduced to it by my first-ever amplifier, an Amstrad unit, in 1972. After the Koreans, I crossed a short stretch of sea to the Japanese, opting for the relatively high-end (£1,600) Yamaha DSP-1, and financing it by the simple expedient of selling my IBM shares now that they had clawed their laborious way back up to parity with their starting price. There's a picture of the Yamaha here. It offered Y-C video switching, and had eight digital audio inputs. Plus, of course, it could handle the Dolby AC-3 RF signals that had been squeezed, by then, on to LaserDiscs so they carried full 5.1 surround sound for a year or so before DVDs came along and swept LDs away. The Yamaha lasted for not quite eleven years of virtually daily use, so I have no complaints. Money well spent.
²  Just as I used a JVC SVHS tape deck in a similar way for routing combined audio and video signals around in the living room back in 2001.
³  I intend to resist DAB until the UK adopts a decent system, and stops cramming too many channels at too low a bit rate on the obsolete system they have foisted upon a hapless public. (Amusing comment here.)