I love listening to music. My current lifestyle means that I mostly listen to music either on-the-move or at my desk whilst working. Most of the time I listen to BBC 6 Music. I try to blog about a record from my collection semi-regularly: those are collected at crate digging.

The Setup

Turntable upon Kallax

My home system lives on top of a 4x4 Kallax, out of the reach of little hands. It's a Cambridge Audio AM10, Eltax monitor IIIs, Dual CS 505 turntable (~1980, a gift from my Father) with an Ortofon dn 165e stylus. I run my workstation through it too.

On the move, with a pair of Bose on-ear wireless fold-able headphones. At rest, I use Sennheiser HD589 Cs.

Historic

expedit unit

My hacked expedit, RIP

For five years or so I housed my Hi-Fi in a customised Ikea "Expedit" shelving system (Ikea later replaced the Expedit with the Kallax), which has now sadly been retired. For most of that time my amp was a stalwart Rotel RA-712 from 1976.

pleasant memories

pleasant memories

The first pair of vaguely decent non-earbud phones was a pair of AKG K512s which were good, but the Sennheisers really put how good into perspective. On-the-move, I really loved a pair of AKG K451 fold-able on-ear headphones. I still have fond memories of my first pair of "real" over-ear headphones, the Sennheiser HD438s.

iPod

iPod with rockbox

Until the last few years, I always used a Personal Music Player (PMP) for listening on-the-go. The last one was an iPod Video with an iFlash adaptor, running the Rockbox open source firmware, which I still have in a drawer on standby.

My first PMP was an iRiver H140.

For a long time I used a succession of Sandisk Sansa-branded PMPs, from the Sansa Fuze (v1 or v2), Sansa Clip Zip and a Sansa Clip+ (gift from my previous coworkers, thanks!). These were great players, but like all things they eventually wear out, and new ones became too costly to buy, so I moved to a hacked iPod.

In the dim and distant past I was a big minidisc fan. I only recently parted with my Sony MZ-R70 minidisc player. I still have a Sony cassette walkman somewhere.

Collections

The Cure

The Cure

The Cure

Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails

There are a lot of cure bootlegs, and a lot of interesting cure stuff to collect on them. Stiff as toys and tall as men has a very comprehensive bootleg database.

unanswered questions

There's a version of the Cure's All Cats are Grey floating around on bootlegs that has a string (probably violin) introduction. Here it is on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mQ4dYHvO8E

I've never found the full song (just the string intro) and never in a good quality. Does anyone know the story behind it? Is it an early demo? Who is playing the violin? Or is it a live recording?

Blue Monday Owner's Club

Now sadly defunct, The Blue Monday Owner's Club was an art project by a New Order / Blue Monday fan. The basic idea of the site was for people who owned the record (reportedly the best-selling 12" single of all time) to submit a picture (straight or artistically-stylised) of themselves with their record. The website showcased each picture. I think there were also biographies attached ("where where you when…-style).

I believe the plan was to publish a book of the photographs, but it doesn't seem to have come to pass.

More writing

Pages tagged 'music':

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