audiosite now has five Forums: Music, Audio Engineering, Electronics, Sound, and Anything Else. They can be accessed under the Contact menu.
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audiosite has gotten a bit big to find things so I have put a Search page up.
I just bought a new music stand. When I got home and took it out of its box I noticed it had one of its rubber feet missing. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to me with Chinese products. In the past few months I have had at least two other items that were faulty and this meant multiple trips back to the shop. Problems include missing bits, the item simply doesn't work, or weak bits that break. The last one is interesting because some of the products are quite heavily built, but have a flimsy part that will break as soon as you touch it. China has learnt how to mass produce but still has a long way to go in terms of quality control. In the last 24 hours I have accessed these websites. I wasn't actually looking for bad websites, but there they were. It's amazing to see that some people still design sites as though they are paying by the square inch (even if they were these layouts are all wrong) and, yes, these are their homepages. Exhibit A. and just to show it is not an isolated case, here is another. Charlie Brooker has written an interesting article in The Guardian. It is actually about drugs, but he makes a comparison to newspapers, saying:
"It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper", although it's better known by one of its many "street names", such as "The Currant Bun" or "The Mail" or "The Grauniad" (see me – Ed). In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards." How very true. I would add that if newspapers are like drugs, then TV is hard drugs. The difference is that we can at least somewhat discern fact from fiction in the print media. This is because we have to engage our brains a bit to read text, and also because we have to form our own meaning from the text construction. These (positive) barriers between us and the message allow us to filter the information, but they don't exist in the case of TV. We simply absorb the message. It involves no real brain action, so we tend to just accept it as is. That would be bad enough, but there is a greater danger. TV news producers have come to identify that moving picture impacts much more powerfully on our senses than print, and they work it for all its worth. Slick editing has overtaken proper journalism to provide a sensation that we are getting real information, when in actual fact it is mostly BS. The way this works is to provoke an emotional response from us, rather than a thinking one. This is exactly the same psychology used in movies, where it is used to the viewer's advantage. With news, this should not be happening - it is manipulation. The TV news should have this subtitle: "this news SHOW is presented for you entertainment only. Viewer's are advised to look elsewhere for unbiased, well-researched news material." You can read the entire Guardian article here. Reach for the sky...aim for the stars...but how to get there? Build the Starship Enterprise.
I recently bought a Yongmei YM7000 keyboard on TradeMe that was earthquake damaged and not going. I got it for $9 and bid just out of interest, thinking I could probably get it going and give it to someone for a learner keyboard. There were two faults, one being a wire had come adrift in the wallwart - easily fixed. The other proved more elusive. The end of the main circuit board was torn beside the LSI. I actually got the thing working, then remembered I had forgotten to vacuum the broken bits of plastic out, so I took the top off, and it stopped working. No amount of coaxing, and resoldering would get it going again, so it's off to the trash. Here's of photo showing why this cheap junk is irreparable - The LSI is on a little piece of circuit board that is inside a hole in the main board, and it is just solder bridges making contact between the two boards. It would seem the brain of the thing was made for something else, and then spliced into this model.
My upward scrolling failed recently. I did a search on the Web and there are plenty of You Tube videos on how to fix it. The first one I viewed was over 8 minutes long and detailed how to take it apart and clean the tiny rollers around the scroll-ball. This is not so easy as the case is glued together, and tweezers are needed as the parts are so small. So, I carried on, hoping to find a simpler solution - and here it is: turn the mouse upside down and roll the scroll-ball around on a sheet of paper. That's it, done, it works!
This article is about photographers but is just as applicable to audio enthusiasts. Get ready to laugh by clicking here.
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