Random post: Fat bird

American Tree Sparrow

An interesting subwoofer

This graph shows its frequency response in different placements -


The "Far from the wall" looks to be the best - it has the flattest frequency curve.

Hmm... a subwoofer designed to be placed far from the wall.

Quote of the day: "The dumber you are, the more problems life gives you"

Life is fair.

Apple and Orange

Don't we like it when people compare apples to oranges?

Inside Philips SWA6311 coaxial audio cable

Found out by accident that the RCA plug can be unscrewed to reveal the inside.


They really care a lot about reliability (pronounced "no short circuit") in commercial products. Minimal amount of exposure, a layer of insulation around the center connector, possibly heatshrink.

The fact that it can be unscrewed plus the quality of the packaging make me suspect it to be a China clone job. But no biggie, it is still professionally done, much better than overpriced and off-spec cables made in Singapore.

Hand-braided S/PDIF cables:

http://www.xtremeplace.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=74222.0

Hand-braided S/PDIF cables... now I've seen it all.

If it can be reverse-engineered by a kid, it isn't worth reverse-engineering... or designing in the first place

Somebody was complaining to me that it is bad to reverse-engineer a product.

I prefer to call it convergent development.

Quote of the day:

"Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me..."

--J Gordon Holt.

Ever bought something on impulse thinking it is cheap then finding out other another place is selling it cheaper at everyday prices?

Like PC shows, for example - where everything is at least the same price as normal, if not higher.

Well I just found out that I got pwned. No it's not the Philips cables - those are excellent buys, it's something else not tech related.

And probably because it's not tech related I got my bullsh!t radar turned off, or I was just too stressed since I went out to de-stress.

MX5020.6

The upgrade part for the MX5020.5 finally came in today - my old Sony SRS-D4 subwoofer; I can't call it trusty because its power button is still not yet fixed, because I didn't have the time to fix it the last time I went home.

Does your place have dreams?

Dreams, does your place have them?

Random thought of the day:

Friction resists motion and is hence undesired

But on a car, between the wheel and the ground, friction is wanted as much as possible

Interesting invention, the wheel.

Computer myth: Having a bigger/better CPU/GPU heatsink makes the rest of the system hotter

It is not true, and I shall provide the explanation - physics style.

There is a myth that a bigger heatsink dumps heat faster to the surrounding hence heats the surrounding up.

While that is true if talking about lower thermal resistance...

But understand where the heat is coming from.

All of the heat energy is coming from the graphics card.

And all this heat energy will have to be dissipated to the surrounding. Regardless of the size of the heatsink

i.e. rate of heat transfer is constant (to be precise, when the graphics card temperature stabilizes)

A smaller heatsink just means a higher temperature before this amount of heat transfer takes place - since rate of heat transfer is dependent on temperature difference between the two.

To illustrate, an example -

A 50W gfx card, a 1°C/W lousy heatsink, and a 0.5°C/W decent heatsink (in comparison, good CPU coolers are 0.25°C/W and lower), with air temperature at 30°C constant.

The same 50W gfx card will reach 50W x 1°C/W + 30°C = 80°C on the lousy heatsink, and 50W x 1°C/W + 30°C = 55°C on the decent heatsink.

But both will dump 50W of heat into the surrounding. Just at different temperatures.