China delivers. Again.

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Fordiebianco

Hello!

The tubification of the household continues. After the introduction of one of Aric Audio‘s pre-amplifiers to the livingroom’s audio chain I was on a roll: what I needed now was similar tubey, valvey goodness for the man cave upstairs. I already had a lovely little pre-amplifier from the nice man at BTE-Design and another chunky Marantz SM-80 to drive the rather power hungry KEF LS-50s, but what was missing was a DAC that could deliver tubey, valvey goodness and decode the bits and bytes coming from the computers in the man cave. Many audio forums were scrutinised, hours were spend on ebay, and in the end the Xiang Sheng DAC 01-A, a tube DAC and headphone amp was chosen. Recently updated with a new XMOS-U8 USB interface supporting DSD64 and 128, this was future proof for more high res music and backwards compatible enough to play my old 128k MP3s from 2001. Doukmall from Ebay again delivered on time and on budget and for £150 there was really not that much risk.

As promised, ten days later a package from China arrived, direct from the manufacturer, XiangSheng Electronic Co in Hefei. DHL get around, don’t they?

Well packaged, with a moderately readable instruction booklet its compact and has loads of inputs:

USB, optical, coax and two analog inputs. The outputs are straight analog or tube enhanced.

Sorry, didn’t have a banana at hand.

If you want to, you can open it up and switch the jumpers to turn it into a pre-amp instead, rendering the headphone amp obsolete. Xiang Shen’s custumer service was quick to help with any questions and the unit has been working faultlessly ever since it arrived. To play higher resolution tracks via the USB 2.0 interface, you’ll have to download XMOS’s driver which is ubiquitous on the net and which works well on Windows 10. It sounds brillant, with significant improvement to my last DAC, even though that was significantly more expensive. Another win for China MidFi. I certainly bow to our new Chinese MidFi Overlords.

What’s Left But To Wallow In Nostalgia?

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Fordiebianco

Hi there.

These days it seems to be the usual thing for me to apologise to you for not blogging sooner.

Well, I’m sorry.

Also, Twitter seems to do it for me these days. 140 characters, wham, bam, thank you mam. What other medium forces you to critise the health secretary in only one sentence. There seems to be a lot of this about at present. Critising the government, I mean. The one in the UK, to be exact. I don’t even want to imagine what it must be like to be an U.S. American these days. As Charlie Brooker said: “I think there is something wrong with my television. It’s showing me images and sounds from a universe I don’t recognise.” Consequently, for old social liberals of the continental sort there is not much to celebrate these days. If I ever meet Francis Fukuyama I will certainly I have a few choice words for him: ‘The End of History’ my arse. With society around us becoming coarser, more polarised and all together more unpleasant, it’s to time to switch off the news, unsubscribe from the political twitter feeds and focus on the pleasant things in life, such as 12″ remixes from the eighties.

Huh?

Indeed. I personally wouldn’t have come up with the topic myself (though admittedly I do hear a few of these), but my favourite corner of the internet, the UK’s ‘Guardian’ news paper last week asked its readers for the best 12″ remixes of the eighties. The response was impressive, with over 750 entries by old people like myself. As befitting the Guardian, the choiced ranged from the daft (early Kylie, The Goodies, Italo Disco) the so-so (T’Pau [who names their group after an old fictional alien. tsstss], Soft Cell, Peter Gabriel), the rare (Kariya, Act, Barrington Levy), the irrestible (Sister Sledge, Mantronix, Thompson Twins) to the sublime (Matt Bianco, Frankie goes to Hollywood, David Bowie, Prince, Freeez). To make a point, let’s just remind you of this lovely example how to make an (at times hilarious) 12″.

So, instead of losing (even more) of my hair by worrying about the world turning into some populistic hell hole, I’ll rather work on my perfect, 10 hour Spotify playlist of amazing eighties 12″ tracks. Suggest some via Twitter!

A Brexit Limerick

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Fordiebianco

There was a young lady from Troon,
who voted for Brexit last June.
Now the doctors are gone, there is no new dawn,
and she regrets that she partied too soon.

Here’s Johnny

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Fordiebianco

I remember it quite vividly: it was 1985, and I was sitting in the only pub of a tiny coastal village on the North Sea, nursing a small beer and staring out the window, enjoying the sunset. The pub had one of those small CRT TVs sitting on the bar, and because I was the only customer, the bar keeper asked whether he could turn it on, switching the channel to a clip show showing the latest music videos (remember those? Big thing in the eighties, especially for countries who didn’t get MTV yet [when they were still playing music]), of course presented by a person with big hair. Between the usual Michael Jackson, Madonna and A-Ha there was suddenly the most enormous big band sound filling the pub and an amazingly catchy tune made both the barkeeper and me look up and check out the clip. On the small screen where 4 obviously British chaps with a large big band doing their thing, miming away with vim and vigour and 3 minutes and 24 seconds later they were gone. I couldn’t quite understand the presenter afterwards, but I caught the word ‘idlewild’, though I didn’t know whether this was the band’s name or the song title. A few days later I tried to find the record at my various local record shops (all of them history), but nobody had heard of the track and that was that. Over the years I tried to find the record from time to time, but all I could find was stuff from the Scottish band ‘Idlewild’ which was definitely not what I was looking for. But just a few days ago, I stumbled over a link on youtube, and there they were: the same video as in 1985, with the same 4 chaps with their funny eighties pop star hairdos and the big band sound. Have a look:

Weren’t they glorious? Isn’t the song amazing?

They were called ‘Here’s Johnny’, from Liverpool and unfortunately dropped by their record company after only a few singles, not even having a single album under their belt (or a wikipedia entry – how sad is that). There is an comment under an (excellent quality) soundcloud entry of the song by Colin McKay, their songwriter:

That’s me . . . Still can’t believe nobody bought it!

True. Nevertheless, I now bought the 12″ off ebay, and while my little contribution unfortunately will not find its way into Colin’s pockets, I can blast the song now, 31 years later, through the house while I dance through the living room like a complete idiot, yelling ‘I start to shake, I start to tremble’ .

Mission accomplished, Colin.