Islander

The time when house prices are crashing is the time to trade up, since the gap between the value of what you have and the price of the more expensive houses is shrinking. Just a thought.

Your system's not really a money pit, like a horse that needs to be fed whether it's working or not. It's an asset that you're not using much at the moment. If it's not depreciating, it's not costing you anything, and it could be expensive to replace later. How's that for rationalizing?

Sounds like you were pretty "loose" for a second after that bolt hit. "Excuse me while I go upstairs and change my shorts..."

Have you tried just turning up the level of the center channel?

My Yamaha Class D power amps are described in their literature as SEPP (Single-Ended Push-Pull). Does that make any sense or is it even possible?

Heresies are popular for HT use. They were the world's first center speaker, after all. I'm running a Heresy II for a center channel (laying on its side under the TV) and a pair of Heresy IIs for surround, with a pair of JubScalas for main speakers. I think there are at least a couple of forum members using 5 Heresies in their home theater systems. If you wanted a pair of floorstanders for your main speakers, a pair of Fortes might suit you well. If your subwoofer works well, it should integrate just fine with your HT. As for Sony AV receivers, Sony is best known for good TVs, not so much for receivers. Yamaha, Denon and Harman Kardon are used by many members, as well as Onkyo.

Are you finding that when you set the level so explosions and gunshots are not too loud, then the dialogue is too low? With modern home theater systems, the special effects can be nearly as loud as they'd be in real life, which is too loud for some folks, so they turn down the volume, but then can't hear the dialogue. If you have a Night setting, it will reduce the dynamic range of the signal, meaning the loud sounds will be reduced in volume, but the soft sounds will not, which might help your situation. The Night setting may even have a couple of positions, so you can reduce the dynamic range just a bit or somewhat more.

The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer thinks the glass should be 50% smaller...

Shouldn't ONE MILLION WATTS be in all caps? It would be pretty loud, after all.

I see, the gymnasts/swimsuit models left me because I could no longer do the helicopter trick due to my injuries, and it was my signature move. Wait a minute, this must be a parallel timeline, since after I paid all the "brokerage fees" and taxes to import the parts to put together my JubScalas, I'd never mail order anything again. Seriously, the downside of dating young beautiful women is that they make you look old and not beautiful.

So I stopped dating those gymnasts/swimsuit models? But it's going so well. What could have happened? I'd better jump off the balcony now, before it's too late!

Man, where was this info last month, when I caught my future self in the sack with my girlfriend? How could I have turned into such an inconsiderate horndog? I wonder what his girlfriend looks like? He even laughed because I had only two JubScalas...

I'm not so sure about that "number one nation for immigrants" claim anymore. All the first world nations are experiencing it, whether from Africa, Asia, or eastern Europe. Canada may be the number one nation for immigrants from the US, so what does that tell you? They don't just come for the hockey...

I've been happily using a Yamaha RX-V750 to drive my La Scalas, then last year I added a Yamaha MX-D1 power amp, which added clarity as well as extra power. Now I've added a second MX-D1 to bi-amp my speakers, which are now JubScalas. The Yamaha receivers work well on their own and make decent pre-amps if you want to use a separate power amp.

Jeff, we seem to be talking at cross-purposes. You're talking about an American government program. I don't live in America and don't think it's my place to discuss your government's policies. What I had an issue with was your characterization of the poor, working or otherwise, and the disabled. I've had quite a bit of exposure to both groups and felt that I should bring what I'd learned to your attention, since it appeared that you were basing your postings on stereotypes and not on personal experience. As well, you likely have better knowledge of the number of scammers in your country's programs than I do, so I won't comment further on that.

Jeff, I agree that 1 in 18 does sound suspiciously high. However, I stand by the items you put in bold print. Most spinal cord injuries are worse. Spending months in a rehab hospital learning how to take care of myself is where I saw that on a daily basis. Spinal cord injury is permanent. There is some improvement for the first 12-18 months as the swelling of the cord subsides, but what you're left with after that is what you're looking at for the rest of your life, apart from small changes that may occur, some for the better, some for the worse. As for my statement that a spinal cord injury shortens your life, this is a proven fact, reflected in thoroughly-researched actuarial tables. The person's fitness is compromised because he's unable to use the large leg muscles to properly work out the heart and lungs. The leg paralysis also impairs blood circulation, which doesn't help either. Those are the major factors. There are other factors as well. However, after typing all this stuff in these posts, I'm starting to think your mind is made up and any information I provide, whether or not I learned it first-hand over a decade or more, won't change that. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I just hope you never have the misfortune of becoming disabled. The reality of it might be more than you could deal with.

You come up with some remarkable generalizations, Jeff. A person may be using a wheelchair for a variety of reasons, from being an amputee, to having MS or some other disease, to having a spinal cord injury, to name just a few. Some may be able to work almost full-time, some part-time, some not at all. As a result, the vast majority of people in this situation live in poverty, unless their condition occurred after they'd been in the workforce for quite some time. A teenage quadraplegic will never be able to earn the living he would have had he not been injured, and his daily expenses will be high, from the basics like single-use catheters that cost $10-15 a day, just so he can urinate, to the purchase and maintenance of a wheelchair and other equipment that he can't do without, ever. He may even need a home-care worker to lift him from his bed into his chair in the morning and back into bed in the evening, as well as taking care of his other basic needs. Would you deny that young man a disability pension? I can tell you first-hand that with a spinal cord injury, not being able to walk is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other health problems that go along with it, from daily pain, sometimes extreme, to occasional incontinence, to fatigue, to the constant risk of pressure sores, which killed Christopher Reeve, by the way. A spinal cord injury is permanent. You don't get better, and your life will be shorter. Believe it or not, there are people who are unable to do productive work, through no fault of their own. The small minority of cheaters and scammers who play the system don't change that fact.

In luxury product lines, the high price of an item adds to its desirability. Some buyers weren't interested in Klipschorns because they weren't expensive enough, never mind how good they sound. People at certain income levels expect to spend a certain amount on the things they want and won't buy anything that costs less, since it would lower their status in their eyes and the eyes of their equally snobby friends. That's not to say that all Palladium buyers are snobs, just that the Palladium line is aimed at a market that may have more than a few.

Congratulations, Mike! Hope the job lives up to your expectations and you live up to the company's. It's great to actually find a job in the field you're interested in.

Perhaps you don't have much contact with the poor, so you think they're just as capable of managing their lives as the rest of us, but they're just too lazy to work for a living. It's not as simple as that. I owned a rooming house for ten years, and I learned that the poor are not poor because they have no money, they're poor because they don't have the basic life skills that most people have. Organizing their budgets to get them through the month was beyond the abilities of some of my tenants, so I had to collect the rent on their payday, since it would be spent by rent day if I didn't. They didn't have the skills or knowledge to get a decent job in the first place, so their low income permitted no discretionary spending at all. If every penny of your income went to paying for rent, food and clothing, and you still often came up short, you'd feel no better than a slave. I rented to middle-aged men who'd been poor all their lives and could see no possibility of their situations ever changing. It wasn't surprising that some of them drank a lot. They probably felt that a bit of temporary joy was well worth an argument with the landlord. There are certainly some layabouts or bums among the poor, but most of the poor are trying to make their way in a world that's just too difficult for them to compete in. They shouldn't be scorned because their best efforts aren't enough. Taking a few dollars from the fortunate people to help the less fortunate is the decent thing to do and reflects the values of the caring culture that we all claim to belong to.

When retirement age was first set at 65, by a German Kaiser, IIRC, that was the average life expectancy. It's easy to fund a program when most clients don't live long enough to collect...

What, you've never seen good technical writing before? Clear, concise and easy to follow. The humour is a bonus.

Tommy Bolin, but no Marc Bolan? And where's Tak Matsumoto? The ranking of the first 10 sort of makes sense, but after that the sequence seems pretty debatable...

Arrrr-right on!

The CD loudness war has been going on for a few years now. It was discussed at length on the forum a month or two ago. Basically, many of the artists and producers today want a CD that's louder than everyone else's CD, so the levels are jacked up and compressed to the point of clipping. When you see a display of the waveform showing the difference between older CDs and current ones, it's very obvious.