Lostin76

Yamaha and Polk definitely make you an audiophile - and you ar over 40. This is the place for you!

Outlaws indeed.

It is often said on the big audio forums that the best/cheapest investment you can make in your stereo system is a bag of weed.

That’s pretty awesome. Good for her. I may be biased, but it’s certainly not harming anyone for her to grow her own.

Over 50 now, so “old people talking about music” fits me perfectly!

It’s really satisfying growing from seeds and you do have a lot more variety to choose from. We just don’t have the space to dedicate to it here. My old man used to grow weed in our backyard - was semi-hidden by the grapevines and rabbit hutches. Then he switched over to an entire indoor hydroponic system with big tech lights and exhaust fans.

Oh man, those are the one and they are incredible. I went with Brandywine Pink for this year, but I will never pass up Giant Syrians if I see them available. They seem to be mostly only available as seeds the last couple of years and not starts.

It’s such a well-mastered album that it literally sounds great on anything! Those guys knew what they were doing in the studio.

The original pressing is pretty hard to beat. And I always tell people great mastering on an old medium will always beat compressed/crappy mastering on the latest tech. I think that’s what really hurt CDs eventually. Sure, they were quiet, but they also often sounded thin and grating b/c of compression and loudness levels. I also stream a ton of music, but I hate not being able to choose the version I want. Sometimes it sounds great and then other times, it’s subpar. 9 times out of ten it’s the good old fashioned album for me. And then there’s always this cartoon that really captures it for me:

It is so weird. I had a staff member ask me in late-December of 2019 if we would have to wear masks and I laughed. And there’s this - currently, one of my faculty is in New Zealand for his wedding (he’s from there). He and his wife landed and were immediately escorted to a hotel for a mandatory 14 day quarantine. No exceptions. Food is delivered to them. The crazy thing is no one wears masks in NZ anymore he said. They look out their window and talk to people on Facetime and it’s like COVID never existed. I think masks are here to stay for at least the rest of this year in many places.

Yep, that album is mastered so well. Their self-titled LP with Sultans of Swing is also mastered really well. Just sounds incredible on any system. I have a 45rpm version of both of those albums and man, they just sound so rich and full. Sometimes, you just have to laugh it sounds so good.

Super encouraging to see the speed of vaccinations increasing and cases going down. We have a new variant here in NYC that is freaking some people out, but hopefully it won’t reverse the trends. My dad and grandmother are both fully vaccinated in Indiana. We’ve been fully vaccinated for some time, but still behaving as if nothing has changed. Last year on this day my wife and I arrived in Mexico City for her birthday. It was an incredible trip to an amazing city - probably my favorite city I’ve ever visited. Felt like the last big hurrah before the world changed. On our way home we were starting to see people in the airport wearing masks and we were like, “Man, these people are totally over-reacting.”

That’s exactly what someone lse who recently got one said. He said, “Sure it sounds good now, but just wait!” I agree that even with all of the advances in audio, analog really can sound so much better and fuller with the right system. I like streaming too and some CDs, but they don’t sound near as good as my vinyl rig. Great question about the tubes. This amp is supposed to be pretty easy on tubes and they say you can get up to 10,000 hours on the big tubes and like 3,000-5,000 hours on the smaller ones. Rogue sells tubes and there are a few reputable places online where you can buy them too. I don’t know if you remember this, but some tubes sound better and are highly sought after. It’s not uncommon for people to pay $400+ for a single tube. I do remember the cabinet of tubes at the grocery store and the stereo store though. Those were the days! They also make new tubes now in Eastern Europe and China, but people still seek out the old US or Holland-made tubes. I will say this, the amp looks amazing in the evening with the lights low and a beverage in your hand!

Oh yeah! And also going to check out Hill Farmstead - I can never get their stuff even her in NYC. She booked us a cabin outside of Burlington, so should be able to hit up a few places.

My wife booked a trip for my birthday in July to Vermont. Am pretty psyched to check out a bunch of breweries up there!

The Rogue Audio CMIII finally arrived today. UPS dropped it off in the lobby and ignored the signature required part. Good thing the box at 60 lbs was too big for anyone to steal. I hooked it up this afternoon and had to bias the driver tubes (they provide a little screwdriver and it only took a few minutes). Have been listening to it since about 3pm and it’s really opening up in the last hour or so. I know they say components need time to break in, but this thing is already a SHOCKING improvement over my Class D integrated amp that I’ve been listening to over the last six years. I’ve been told to give it a few days or up to a couple weeks for it to really sound good, but am already just gobsmacked. Even my wife was like, “Damn, this sounds incredible.” I’ve never seen something so thin and relatively small weigh so much though. I guess that means it’s high quality and US made in Pennsylvania!

Not surprised by that at all. But yeah, board rules. If you lived in NY back then, you knew that it was going to be a deluge of cases and deaths pretty quickly. Hospitals were struggling to figure it out and nursing homes had no chance.

Numbers are looking much better for most places. And the winter wasn’t quite as horrific as I expected. Happy to be wrong about that. Our governor has went full on movie villain at this point though. What a douchebag. It’s like he’s insulted that people question him about the nursing home deaths.

Good point about the next 4-8 years, everything could definitely go pear-shaped. I have run the numbers though and unless we hit the lottery (that we have never played) then there is absolutely no possibility of us earning/withdrawing more in retirement than we make together now. It’s just not going to happen. That said, I will most likely toss some dollars at an IRA in my last years working. Will be nice to have a tax free pot to withdraw funds from with less rules.

So, so much, my friend. My job is great and pays well, but lots of responsibility and worries. I’m about five years away from retiring I think. Could do it comfortably in three, but those two extra years will help. Then I can focus on photography (going to build a darkroom for printing), gardening, and relaxing!

That’s certainly possible, but let’s hope not too much higher! Also, my wife is 11 years younger than me, so she will most likely keep working for the first five years or so after I retire.

I’ve always understood that you will be withdrawing less in retirement than your income in your prime earning years, which would put you in a lower tax bracket in retirement. Edited to add: I’m not an expert at all. Know just enough to be dangerous.

Sobering front page of the NYT showing a black dot for all 500,000 of the US COVID deaths. We’ve obviously been following this thing all along, but I’m still shocked to sit and think that at least 500,000 people are dead in the US b/c of COVID. That’s a staggering amount of loss. My Administrative Coordinator has had so many friends and relatives die over the last year. She’s very active in her church (through Zoom this year), but the number of older, black people she knows who have died is just brutal. Recently one of her Sunday school teachers was admitted to the hospital for something else. She caught COVID in the hospital, was placed on a ventilator, and died last week.

I really need to do an IRA at some point. I like the way you laid out using it as a bridge between early retirement and 401K eligibility. My strategy has been to max out my 401K to get that tax savings. I’ve got a Scwhabb account with some index funds and Apple, but no IRA of any kind. I guess I have until 4/15 to start one.

Since Apple tumbled a bit today, I bought another big chunk of shares. My wife held off to see if it falls any further. Watch it fall again tomorrow. 😬