blueqube

I’m not really a movie buff but I am trying to get a collection of things I like on physical media. The Goonies was one of my childhood favorites so I pre-ordered this in 4K UHD from Amazon today. 😅

It will probably have a ton of film grain like the copy of the Matrix I have. But I guess who cares. 🙂

I will also pick up Battle Angle Alita soon because I really enjoyed that movie. It looked amazing on regular blueray so kicking it up to UHD should be spectacular.

That’s all for today! Chilling in my listening room with Tubular Bells. Oldie but goodie.

A picture from my Sunday walk in the park. Very nice weather and very enjoyable except for the stupid mask! 🙂

I have a faulty service valve on the low side of the compressor. It is leaking R410A when I uncap to connect my gages and lineset. If I try to pull a vacuum I will vacuum out the R410A.

I called the company and they went on the blame game immediately. Saying I did something wrong… I went off on them cutting them off and yelling. I think I got my way and am waiting on a confirmation of a new unit… If they screw me I will send it back to Amazon and let them try to fuck Amazon… I’m sure Amazon will force them to take it back.

Unfortunately I will need to unmount the compressor which was a pain in the ass to get up on its mount alone…. Now I have to figure out how to get it down and the new one back up.

Today wasn’t a total bust tho… I ran the electric to the unit and will button it all up tomorrow. I didn’t feel like finishing up today because it was getting late and I didn’t want to rush and make any mistakes.

Anyway, listening to Aurora at the moment. I can’t get enough of her voice..

I started the work to install my mini-split. The work is not very hard but with work and bad weather I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. I have the indoor and outdoor unit mounted. The line set and communications wiring has been done. I still need to pull a vacuum and run a new 220v circuit.

The indoor unit looks to be crooked but it’s dead on level… Old house. I can’t adjust it visually because it needs to be perfectly level for the condensate line… Just have to live with it.

I ran the line set out the right, not ideal because it has to go under the stove vent but it made my piping alot easier to deal with. I don’t have any outdoor pictures at the moment but will add later if I remember.

The electrical will be the most difficult part of the installation and I hope to get that done early next week so I can beat the heat. I will be running the power in one of the on wall conducts up by the ceiling. It should look like a strange molding when I am done. Going to run a 110v ckt as well so I have power in my closet to run my some small audio related stuff. 😬

That’s about it for now… More later when I have the time.

I really miss Roon when on the move. The interface on the Tidal and Qobuz apps are so clunky. I’m currently trying out USB Audio Player Pro with mqa support on Android. Doesn’t make the interface any better and search still sucks but it does add alot of configuration options not available without it.

I’m using my Tin Audio T3’s exclusively with Dekoni tips as preached by Zeos of Z-Reviews. The Dekoni’s do really help in the comfort department and seal out external noise pretty well. Great little combo for an extremely low price… You do need some patience because shipping from China was slow and I bet it’s worse now.

I noticed yesterday that my car doesn’t have an analog input… Just Bluetooth and USB… No external DAC for long drives. I guess that’s a good thing because I use Waze religiously and would loose the ability to see the maps on the main display if I used an external dac.

Not much else to add at the moment. Be safe everyone.

Doesn’t look like many people around here are taking the quarantine very seriously. I am keeping my distance and being very careful. Will go the park later in the day and check things out. If course I will take precautions and stay away from people.

The weather is really starting to get warm. The pollen is really starting to bother me as well. I read something saying the pollen is going to be bad this year… Something wonderful to add to the quarantine! 😅

I purchased a diy mini split which I will be installing next week. Hopefully I didn’t bite of more then I can chew with it! If I am successful I will install a multi head unit next year upstairs with ceiling mount cassettes. I don’t want to work up in the attic in the summer so I will do that work on the winter.

One of my top 5 favorite albums of all time is MCMXC A. D. from Enigma. After a lengthy search I was able to get a limited edition of this on colored viynal! Still looking for the rest of the Enigma catalog but this is an excellent start.

This is a great album to listen to in a dark room and chill. If you have never listened I recommend it highly.

Since I have been traveling to NYC for business and pleasure quite a bit. ( Before this crazy lock-down) I have been looking for a good way to take high quality tunes with me. I didn’t want to go down the DAP route because my phone has a shitload of storage space for music and an unlimited data plan so using streaming services is a no brainer.

My original idea with to get an AudioQuest Dragonfly Red or Cobalt. It has a great form factor for traveling, super light weight and it can do MQA . Of course that would be logical so I eventually settled on a Chord Mojo… something super cool looking with colored marble buttons but a bit inconvenient for traveling due to it’s size.

So why did I pick this heavy ass aluminum block to carry around with me? Many reasons actually! The build quality is first rate, it’s a solid block of Aluminium. The marble buttons are dead sexy and the use of different colors on the buttons is cool. The volume buttons cycle thru different colors as you raise and lower the volume. The power button also changes color with the sample rate of the input signal. Getting past all the superficial beauty of this thing lies a little monster of a device. Chord doesn’t do an off the shelf DAC chip like most devices. Chord uses a custom FPGA chip with an upper sampling rate of 768kHz/32-bit . It doesn’t do MQA but it does DSD 256! If that wasn’t enough the headphone amp on it is hella powerful. It will l be able to drive anything I’ll ever get in the future to hearing loss levels, and do it super clean.

I was also looking at getting the Chord Poly which adds the ability to connect the Mojo to Roon and stream via bluetooth but I found a cheaper route! Enter Ropieee for the Raspberry Pi. Ropieee adds all the same functionality but is a bit less elegant looking. I have it running on a RPi3 which has more then enough cpu cycles, it works flawlessly. I have the pi powered from a USB powerbank so it’s portable and has clean DC power, less electrical noise and less jitter passed on to the Mojo. I can’t justify spending $600+ on a device that does the same thing as a $35 RPi and 10 mins of time setting it up.

Anyway thats about all I have for now. If your looking for some high quality tunes while you commute I highly recommend the Mojo and a Tidal Masters subscription.