damn… err, i repeat. damn…

I’ve just finished assembling a pair of modified Decware Radial 1 speakers. Cutting to the chase these sound absolutely stunning and come close to trumping my Infinity P-FR’s in almost every way.

As these original Radials came unassembled with upgraded speakers, Jensen capacitors, Audioquest Indigo internal wire, etc, I took the liberty of continuing the upgrade to 1.5′s by adding new bases, cones, passives etc. (thank you Zygi!). After fixing various issues with the veneer, I decided to turn my attention to seal the inside of the speakers with black hole pads that I obtained from speakercity a while back for a different project.

(If anyone is curious, you can do both speakers, top and bottom gaskets, etc. in 6 sheets. – highly recommended).

I sit here slack-jawed as I can’t believe the detail and range I’m hearing from these speakers. When I hear folks talk like this, I usually role my eyes and move on, but the imaging, depth and bass (yes, i said it… bass!) that is coming out of these speakers is absolutely astounding. I need to experiment a bit more with different resistors and weighting the passives, but I’m absolutely floored by what I’m hearing.

I have a crummy room for audio, but these speakers seem incredibly forgiving of this sin. And when I open my eyes I absolutely amazed at how such small speakers can produce such a large, accurate soundstage.

ok… enough of the rants, back to the music…

The legs are 2.25″ diameter cherry with 1.5″ maple shelves and maple cross supports. The black cones and spikes are from partsexpress.

The design is more complex than it needed to be, but the adjustablity and leveling I find extreamly effective. The ‘floating’ aspect of the design is asthetic, modular and allows the shelves to expand / contract (as maple will in the climate I’m in).

There are various modifications I expect to do to make this more useful and minimize the problems inherent in this floating design. (FWIW, I don’t think I’d do another one like this.) In the meantime, however, I’m pleased with the result.

Additional (albiet poor) pictures are available for those interested. Caveat emptor… I know far more about wood than photography.

I’m a jazz fan. The combination of vinyl, low watt tube amplifcation, high efficency speakers and jazz works for me. Spinning some Miles Davis in particular I really enjoy.

Ok… enough on that. A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes combining some of the tools that we’re building in the Simile project together to show the value of accessing data that is “behind” web pages and viewing this data in new and interesting ways. The Miles Davis discography timeline is a quick example of this (as well as a painful reminder of all of the Miles Davis albums I don’t have!).

For the unfortunate souls who don’t know who Miles Davis was, the BBC sums it up nicely…

“American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. He was in at the birth of hard bop, ‘cool’ jazz, modal jazz and jazz/rock fusion. For much of his life he struggled with racial prejudice and drug addiction. An icon of the modern age.” – BBC Artist Profile of Miles Davis.

The Miles Davis discography data (rdf/xml) and corresponding scraper that extracts the data from the BBC site are available for those interested in learning more. The Timeline tool is another excellent creation from David Huynh and provided by the Simile project.

Well, I miss google maps more specifically.

Even more specifically, I miss google maps on piggy-bank.

Piggy-bank is about making it easy to manage information you find interesting and share this with a group. Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways. The information I find personally useful comes in many shapes / sizes (personal contacts, bookmarks, bibliographic citations, interesting news items, photos, events, personal email, etc.). While I’ve found lots of applications help me manage each of these independantly, the real benifit I’ve found is being able to see how individual bits of personal information connect. “Oh! I have a meeting with ‘Company Y’ at 5 pm today? Who have I talked with recently that is working with them?” The value from my perspective when you start acquiring enough data is in the relationships among the data rather than the data itself.

You might not know all of the relationships that exist between the information that you find personally interesting, but others may. Sharing these relationships with trusted colleagues creates webs of data greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Ok, back to maps.

One of the nice features of Piggy-Bank (and of the Simile project in general) is making it easy to not only to mix and match different bits of data, but to mix and match different services as well. One of the examples we provide is integrating Google maps to provide a geographical overlay of the data one might collect.

As a thought experiment, I did this with a group of folks that have a serious problem with low-cost, high-quality, flea-powered tube based amplifiers and high efficency speakers (ok, so its a relatively small group… but as a card-carrying member, this stuff sure makes my ears happy-happy!). And while I hope to eventually get around and connect the dots as to why I think global Initiatives like the Semantic Web and specific projects like Simile are so potentially revolutionary in helping communities share information, experiences and more effectively collaborate – the short version is I helped plot the folks that are in this group on a map. People didn’t realize how physically close there were to one another and this little bit of effort is helpful in starting to pull together regional events where folks can geek together on a face-to-face basis.

And it was easy! Piggy-bank helped reduce the cost for collecting this information, merge it with other bits and with minimal effort plot this on a map. Further it allows the ability to overlay *multiple* bits of data onto a map. You want to overlay hotels *and* subway stops in Boston? No problem! Ok.. so there is a problem (you need to have this data transformed into a common representation that faciliates this stitching together on information) . But the effort in doing this is far less than what it would have taken before. And if one person does manage to do the effort of translating the data regarding hotels from ’site X’ and another does subway stops from ’site Y’, its easy for the next person to reuse these translators (along with the translated data!). This in part is what the ‘Semantic Bank’ is all about. Being able to share this information in a way others can reuse it. Collectively, we’re all smarter than any one of us individually.

Ok… so here I am very excited. Whats next? For a long time I’ve been wanted to overlay airports and my travel history for the past 10 years as I’ve often though this would make for a cool map. Here I am getting global airport data into RDF (10 min worth of work) and then start the process of merging this in with my historical travel data.

I go to visualize this and Google turns around changes the API. This is to be expected – they’ve done this on a weekly basis for a while. Its beta, and I more than understand beta code. only now an additional requirement of using an application Key based on a static IP address has been introduced. Err…. now we’re stuck. This shoots the whole personal information meets google maps revolution. There is no static IP address for my client / browser. Various inquiries are underway with Google to see if if there are other options we might consider, but until then I’m unfortunatly mapless.

In the mean time, I sure do miss google maps on piggy-bank. If you want this too, please let us know over on the Simile list.

The face-lift on my Decware Zen amplifier is finally complete and I’m extremely happy with the results. The Zen is one of the best amplifiers I’ve heard and now it looks (almost) as good as it sounds. The re-termination of some 25+ year old silver braided speaker cables have complemented this amp quite nicely.