Journey Beyond Madness: We Finished Our Speaker Project... For Now

I don’t know how many folks have followed our first halting steps into the world of HiFi audio, but to say the very least, we’ve been on quite an odyssey. To be clear, you can take it much, MUCH further than what we’ve done here. However, like my enthusiasm for photography, I now feel like we’ve learned enough to continue learning at a slower, more reasonable pace. More to the point, we’ve reached a level of resolution that feels entirely reasonable and fulfilling, at least for the time being.

Here we're showing you a picture of an auditory experience.

To put that another way, if we go any further with this thing, it’ll get SUPER expensive. This is not the goal.

A Few Favorite Pics from Maine

Sally and I went to Maine last week on vacation. Now that I've finally had a chance to comb through all the pictures we took, here are some of my favorites.

Final Thoughts on the Swim Across the Sound 2024

Happy Friday, friends!

Just wanted to take a minute to give some final thoughts on this year’s Swim Across the Sound. 

When all was said and done, Team RBG raised over $9000 to help BEAT CANCER. We also finished an outstanding 4th out of 17 teams in the Classic (No Wetsuit) division. Considering that we are all mostly in our mid-to-late 40s or early 50s, we all thought that was pretty darned good.

D&D: Penguinoids

My daughter Emma and I discussed some D&D character ideas the other night. I then wrote this yesterday on my way into work.

Penguinoids

Noble but rare and often somewhat reclusive, the Penguinoids of the polar regions live in settlements scattered across the polar tundra. Many fear outsiders, but a select few venture forth to trade and to see the world.

AI conceptions of Penguinoid adventurers. All pics via Microsoft's Copilot app.

Penguinoids revere nature and their great Goddess of Frost. Tribal Arctic Penguinoids tend to be Druidic, living close to the land. More civilized Emperor Penguinoids live in a handful of large towns that dot the Arctic coastline.

Swim Across the Sound Update

Friends,

Team RBG had a banner week this week, totalling over $8,000 in donations from our incredibly generous friends and families. I feel truly blessed and humbled by your outpouring of support this past week, and indeed, throughout this whole season. The Swim changes lives, especially mine. Watching my own friends and collegues come together to support my cause has been a life-changing, life-affirming event in an increasingly hostile and polarizing world.

Selfie from Tuesday's taper training session.

Journey Into Madness: The WiiM Pro Plus & Our Household Sound System

With this post, we've now written three times about our never-ending journey towards building a high(ish)-end sound system in our house and on our back deck. While I don't know that we're necessarily done with this project, we're done for right now. Thus, this post serves as a cross between a write-up of lessons learned and an exorcism of the madness that's developed from starting to learn about this stuff in the first place.

From an early version of Sports Bar on the Back Deck.
We've come a LONG way from here.

If you missed the previous entries in this series, you can find them here:

• Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck
• Twitter Threads: Sound Quality

We may well come back to this in the future, but for right now, I feel like I've maybe exhausted my wife's patience with this thing. Moreover, we've definitely hit a point of diminishing returns.

Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck

If you know me, then you probably know that I go through phases. I get obsessive and maniacal about stuff on a rotating basis. My most recent phase is high fidelity (HiFi) sound on a budget, and it's been perfect for me in the sense that it's intensely, endlessly complicated with no obvious end-point in sight.

Our back deck canopy

It turns out that like Triathlon, HiFi is a journey, not a destination.