Richard Farrar's Blog

Any system is only as good as the weakest link in the chain and audio systems are certainly no exception to the rule. Assuming that your music system is producing reasonably pleasant sounds, you may never stop to give it a second thought, but with a few simple tests you can check to make sure that your speakers are wired correctly and that you’re getting the best out of your system.

Attaching speakers to your Hi-Fi system usually only requires a few cables. You wouldn’t think that getting these cables mixed up would present much of a problem would you, providing your music plays back OK and no smoke comes out of the system?

Well, under most circumstances you’d be right, with a simple channel mix up being the most likely probable outcome, but if you have a real knack for getting things back to front, then you could have your speakers wired out-of-phase, which while it won’t do any damage, certainly won’t help you to get the best out of your system.

These potential problems are easy to spot with a few simple tests and luckily the corresponding remedies are equally simple.

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Our desire for the illusive paperless office has been around for many years. So, are we any closer to achieving this seemingly impossible dream with recent technological advances, or are we still consigned to emptying the shredder and waste bins every other day?

The concept of the paperless office is certainly nothing new. In 1975, Business Week published an article on “The Office of the Future”. Much of what was predicated in that article has since come true, thanks largely to the release of the now ubiquitous IBM PC in 1981.

However, since the release of the aforementioned PC, rather than decreasing, paper usage in offices doubled in the following 20 years, eventually stabilising around the millennium; hardly a success for the supposed paperless office!

According to the Economist however, since 2001 office paper usage has actually decreased. So, it looks like we’ve finally turned the corner in our paper consumption, but does this mean that we’re close to realising the dream of the paperless office, or do we still have a way to go?

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I never planned to have a home network, it just kind of evolved out of necessity. After a while  though,  I decided that leaving things to evolve naturally may not be the best strategy and decided to apply a bit of intelligent design to the process instead, since which things seem to have grown exponentially.

Only a few years ago, networks were the preserve of large or medium sized business and definitely not something that you would find in the average home.

So, why did I decide to setup a home network in the first place, what benefits do I get from it and how and why has it grown so much? Read on and hopefully all these questions will be answered. Not only that, but you’ll see that a home network doesn’t have to cost the earth either.

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Nowadays, every piece of consumer audio-visual equipment seems to come with a bewildering array of video connectors on its rear. How can you possibly know which is the best one to use and why?

Things are supposed to be getting easier, not harder. Yet trying to link your latest bit of electro-trickery into your existing audio-visual (AV) system is a bit like a camel attempting to do the tango; an exercise in futility.

How do you choose from the plethora of video connectors available to you on your latest Carlos-Fandago Super Ninja Turbo DVD player/toaster? Well, thankfully things can be broken down into some sort of order. There is a technical hierarchy amongst these video connectors that can be exploited, giving you a series of preferred choices, depending on the options available.

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When people talk about MP3 files and the like, you often hear the term Bit Rate also mentioned, so what’s it all about?

Until the mid 1980s, commercially purchased music was always in analogue format, be it typically vinyl or cassette. In late 1982, the arrival of the now ubiquitous compact disc (CD), co-developed by Sony and Philips, changed all that and revolutionised how we listen to music.

Digitisation

In order to create digital recordings such as CDs, the conventional analogue audio first has to be digitised. The process of digitisation takes the original audio source and chops it up into lots of thin slices. Each slice represents the volume of the audio source for a particular point in time. A digital number then stores the volume level of this slice on the CD. Each slice, or sample as it’s actually called, represents the level of the audio for a mere 23µs (23 millionths of a second).

To reconstitute the audio track, all of these samples are stuck together and the volume level of each sample is sent out to your speakers every 23µs (in the case of CDs). It’s a bit like slicing a loaf of bread and then squeezing all of the slices of bread together again to make it look like the original loaf. Not perfect, but if you squint, you’d never know that difference. CDs are very similar, because the slices are so thin, you don’t know the difference.

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