The New year was just born when I broke my ankle, in a downhill race. I am a member of a club / organization doing downhill skiing, with start number, electronic timing and all. In the second round I crashed with a port and went over. It was painful like hell, and at the hospital an ankle fracture was confirmed. Am walking with crutches. It makes everything cumbersome and slow. I am not complaining. Bone fracture is better than cancer. Now I have tried both. 

Then you think I've had plenty of time for writing? Kind of right. But ankle ache ruins my concentration. Then it's Paracet and Botox - or was it Ibux? And when that didn't help, adding aquavitas did. But then you shouldn’t  write perhaps. By the way, I see from my history that I haven’t written anything since October last year. That's not really the case, because in December I reported from the Osa folk music festival. It is placed under "reports", but could possibly be under Diary also, so it wouldn`t look like I have done nothing for 4 months. But ok, leave it at that, now it's a new year, and to get started I am going to write about a couple of recent events that are pretty quick to work out. And the beer column, of course. 

What is the impact of the bass?

One day, I thought the sound from the stereo system was better than usual, but I didn't think too much about it. Maybe just a good day at the utilities. The next day I had the same feeling. It sounded damn good! This needed to be checked. I went over to the amplifier, which has tone controls. The bass control was - by accident - at a quarter past 12. This worked great on music, I got a nice fat sound. By the way, it worked poorly on radio voices, which got too fat. Thats how I discovered that something wasn`t right. 

This got me thinking. Now I understand why I liked the sound better with the bass turned up a notch. My lousy speakers have a 6.5 ” woofer only, and these usually have a rising frequency response, thereby being a bit thin in the low ranges compared to larger units. In other words, with the bass turned up a little, I got a better balanced sound, that befitted lots of music well. It dawned on me that a well-balanced basic tone area may be the most important thing for a natural and credible sound. Not that I didn’t know this, but thanks for the reminder. But as an audiophile purist, I turned the bass control back to zero for the least possible damage to the sound, technically. Many audiophiles prefers no tone controls at all. It is a mattet of fact that in this case the simplest is the best. Still, I came to remember the old radio cabinets. They typically had a selector for "speech", "concert", "jazz" and a few others, adjusting the frequency response to suit the different kinds of music and speech. I tried, many years ago, to have my repairman remove / disable the tone controls on a Nad 3020. He couldn`t make it, as they were part of a feedback loop. Just as well? I cannot recall the last time I used the bass or treble controls, but now I see that they’re maybe not such a stupid thing after all. After this experience, I may use them more often in the future; to compensate for poor recordings or whatever. But remember to set them back to zero before turning off the system for the evening. I happened to play music with the mono button engaged for days before I realised the mistake. Nobody’s perfect.  

Let me quote my neighbor, Erlend. I was invited to his place one evening for some music and a beer, and noticed that the sound was kinda big. I know his setup, so I went over to the amplifier. “Did you engage the loudness button by accident?" "No," he replies. "Remember, Stig, in this house there are no audiophiles, only musicians". There was no more talk about hi-fi that night.

What impact does the power supply have?

The beer column: We have a winner