So That's The Day Job Over...

I have finally retired. The last day was April 30th, which meant that the first non-working day was Tuesday 4th May. Weekends and Bank Holidays happen when we'e at work.

I am not going to miss the day job. I would have missed it if I had been commuting and seeing everyone in the office. Then retiring would have felt like a much bigger change, and far more abrupt when it happened. But a year of working from home and I had already made all the adjustments. All retirement involved was not opening the work laptop and not signing on to Teams and running reports. Which is no loss at all.

My plans for travelling are on hold until the hysterics are over, which will be about 2023, or until those of us who have been 'jabbed' (notice how they can't bring themselves to say 'inoculated') can move around without let or hinderance, except to places where we wouldn't want to go anyway.

I can't even pop out for a spot of lunch, since it's a) freezing, and b) the restaurants are still half-closed.

I did pop out for a spot of non-food shopping, in the Kingston John Lewis, and realised that I have always hated that kind of shopping, and doubly so now when I have to wear a mask. John Lewis have gone full retard on how many people can use lifts. Not going there again. I'll use their online site. If there's one thing I've learned to do in the lockdown, it's online shopping. Books, DVDs, food, shoes and clothes: almost everything else can be had online or by phone with a trial period.

So my days will be full of arranging and doing little things until, you know...

Which is just fine by me.

Sound Happiness With Subwoofers

My current set-up is a little light in the bass. I get more bass from the headphones.

I ran across a video in which Steve Guttenberg talked about upgrading or changing gear: don't just make sideways moves, he said. Try a subwoofer, he said. You will be amazed, he said.

Steve Guttenberg is the hi-fi reviewers' hi-fi reviewer.

What do the experts have? is always a good question.

So I looked at subwoofers. Enough to start looking at how I connect an amplifier without a Pre-Out or LFE terminal to a subwoofer.

Also I calculated the possible standing waves in my room. The width and length don't correspond to a note on the piano, but the height is close to C (one C means all C's, as octaves go in powers of two). So standing waves won't be a huge thing.

Who else has subwoofers?

Hans Beekhuysen does.

Paul McGowan has one. In fact two. And in small rooms. Paul McGowan as in PS Audio.

Who am I to argue?

They all say the same thing about the difference it makes to the sound. It's the kind of difference I would like.

I watched some more You Tube videos about setting the things up. And how a music subwoofer can be way less powerful than a home cinema one.

REL is the go-to manufacturer, and I found the smallest one they do. Sevenoaks Hi-Fi shipped it over. I followed the instructions carefully, wired it to the B-speaker posts, and put it to one side of the shelving holding my speakers. Given that LS50's roll off the bass at 80Hz (just above E-flat 2, the 19th note on an 88-key piano) and the top end of crossover is around 120 Hz (just above B-flat 2), and the knobs have no markings, I wound the crossover right up and tweaked the volume now and again. The aim is to get rid of the sense of a thump when a low bass note hits, but have it loud enough that when I switch off the B speakers, the sound suddenly seemed, well, anaemic.

The result is EVERYTHING they said it would be. The music just feels more solid, more full, and what it does to the kettle drums in Bruckner 2 is something wonderful. And the additional bass seems to be coming from the bookshelf speakers, not a little box in the corner on the floor (yes, that is okay, according to REL).

Acoustics is a great mystery. For which we should all be glad.

Hi-Fi Upgrades - Go Qobuz!

I must have played one too many Spotify playlists. I got tired of Spotify.

I've done Tidal.

So I tried Qobuz.

OMG!

96kHz streaming. 192kH... iPad reboots itself. Set 96kHZ as maximum.

CD-quality streaming.

Why wasn't I listening when various You Tubers talked about it?

Maybe I thought, hey I can barely tell the difference between 320kps vs a CD on my current system, why would I notice the difference between anything more?

Stream CD-quality through the Jitterbug+Black Dragonfly and it just sounds better than 320kps.

As good as my CD player, if not better.

Sources matter.

What I Did In The First Post-Lockdown Week

(aside from the day job, daily walks, cooking food and all that routine stuff)

Monday: the nice man from the AA pumped up my flat tyre and drove with me to the local tyre emporium just before it opened, where I had the whole lot changed over. Later that morning, I stopped by the local Pure Gym. A manager was there to show me around.

Tuesday: early morning shopping at Sainsbury's. Joined the gym online. 50% discount. (Even at the full rate, that gym costs as much in a year as my old one did in a month. And I was happy to pay that money then.) Added Qobuz to my streaming services. I am liking that decision more and more.

Mid-week: lots of hefting of books and building of IKEA shelving. Didn't need to leave the house for that.

Thursday: first visit to the gym. Man those pull-downs felt good.

Friday: a visit to London by train. Haircut at George the Barber's in Bedfordbury; sunbed session at the Tanning Shop, Covent Garden; a visit to the Vodafone and Apple shops; lunch outside at Maxwells; a browse round Foyles; and a visit to Lillywhites for some new trainers.

Saturday: a visit to Sis's new house in a secret location for lunch.

Sunday: second visit to the gym in the morning. That was more tiring than I thought. Snooze in garden sun-trap. Get new iPhone SE2 working, and set the old one up to be another iPod Touch (that's why Apple downplay the iPod Touch).

And all I had to do was wear a mask almost everywhere.

Masks do not counts as "freedom", and sure as hell not as "normal".

This ain't over 'til the masks get burned.

I have my second jab this week.

Two more weeks before I never have to open that work laptop again.

Retirement Countdown

I have to talk about this.

In three weeks' time I will stop working.

I have to fill in some forms, and one reason I haven't already done so is that I did not have a black ink pen in the house, so I had to buy one on Thursday. And some stamps. On Friday I woke up late and did nothing. I should have been filling in pension forms and getting the flat tire on the car fixed. Instead I watched You Tube videos on anything and generally futzed the time away. I got a walk and a few reps in, just so I hadn't had a complete wasted day. Then I went to bed at 22:00, and came back downstairs at 23:30. No sleep Saturday morning. That happens when I feel guilty about leaving things undone. I felt guilty because I'm supposed to be Superman, and never have a bad day.

I spent a lot of time on Saturday dark morning thinking that the sleepless night was about retiring, and not having a job and all those other cliches.

I'm totally down with the I-will-not-have-a-job-to-wake-up-to-do bit. Me? Miss the day job? Have you met me?

Not getting the tyres fixed is about me being indecisive and lazy and maybe it's the pollen. I wake up with a blocked nose, itching and sneezing. At 04:30. I kept dozing until 08:00 Friday, and spent the rest of the day being an hour behind schedule.

If I was going into the office, I would have a countdown of days left commuting. I would be having handover meetings and chats with people. I would have something anchoring me to work in those last days.

But I'm at home. I've been at home for over a year now. My unconscious heard me say I was resigning, took a look around, saw that it was home, and checked out of the job. It thinks I'm done, and it does not like it when I keep opening the work laptop. It gets confused.

I can't concentrate on work because I've almost left it. I can't concentrate on organising things in my life, because I'm still at work.

It's not retirement I can't handle.

It's these last three weeks.

Catching Up: It's Been A Long Time...

...since I published anything. I've written stuff, but held it back.

Vaccine passports. The irrational fear of the insides of pubs and restaurants. Schoolgirl allegations without police charges, blaming boys. The EU threatening to stop vaccine exports. Teenagers burning the Union flag and complaining about 'colonial' history. NFT's in art. Museums turning into social justice institutions. Police breaking up Easter Sunday services.

Never try to understand crazy. There's nothing to understand, that's why it's called crazy. Walk away, have minimum contact if you can't, and never ever try to figure out what's going on. Because crazy makes no sense.

So I have to pass to No Comment.

I put in my retirement a couple of weeks ago. I stop work at the end of April. I have had conversations about pensions, taxes and investments. This stuff I really don't want to discuss, because most of the thoughts I'm having are first drafts, and so are just the cliches and stock responses, that I have to work through to get the real issues.

For the next four weeks I still have to show up at the work laptop four days a week (I've booked every Friday off in April). It wasn't the lockdown that kept me in the house during the week, it was the work laptop.

Retirement doesn't start until work stops. I don't know what I'll feel until the first Monday I never have to show up to work. In the meantime, my motivation to work is... fading.

Writing this, I have realised that I've put my plans on hold for four weeks because of work.

Nope. Don't do that.

I should go ahead and order the things I want, even if I don't unwrap them until the 1st of May.

See? That's what writing a journal entry does for you.

Streaming Economics

If Home Taping was supposed to have killed music (it didn't) then streaming is supposed to be starving artists and performers.

Look at a history of music. Musicians have always been badly paid, not paid at all, relegated to the servant's quarters, screwed over by record companies and mangers, and otherwise as badly treated as actors. Even a Court composer might not get paid for months on end and have to live on credit. Unless they were a celebrity or wrote popular opera. And even Mozart died a pauper.

Music streaming companies are carrying on a long and mildly despicable tradition.

The core of the streaming proposition to the customer is that the marginal cost of a stream is zero, and the average cost decreases as the amount streamed increases. In the UK this is only beaten by BBC Radio, which has zero cost, a decent quality of content but a now fairly lamentable quality of transmission, and is paid for by the people who watch television, so there are no advertisements. Either beat the heck out of buying CDs. Or listening to adverts.

Imagine that the marginal cost of a stream was not zero. That in addition to the monthly fee, we had to pay, say 20p for the first time we streamed a track, and then it was free thereafter. Taylor Swift's 2019 album Lover is £6.88 for 18 tracks at Amazon, or £3.60 under this suggestion. (Keeping a record of a customer's free list and doing the accounting is easy, though making it blindingly fast might be a challenge.) Maybe we get "20 free tracks" a month.

I image that the number of people streaming would fall faster than Disney losing subscribers for firing Gina Carano (that reference isn't going to age). Even at 10p a track. That zero marginal cost gives people the feeling they are getting something for nearly free. Which is a powerful feeling for a marketing department to have working for it.

Hold those thoughts for a moment.

Streamers pay the artists per play. I might play a favourite CD 100 times over four years (say), and at £0.0022 / stream for a 10-track CD, that's £2.20, which is about what an artist with a good lawyer and agent gets from the sale of a CD. But the CD (or downloads) pay the artist's royalties up front, when the money is most useful. Artists would love my suggestion of an up-front charge followed by free repeats, because it matches what happens with CDs, vinyl and downloads. (Except for the bit where I own the CD, but I only have a free repeat as long as the streamer a) stays in business, and b) decides to change its mind because that's what big corporations do. Let's note this ownership issue, and move on.)

What's good for the artists is going to put off the customers, and vice versa.

But then again: what's the point of providing music to people if the artists don't make money from it? Or if the effort it takes might be more profitably used in another medium?

None. Which is why the streamers make it very easy for artists to get their music onto the service. If the streamers charged the artists (as Spotify is rumoured to be thinking of doing), I imagine a lot of the artists would simply vanish. The expected benefit for most of them would be close to zero at best.

Streaming looks like a robust business model. It piggy-backs on fast broadband that is going to be there anyway, on super-capable mobile computers masquerading as phones that everyone has, on the willingness of artists to provide music and accept what amounts to deferred payments for an extended period, and a pricing scheme with a zero marginal cost. What could go wrong?

Well, something is, because music streamers are not making scads of money. It's news when one turns a profit in a year.

What really go wrong is the Regulators enforcing minimum payments to artists. Governments in need of money realised a while ago that digital businesses are not paying enough for the access to the markets those Governments provide. It is taking them some time to figure out how to get the money while not losing the service, but they will get there. Legislation grinds slow, but it grinds fine.

It's also a thought that Amazon or Apple could buy all the major streaming services (except each other) with about half-and-hour's profits, take the savings, and run them as brands. Is that going to be what happens a few years down the line?