vintage hifi

the following components i use and they go quite good together, in both, sound and design:
– speakers: infinity rs 4b
– amp: sansui au 317
– dac: cambridge audio dacmagic100
– tuner: kenwood kt 5300
– phono: dual 1009

sound is warm and powerful. bass is never too strong but deep. i would also recommend this setting for studio-work or mixing. the speakers don’t hide anything. and i guess, what sounds good in this environment, sounds good everywhere (as long as mix is kept warm enough to sound good on less warm systems as well).

my budget mixing combination:
– speakers: yamaha ns 10m
– amp: nad 3020

nothing to add to this mix. it is a classic studio combination. very realistic but nothing for listening only.

a small hifi-configuration i like as well:
– speakers: heco odeon 200
– amp: sansui au 217

sansui au 217, with the small hecos sounds surprisingly warm and powerful. i tested it with the infinity speakers as well, but this combination lacked bass. as there was a crackle on the left channel (even without any music playing and without any handling on the amp), i had to recap it. it turned out to be very easy to open and edit the electronics of this amp. there are no ics in it! all bigger caps are fixed to the board with an aggressive glue that destroys elements if there was used too much of this glue. in my case, the glue had destroyed one foot of a diode. after changing the diode, the amp stopped making cracks and noisy sounds. it is the best budget hifi-combination i have ever heard.

cyberduck vs. filezilla

comparing the two major free ftp-clients for mac osx.

in the last years cyberduck started to get buggy. for this reason i tested filezilla today.

cyberduck always worked perfectly well for my needs. but todays versions are crashing quite often, eg. when opening a connection that fails, i need to kill and restart the app. workflow also starts to suffer. the quick-connect drop-menu shows only one server. so i need to close this window and open a new one, where the drop-menu works. additionally the program needs ages to start. in the past it opened quickly and was absolutely reliable.

filezilla seems to be much more stable but less stylish. the icon in the dock is ugly. the gui looks like from the last century. most settings working out of the box in cyberduck, have to be changed in filezilla to work like expected. eg. if i double click a file it will download it to the folder that is opened on the left part of the gui. who needs this behavior? after changing all settings, the workflow is still frustrating. if i double click a file, a dialog pops up, asking what to do. after confirming, that i want to edit this file and not the last local copy of it, it will finally open in the editor. after editing and saving the file in the editor, i would expect the changed file to be online already. but filezilla asks again, if i really want to upload the changed file. this behaviour cannot be changed and makes the workflow completely unusable for me.

and there are other issues with filezilla:

– inside of settings-menu, it is not possible to use copy and paste. well: pasting is possible. but copying closes the menu instead of copying text.
– passwords are not saved in system-keychain, but in filezilla’s own keychain.
– uploading several files doesn’t show total progress and there is no sign or comment when or if upload is completed. it just stops doing something.

my conclusion after testing filezilla is, that i will stay with cyberduck but keep filezilla installed for the case, cyberduck breaks completely due to its many bugs.