Philip Fibiger

We’ve been doing a lot of minor renovation around the house, trying to make the place ours. Painting, replacing hardware, new appliances in the kitchen, that sort of thing. Our half bath downstairs was painted a nice color but in all other aspects it wasn’t at all our style. It had this ugly gold hardware on the sink, and the toilet paper holder and towel ring were gold and antiqued iron. The walls had “decorative” fleur-de-lys painted all over it. Emily painted over the decorative paint and I hit ebay for some new bathroom hardware.

The Kohler Fairfax faucet that I bought was really astounding. The old faucet I removed (which likely wasn’t that old, maybe 7-8 years?) hooked up the traditional way. Each handle and the faucet were attached separately with nuts, puttied in place, plumbed to the water supply with lengths of pex. The multi-part drain was epoxied together. Contrast that with the new faucet set:

A single piece drain that has a gasket built in and just screws tight (plumbers putty around the drain is the only place it’s required). Braided stainless supply lines that can fit a variable length run. The real beauty of the installation design is the way the faucet mounts to the sink itself. Instead of having to putty it down and then try to tighten it down from below, it has a rubber gasket and uses a toggle bolt to hold it tight. The toggle is guided up the bolt by a pair of plastic guides, literally all you do is fit the faucet in place (the toggle pops through the centerset hole) and then turn the hidden screw (in the drain plug control) until the toggle moves up flush with the bottom of the sink.

In the end removing the old faucet and cleaning up the old putty mess was the longest part of the process, actually installing the new set was a 10 minute job. A lot of home improvement technologies feel like they really haven’t changed in 50 years, It was a pleasant surprise to find out how easy Kohler had made this task.

My stereo had long ago morphed into a home theater system, and for a while I’d been thinking about separating the two. My stereo had been built up piecemeal since I was in high school, it was a real deal-hound special (huge floor standing cerwin vegas I got a garage sale in a ritzy suburb of Albany, the receiver that I bought online and the company sent the ship request to the warehouse, but had their credit card processing ability shut down before they could charge my card, the cd changer that was broken and kenwood replaced it with the top-of-the-line model). It served me well, but I knew that when I got a high def television set, I needed a receiver that could handle passing around the audio and video signals via HDMI. The speakers really didn’t fit in the house, either as part of the home theater setup or as part of a separate listening system.

After setting up a new home theater system (with just a receiver and a set of smaller infinity satellites), I decided to get a little radical with audio. I got rid of my cassette deck (it was time), my cd changer, and my turntable (still a little sad about this). The only pieces that survive from my system in LA is the Roku Soundbridge (a MP3 streamer) and the Mac Mini that sits in my office and serves it.

I wanted it to fit on a shelf in our new built-ins, and I think I put together a near perfect shelf system. It’s a Jolida Hybrid Tube Amp powering a pair of NHT Classic Two speakers. Against my better judgement I even upgraded my speaker cables and rca interconnects from radio shack models to Ixos wire and Acoustic Research interconnects.

The system sounds fantastic, the speakers have tremendous detail and the tubes in the amp add warmth to the sound. The weak link of the system is definitely the DAC in the Roku. It’s a budget unit, at some point I’ll use the optical output of the Roku and bypass the DAC, feeding it into an external DAC like this. At that point the only difference between my system and a high end cd system is the mp3 compression itself. Some day I’ll probably move to a lossless format, but the issue there is the iPod. Apple lossless files are so much larger than even 320k or v0 mp3s that the effective capacity of my ipod would only be a fraction of what it is now. Maybe this’ll change when my next iPod holds 200gb, but the elegant solution would be for apple to either compress files on the fly for adding to a portable device (your itunes library is uncompressed, but when it syncs to your iPod it compresses the files to mp3) or more likely when ripping it gives you an option to store two copies of the file, one for playback (lossless) and one for portable devices (mp3). C’mon Apple, stop screwing around with mobile phones and make it happen.

Even though I got rid of my cd player, I can’t bring myself to get rid of the discs themselves. I’ve probably got six hundred cds sitting in boxes in my attic. They serve as the ultimate backup if something were to happen to the music on the mini, and it keeps things in check karmically.

I thought I’d feel like something was missing, moving from physical media with liner notes and album artwork (however compressed vs. LP artwork), but I think it’s liberating. I make it a lot further into my collection than I did with CDs, where the same five discs would live in my changer for weeks or months, and clearly a playlist is a huge upgrade over a 90 minute mix tape. The biggest drawback is the display. It’s more difficult to get an overview of the collection on a two line vacuum flourescent display than it is standing in front of a wall of cds. Something like cover flow in the new itunes/iphone is probably the way to go.