Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

Crimson at night! We sent back the Crimson Audio gear ... The guys at Austin Hifi were generous to let us borrow the Crimson Amps and Preamps with a set of their crazy Good cabling . We made the trek to send back the giant Pelican cases happy that we heard it and with a tear in our eye.  While we're gathering our thoughts for a review, we'll say that this is a truly magnificent, transparent, fast and realistic sounding set of gear and we were happy to have tried it out.  We sent it back with a sad farewell, but hope we'd be able to make it a permanent part of the mancave at some point.  Stay tuned for a review ... We had a network filled weekend ... Cat7 ... shields and shields ... kill that RFI dead! We spent a good chunk of the weekend upgrading the wired side of our home network (going from a mixture of Cat5, 5e and 6, and 10/100 switches) to Gigabit and Cat7 where possible.  We noticed that even when not using streaming services, it seemed like the no

I would be a liar if I claimed that we didn't love the Beatles catalog.  We have a large collection of pressings on vinyl, the stereo and mono CD sets released a few years ago, and they are in regular rotation.  Their music is timeless, and the enjoyment spans the generations in our house. The Beatles were late to the digital game, and only recently allowed their taped to be converted to digital .  After lengthy legal negotiations with all the estates and remaining band members, they ripped the tapes to 24/192, but for some reason, only 24/44.1 downsampled has seen the light of day.  Now we own and love the stereo box set.  Given the difficulty of locating an affordable copy of a quality pressing of their stereo albums, this was a godsend to many.  But ... purists complained (they always do!) that since it was rumored to have been mastered from those 24bit/44.1kHz digital files - the Vinyl fell short of expectations.  We had hoped the release would be a last word on fidelity,

This was supposed to kill our sound and save our amp.  It made our sound (and sleep) better! "You know ... if you use a surge protector you will ruin the sound" I had bought into this idea, plugging in the amp right to the wall, since instantaneous power delivery was supposed to be compromised wheever anything was between the wall and power cord, and therefore the sonics compromised.  The only give-back I had, was utilizing a Chang Lightspeed powerstrip to handle sources and our preamp (low current stuff). For things well outside of the sonic pathway we still have a long extension cord to another plug with a standard (inexpensive) filtered powerstrip that the motors, and dirty digital stuff (Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Sonos, the cool Philips Hue products, and our Lava Lamp). But ... every single time there was a thunderstorm rolling through, we got nervous - with visions of a smoking carcass of that amp (making us unplug the amp) - and that we aren't exactl