End of my tether

Hope all goes well, I must apologise if I did not fully appreciate your circumstances and of course the relationship with music that must be heightened with your disability.

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If you want to remove the Hiline, or add the lavender later, you don’t need to turn anything off whatever. Just mute the preamp.

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Normally I would agree with you on that advice Nigel, but Mike has a sight disability and so there is always the risk that he may inadvertently dislodge something else, which is why I agreed with him that turning everything off is probably safer on the whole.

Best

David

Fingers crossed that a clear path of action emerges from today.

There is a full battalion of forum members knocking wood and keepin’ fingers crossed currently.

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No need to apologise at all. Not sure it is heightened so much as you naturally use more audio cues in everyday life so it maybe seem like it’s a more developed sense.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks. Dislodging isn’t an issue so much as not being able to locate things into sockets properly. You can always tell where someone with a VI lives as the keyholes on external doors are scratched to hell :slight_smile:

Friends and Foes alike !! :sunglasses:

Interesting to read @GaryYeowell comment on another thread about Hi-Line and preferring lavender.

I’m not going to post any definitive conclusions tonight as the system has been powered down twice today. It’s good to be reminded just what a bargain the lavender is though. Have already listened to more music tonight than I have in a few weeks. Partly through necessity but partly through it simply being a tad closer to listenable.

The music has stepped forward a few feet; doesn’t feel recessed any more and has a little more power behind it. A bit more PRaT too. It sounds like a Naim system again. Having ploughed through key tracks I always go back to, vocals are unexpectedly clearer and more articulate but there’s what I would describe as sibilance on the high frequencies and high notes, if not wholly unpleasant, are just on the edge of putting me on edge.

Bass is more defined but thus far the mids warmth isn’t there so it’s not immediately obvious that it’s deeper. Even from cold I would have expected most of it to be there so I suspect something else is going on.

Dealer going to A/B the Hi-Line so that will add to the picture too. My guess is that if there is any issue with that then it will be marginal. Loaning the lavender until Saturday and the family have agreed that’s the moment to take the Sky box out of the 202 and see what happens over a day or more.

So, unsurprisingly, nothing definitive as yet. Change the IC back on Saturday and put the HL back in.

On what I’ve read before, I’m assuming that rather than power down I can just do something like switch the TV input to CD; put that on mute then remove the Sky input? Put the CD input to TV or whatever; mute that and remove the lavender?

May need to power down to reinsert the HL for reasons described previously.

I consider it one of the privileges of my life that emojis, even when blown up, are meaningless to me. Years of being unable to do facial recognition and body language.

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It is not an insult, I just feel humbled. In one thread you managed to write more than I had uttered in eight years here…

The one I used was intended to convey a sense of humour. We’re all rooting for you, regardless of past comments !

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Mike if you mute the preamp then you can plug and unplug input leads, be they Sky or CDX2, without powering down, as HH said earlier. Switching to a different input to the one you are about to plug or unplug is also a good move.

You can swap the lavender and the HiLine without powering down just the same way.
Best

David

Cheers. Unplugging is no issue for me so I’ll do as you say. Plugging back in tends to lead to lots of fumbling which I’d rather not do on a live system which aircraft has some issue(s) so I’ll maybe power down when reconnecting.

May I suggest disconnecting the cable to the Sky box before reconnecting the HL and listen to the system with the lavender in place but with the Sky box disconnected. Doing one thing at a time makes for clearer information on which to make well informed decisions.

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I can see why powering down may not be nececarry when using DIN plugs, but I’m not convinced it’s a good idea when using RCA.

I always switch off equipment before removing or inserting interconnects. Better safe than sorry.

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Why should ot make any difference if muted? (Or volume control turned to zero.)

But always, always power down the power amp before doing anything with interconects between it and preamp.

I suppose that it depends upon where in the pre-amplifier’s signal path the volume control sits. If it is right at the end then any bad effects on the input side will affect the pre-amp, possibly badly. If at the start of the signal path then it would not affect it at all.
Years ago I built a pre-amp which had controls at both the start and end of the pre-amp. The volume controls at the beginning were there partly to provide a sort of impedance match between source and pre-amp, and also as a balance control. The one at the end was ganged, and acted as the main volume control. It was a design from Wireless World IIRC, probably around the early to mid 1970s.

Makes absolutely no difference if you plug in and out a signal cable like a Hiline without turning off pre amp. If you must, press a different input button first to the one you are plugging in to, to avoid actually hearing something. You don’t need to turn off gear.

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You don’t have to turn off, but it is very unwise to unplud inputs without either muting, or turning the volume low or zero, or selecting a different input - especially if last time you played was ar a high level, and have left the VC turned up.