Years and years ago I did just this and went from being able to do maybe three or four to being able to do 30 on a full grip and 20 on fingers (I was climbing a lot at the time).
However I was 20 at the time. I’ve been trying more recently and it’s incredibly demoralising when I can only do maybe three (even though I can now bench press approaching 100kg!)
If you try and find you just don’t have the build for it, don’t be disheartened, just try doing something else like press ups. Otherwise, it’s just a case of making the effort and being disciplined about it.

I have it going straight into a pair of fully active studio monitors and am willing to bet money the sound is far far better than traditional hifi costing thousands.

Active speakers are traditional hifi aren’t they? Although it is interesting that active drive is not more common in speaker design; it is something of a flaw I think in the prevailing fashion. I read an interview with the CEO of a company called Stenheim, Swiss manufacturer of high end speakers, who said they would like to produce all their speakers in active configuration but the market demand for this approach is just not high enough to justify bringing those designs to market.

It’s clearly evident that you’re here for the mountain biking, given your prolific output in the Bike Chat forum since you joined. What bike do you ride?

I only just joined! Bikes include Genesis, Condor (I am a roadie convert) and a Pinnacle.

None of those listed can be caught by the wider community from the sufferers

@sandwich no this is true but then the strategy is not to stop contagion, it’s just to slow it down and that has always been the strategy even if no one is publicly saying it. Eventually everyone is going to catch Covid (or else avoid it through natural immunity); the only vector we’ve ever had had any control over is time and I think people are coming to realise this which is why there is a growing voice questioning further restrictions over movement and freedoms. It’s a tough call to make and I fully sympathise with the difficult position the government are in.

Covid measures just aren’t in the same league and anyone who thinks making comparisons is valid and acceptable is siding with some unpleasant conspiracy theory manipulators

I think I already addressed this – I acknowledge my comment was hyperbole and explained why. A lot of other people feel this way also and the great majority of them are just regular people, they’re not consipiracy theorists or nut jobs (though there are plenty of those around).

Sorry but if I can just step back for a minute and ask, since I am new here, but is there some rule book I’ve missed about what I am or am not allowed to say without being accused of being a troll or of talking ‘bollocks’, as someone so eloquently put it above?

I’ve come to mountain biking recently and was recommended this forum but am seriously wondering why I bothered.

@Elshalimo I think you know in your heart of hearts that my spelling is just fine and all that you’re seeing are typying errors (because this is a biking forum – or at least I thought it was when I signed up recently, I begining to regret that decision – so who really give a toss about accurate spelling?)

If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. Perhaps formulate a cogent argument as to what you disagree with and we can debate it like civilised people?

@kilo yes quite possibly – my friend is one of those silly high achievers (runs her own PE firm for instance) but she is quite the exagerator! It’s possible that what she has said is true but I coulnd’t swear to it.

Does it cause you some anxiety that I posted it? Apologies if it did, that wasn’t my intention.

My old one fried its SSD just after I bought the new one, so I whacked in the old HD and sold it on.

That you can actually do that makes those older MBPs quite desirable. I have one from, I think, 2009 that I ‘retromoded’ for my eldest son to use. I stuck in 16gb of RAM, a 1TB SSD and installed the latest OSX (although that took quite some doing as the machine was so old I couldn’t just download the OS from Apple and had to get some help hacking the kernel to get the machine to install from an external boot drive).

The machine works a dream now!

@kimbers You wouldn’t know this, but I am a second generation Polish refugee whose grandfather was in a concentration camp (Belsen) so this is an area of history I’m quite well versed with. And with respect nothing I’ve said is ‘exploiting’ anyone; I’m drawing comparisons and yes they may tend towards hyperbole and irony but that is not the same thing as ‘exploitation’.

The very reason we need to preserve the memory of what happened is so that it doesn’t happen again, where the ‘it’ in that sentence is that we create a two teir society of those with and those without access to things we now take for granted based on their social status.

@kilo well a very good friend of mine was there recently and told me this is what was happening. I should check the veracity of her claim (she’s pretty trustworthy but is prone to hyperbole also!) but in case you’ve not followed the news, Germany now has made it illegal for those not vaccinated to go into non-essential shops.

I just replaced my 2017 top spec Macbook Pro with a 14″ M1 Pro and honestly it is blindingly good. Battery life is easily a whole day or longer or constant use, the speed of the thing is blindingly quick compared to my four year old machine, the keyboard is a delight (god I hated the old butterfly keys on the 2017 models), the function keys are back and the beyond stupid touch bar is gone and I’ve even got an SD card slot (damn and just when I stopped shooting digital and moved to film!) and, bless me, the mag safe.

I’ve been waiting for a good 18 months for the M1 Pro specs to come out and now they are here I’m super happy. I do a lot of image processing of film scans that come in around 400MB per image (these are medium format high res 16-bit TIFFS) and the speed with which my PP now works is just a delight.

If you stop the stuff about yellow stars and making light of the Holocaust I’ll have reason to believe you.

Honestly, I’m not making light of the Holocaust, really, I’m doing the exact opposite: using something so universally regarded as an attorcity to demonstrate that we hold our civil liberties and freedomes delicately in our hands and they should be cherished lest that vile situation repeat itself. Yes I’m being somewhat melodramatic, but that was the irony part.

From where I’m siting the management of Covid has been a compromise between personal freedoms and keeping essential services working.

Yes it has indeed and we’ve succeeded and I think we’re, just about, on the right track but it’s a precarious one and one that could tip either way, like it has in Germany, Austria and Greece. Passports for large venues are scary but not as scary as compulsory vaccines, which thankfully we are not talking about in this country.

So OP does your company not issue you a work phone, because that seems to be the real issue here. Whether the 2FA is an invasion of privacy is irrelevant if the company gives you a work phone and you choose to use it.

To his credit, he had the savvy to post 3 times in non Covid related threads.

Being new here you will have to enlighten me as to the cunning subtext in that comment.

I find your comparisons with the Holocaust offensive. Anti-semitic even.

You’re free to find it offensive – that’s not my problem and I cannot help hwo you feel. But I can assure you it is not remotely anti-semitic and anyone with half a brain can figure that out by reading what I wrote as ‘irony’ (then you will see I am drawing that comparisson in order to deliberately throw the trend towards social coercion into very sharp relief).

For the record, I have always been staunchly pro-Israel and deeply against anti-semitism. You’ll just have to take my word for it since you don’t know me.

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy and one of my favourites. Jude was the patron saint of lost causes. Thomas Hardy was also being ironic, as indeed am I.

New member too

Yes indeed; is that OK or do I have to wait and serve a probationary period before I am elligible to express an opinion?

If one chooses not to assist the community by getting vaccinated then one chooses not to participate in that group. One gets to stay home and order in food online.

Totally get that (and I am vaccinated for the record), but where do you draw the line? At what point are you comfortable making a two tier society, where one group of people have access to certain priviledges based on their willingness to comply with societeal demands; would you be comfortable making the same moral judgement of people who are over weight and have heart disease, smokers with cancer, those who indulge in promiscuous unprotected sex and contract HIV? It’s a genuine question and a valid one if you are making that moral argument.

I used to believe that it was acceptable to bar kids from school if they didn’t get the MMR but the way society is going today, with the level of moral coercion, finger pointing and identity politics, it’s got me really thinking we’re heading down something not wholly unlike 1930s Germany.

100 Tory MPs rebelled in the vote today

I salute them. They’d get my vote.

Everything so far has indicated that the genuinely medically exempt will also be treated as vaccinated

Cool. Maybe we could get the others to wear a yellow star.

You missed the bit about being able to show a -ve LFT so no issues for those who cannot or choose not to have the vaccine.

I did miss that so thank you for pointing it out. Yellow stars can go back in the sewing cupboard.

Have the vaccine or don’t have the vaccine. It should surely be a matter of personal choice and the consequences of that decision should rest with the (soverign) individual.

If the counter to this is that not everyone can have the vaccine and therefore we need to do everything we can to nudge people to have it, then what is the point of vaccine passports (which hae just been introduced in this country for large venues), for surely they are overtly punative to those who cannot have the vaccine (through no fault of their own)?

Can someone explain then why we need vaccine passports or why they are a good idea?

No, but they are profiting massively from the situation though. Why not do what OxAZ did (to great cost of their share price I might add) and provide the vax at cost or minimal profits?

Because the profit motive is what off sets the risk of investing with no guarantee of return. You almost certainly own shares in all the big pharma companies if you have any kind of pension.

@bazzer very interesting insight and not one I’m remotely challenging as I have zero technical knowledge on this subject (I just use my ears), but in terms of generating a ‘bit perfect’ copy of a CD stored as a digital file, is the variability introduced by the CD-ROM drive negated by the processes undertaken by the ripping software (in the checking and correcting of that copy)?

A fabulous recent discovery for me is Joan as Policewoman – not sure how I missed her but I also think she is vastly underated anyway.

I discovered her when she played at the Tony Allen retrospective recently at Royal Festival Hall, which was organised by Damon Albarn and was the singularly most barnstorming, wonderful gig I’ve ever been at.

On that point, I’ve also recently been really enjoying Fela Kuti and the whole Afrobeats scene.

Other top picks are Iron & Wine, Laura Marling, Emiliana Torrini, Agnes Obel, Jesca Hoop, Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Manu Katche.

However a few albums really stand out as exemplary:

Wax Tailor – The Shadow of their Suns is an absolute banger! Utterly brilliant and orignal in the mould of Avalanches meets Tricky’s Maxinquae.
Chloe – Endless Revisions is a superb blend of electronic, dance and techno wrapped up in a very cool downbeats package.
Beirut – The Flying Cup Club – so original it’s hard to classify but I guess it sits in that very cool current fusion of folk, indie/rock, alternative folk genre.

Straw man is full of straw. As far as I’m aware an abortion does not affect anyone other than the woman and the foetus (possibly the sperm supplier too). Failing to vaccinate can have disastrous effects on the vulnerable in society.

Plenty of people would disagree with this (that abortion has no effect on the wider society); clearly many people feel that abortion is wrong and they fear the negative consequence of its practise. I personally don’t agree with them and support the right for abortion to exist, but that does not negate any other prevailing sentiment that others have.
Yes the vaccine has a collective good but that collective good is in the same category of good as say not smoking, not being over weight, not having lots and lots of unprotected sex etc. There are any number of behaviours that result in the individual becoming a burden to society. If we make vaccines compulsory on the premise of the collective good, you are then going to have to grapple with the moral corollaries of these and run the risk of hypocrisy if you decide that one lack of collective compliance is necessarily less problematic than the other.
Of course, societies do this all the time; decide one moral equivalent is acceptable and another isn’t; but then all societies also tread the fine line between liberty and tyranny. Telling someone what they have to put in their body should never be something we accept (in my opinion).
I know we aren’t talking about them being compulsory here in the UK but they have been doing this in many parts of Europe. In Germany now you have to show papers to police officers in the street to prove you are ‘clean’; goodness if only there was some symbol you could wear that would indicate this to the wider society,.

Today I’ve survived 2 x 1h car sharing with two anti-vaxxers without once raising my voice or taking the piss.

The thing I don’t understand about both the anti-vaxxers and the anti anti-vaxxers is why it’s even a debate in the first place. No one should have the right to tell another person what to do with their body (do we really want to have a conversation about abortion rights for example?) and the success of vaccine programmes is always predicated entirely on them being voluntary – making them compulsory is entirely counter productive.
I get the anti-vaxxers more than I get those that get so angry with them even though I cannot find a single reason to agree with those who are against (voluntarily) having the vaccine.

Do not have the Recons but have Renegade wide fit. Got them a few years back, after struggling for a year or two with a pair of Meindls which were a touch too thin and never gave.

Funny but I made the exact same move this year. My Meindls were just too narrow and they caused excruciating pain in my toes (which I think is actually arthritis but the poor fit of the Meindls was exacerbating the pain). The Lowa Renegade’s were one of the few boots that I could get to fit properly (oh and on that point getting the staff of Cotswolds to do a proper fit was also key to comfort).

The difference is very noticeable, how about you try? I know it works for my ears.

@sandwich the difference between 44/16 and higher resolutions, especially 192/44 and upwards, is remarkable. Have you listened to many DSD files? DSD128 seems to be the sweetspot for quality and file size (DSD files are huge and many DACs can’t handle DSD256 and higher and almost all DACs can’t handle the full DSD512). Those files play incredibly well (obviously on a well resolved system); the difference is like spending £30k on a new source.

I never realised how much smell helped me enjoy food even down to packs of crisps!

Your sense of taste is almost entirely down to your sense of smell; you can only differentiate betewen salty, sweet or bitter via the tongue; all the nuance of taste beyond that comes from your sense of smell.

I am actually very annoyed that work has not cancelled my christmas party,

Why would you be angry? It’s a personal choice if people attend or not.

Officially you don’t need to self isolate. The ‘guidance’ is that you need to continue with daily self testing and if you do this and have no symptoms and are double jabbed then you’re fine to carry on as normal, even if you’ve been in contact with the moronic strain. Of course all this is still just ‘guidance’ so what you do is your personal choice.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59628609

That 63KI Sig was one of the most musical machines ever made.

I had one of those and it was something of a legend but, yes, DAC technology has come on massively especially in the last ten years.

The best DAC I’ve heard is the dCS Vivaldi. Something else.

I have heard a full DCS stack and really didn’t like it; there’s no arguing it does a very good job of converting a digital signal to an analogue one but, for my taste (and I know I’m very much not alone here), it doesn’t do a very good job of making music; it’s very clinical and dry sounding.

My personal preference for DACs are those with tube output stages. Lampizator Golden Gate is currently my DAC of choice.

He comes across all technical but spouts the most insane amount of bollocks ever spouted on matters concerning the digital domain.

I’ve never paid much attention to him; what kind of things is he saying to make you say this?

The best way to connect your iMac to a DAC is via USB assuming your DAC has an USB input. Your Mac will enable the USB to output a digital signal. There is some useful insight on why USB is the best choice for a digital out in this case here but in short it is because you want the DAC to do the reclocking rather than the Mac, as undoubtedly the DAC’s reclocker will be better than that in the Mac.

You are effectively looking to use your Mac as a streamer; treaming is very useful for exploring new music and I’ve discovered a ton of new material in the last year as a result of this, but I have to say that if you value sound quality as well as choice (and it, ahem, sounds like you do given that you’re running biamped mono blocs!) then there are much better streaming services than Apple Music.

The best is Qobuz, since they offer everything at least at full CD quality (44.1khz 16 bit) and quite a lot at resolutions higher than this. 192/44 is routinely available and the occassional DSD files crop up as well (though your DAC might not be able to handle this).

One thing I would highly recommend is Roon if you’ve not already discovered this. It is effectively a piece of software that curates your music, whether that be locally stored (and BTW locally stored still sounds noticeably better than streamed); or streamned. It sits between you and all those sources and acts like a very effective window onto your music world. It’s either subscription based or outright purchase and is easily one of the best things to happen to music listening.

As for file sizes etc, it is entirely right that a bit perfect rip is a bit perfect rip and the CDROM drive makes no difference. dBPoweramp is a perfect tool to rip bitperfect copies of your CD archive onto a hard drive (I have a 4TB SSD in my music server for this purpose). What is entirely down to personal taste and hearing discretion is resolution of file. I can very easily hear the difference between, for example, 44/16 and 192/44; lower than 44/16 is something I would never bother with but then I am a bit of an audiophilliac.