Snakeoil OS: The Blog

I am a firm believer that while money cannot buy happiness, spending money can sometimes take some pain away. And spend money I did. Pre-ordered this baby back in early March, and here it is almost 3 months later, the latest Marantz 2018 Surround Pre-Amplifier - the AV8805!

This is actually the first unit in Australia at time of writing this blog! Kudos to QualiFi and Tasso for bestowing this honour upon me .

I love this disclaimer:

THIS CARTON HAS BEEN OPENED FOR QUALITY CONTROL TO ENSURE THE PRODUCT MEETS AUSTRALIAN STANDARDS

QualiFi

Translation: they have removed UK cables and replaced it with Australian ones? This will just be a quick preview of the unit as I have been out of the HT game for nearly a decade so it will take me some time to get everything setup and running. This is going to replace a Denon 3808A that’s acting as my AV pre-amplifier until late last night.

Funnily enough  The Denon 3808A was also purchased on the first day of release (Late November 2007). I know the date well because it was 2007 Christmas Eve when I blew up the Denon video circuit board! That’s a story for another day perhaps. It was this experience that taught me to be extra vigilant in setting this up. Hopefully not going to repeat the same mistake twice (*touchwood*)

I digress, on with the Marantz AVP Show!

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My company held a lucky draw recently and I am lucky enough to win this, a Sony LS-F50G Google Assistant:

This is Sony’s take on Google’s Google Home, a mains powered mono speaker with built in Google Assistant.

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I’m sure most of you are aware of this by now:

Do you hear Laurel, or Yanny?

Apparently if you hear the word ‘Yanny’, you have younger ears because you can hear the high frequency tones. If you hear the word ‘Laurel’, then you are only hearing the lower frequency tones.

Videos like this always interests me as an audiophile, and this one is especially interesting because unlike what the others are saying, my take on this audio illusion is it’s not about hearing loss.

It’s audio cognition!

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Google is getting real stupid these days. I don’t mind that they keep changing the goal posts and make it impossible for me to get my URL.

My frustration is they keep changing the rules making it difficult for me, while doing absolutely nothing to stop the squatters. Previously it was 10,000 views, now it’s 100 subscribers. The latter is so much harder to come by when I’m not dedicating 100% effort on YouTube. I rather spend my time coding, supporting and updating the manual thank you.

It is so easy to get to 100 subscribers by nefarious means - be it paying somebody, or creating 100 accounts to do this myself. Even something as silly as ’subscribe to my channel, and I’d subscribe to yours’ will work. I’m sure there is already a healthy black econony providing this 100 subscribers service. Why should I involve myself in that false economy?

How can Alphabet, the owner of the wildly dominant search engine, not realise these rules are stupid - makes it harder for me to earn my custom URL, in the meantime doing absolutely nothing  to prevent other people from squatting on it?

Do they seriously think they can use AI algorithms to detect fraud? While here’s an idea - why not use an AI algorithm to stop YouTube squatters instead?! This 100 threshold is only slowing the advance, it’s not going to work. It will be 100 now, it will be 1000 in the future.

At least give me an option to reserve my custom URL for f**k sake! The odds of me getting a consistent URL throughout is getting bleaker and bleaker by the day.