Playing With Hi-fi

One more session of work on the linear tracking turntable and it's working perfectly. Or at least, as well as I can make it work without delving deeply into the voodoo and black magic of "proper" turntable adjustment. I ran a record on it while I had it opened up and made fine adjustments on tracking angle and start position, then adjusted the stop on the vertical travel of the arm because it seemed too low. Finally, I swapped it with the Technics belt-drive table that's been on the entertainment center and connected it up.

I tested it out with a couple songs from Lisa's Violent Femmes album I still have here. Does it sound better than digital? Hell, I dunno. The record is dusty and hard to clean. The stylus is probably old and may not be perfectly adjusted. The signal is being processed through a phono preamp that's integrated into a digital surround sound receiver and is likely not the greatest piece of hardware ever: though I don't know the guts of the receiver, the signal is probably going through a digital phase in there anyway. My speaker system is lacking for hi-fi music.

But screw it; this thing is fun to play with. The tone arm sled moves almost imperceptibly slowly along its track as the record plays, following the stylus' progress across the disc. The glowing red timing marks are rock-solid. Everything is push-button in a wonderfully retro-futurist kind of way. And I can get back to digitizing more of Lisa's records, finally.

Facebook "Community Standards"

Earlier today, I shared an essay on Facebook written by Jim Wright, a retired military officer, about 9/11 and the importance of moving beyond the blind nationalism that sometimes surrounds it. That we instead work toward the kind of national unity that can come from collective response to a crisis.

Facebook removed that post because it violated community standards. How 'bout that? Now it's gone from my timeline, down the memory hole.

I think that, more than anything else that's happened, inclines me toward closing down my Facebook account. I don't want to be a part of a communications venue that takes that kind of action. The problem is that I can't leave Facebook without closing the communication channels that connect me to many of the people I interact with the most frequently online. Facebook has become the de facto national messenger service for a large group of people, and it's really hard to opt out of that in a way that doesn't really and truly change one's position in a social network.

I need to think about potential responses or solutions to this.