By Antoine, on July 20th, 2010%
The final product
One of my friends, who creates music as a hobby, recently bought a pair of AKG 601 headphones. While I do listen to a fair amount of music, I would not consider myself an audiophile or anything close to that. However, those headphones do make a difference I can notice in the quality (or lack thereof for low bit rate MP3s) of whatever is being played. There is only one small problem with them. Being massive open headphones, my friend’s sound card is only able to put out an acceptable level of sound at maximum volume; his MP3 player, on the other hand, is simply incapable of driving them. The AKG 601 have a rated impedance of 120 Ohms while normal earbuds seem to be around 20. As a result of a soundcard’s output impedance being too high, a normal speaker output is not capable of providing enough current to the headphones.
They are huge, expensive and leak a lot of sound, so he does not plan to use them on bus rides, but there are still some serious downsides with having to drive them at maximum volume:
Levels of distortion . . . → Read More: CMoy headphone amplifier
By Antoine, on December 28th, 2009%
I really enjoy putting a lot of thinking in the gifts I give. Apparently, its the gesture that counts, but I feel a gesture and a thought are worth much more. Buying a gift for the sake of buying a gift is just like calling the plumber to get a leaky faucet fixed, you pay someone/something to take care of a problem for you. On top of that, useless gifts too often end up spending a few years at the bottom of a closet and then get thrown in the trash during a session of spring cleaning.
So the ideal gift should be something into which a lot of thought was invested in, be it in choosing, finding it or building it. It not only has to mean something but it also has to remind of the giver.
This Christmas, I built (with the help of my mother and my other sister) a light box for my little sister. A picture is worth a thousand words:
Basically, its a table top studio. It diffuses light around the object so as to diminish reflections and shadow as mush as possible in order to capture the object itself rather than it and its . . . → Read More: Lighbox
By Antoine, on April 27th, 2009%
This is another project I have fun on while I get a bit of spare time from having no life. It has actually been in the works for quite a while but I have just recently started the actual programming (in C++). It is called the Elements Framework. Despite being just another tool for myself, I have had a few friends who expressed interest into knowing a bit of details about it. Since I cannot precisely really formulate what it is myself, I though it would be a worthy exercise to write a short description of the framework. Now you might be asking yourself, how the hell can you not know what you have been working on for the past year? Well the answer is: when I think, I do not necessarily use words, I use ideas, I use examples, I use chunks of code, I use drugs, but since I do not work with verbal constructs to begin with, explaining what I do is somewhat tricky because I have to compile a bunch of concepts into correctly formed sentences. Something I can normally do just fine with everyday objects and concepts (I am not speech impaired), but when it concerns . . . → Read More: The Elements framework
