Engineering piece by piece

http://www.xtz.se/uk/products/mearurement-system/room-analyzer

Ok, considering that I invested some time/ money and effort in my listening room (see older post) I thought it might be a good idea to measure it.

The first sweeps using a simple 20-20k Hz sine generator showed a room resonance around 60Hz that was quite annoying! Unfortunately there was no more time to improve anything – the room sits in my parents house – Romania, and I sit in Birmingham UK. But there is still enough to improve!

Lately a nice piece of kit caught my eye – XTZ room-analyzer. Looked like what I needed to finish up my room design, so I bought one from  Audiosanktum.co.uk – the main retailer for England.

The experience I had with it proved positive. It’s very simple to use, gives good – similar results on consecutive measurements and has other features except room-analysis – you can do near-field measurements with it, meaning you can measure the response (past crossover) of each speaker driver.

There are a few other nice things you can use it for but I must test further myself.

All in all it is a good investment if you feel you are not getting the most of your audio set-up. It’s also a very good tool in case you plan to create a dedicated listening room in the near future!

Here are the pictures of my listening room:

OK… this is geek-ish but I’ll post it anyway.  I spent my last 2 weeks reading around the IET in Savoy place.  It’s in central London so you can get there really easy.

The books are good but a bit outdated (well I compare it to the Coventry library and I must say Coventry is just better! – because I’m interested in so many different engineering domains I really like that all the books are there to grab ) and IET’s library is electronics only! But you find everything and anything about electronics- digital/analogue, radio, telecom, soldering,- except any for the AVR (Atmel’s uC ) – big minus for them!

The reading room and the desks are good and there’s free water :)))

Oh, you have to be a member to get inside but for students it’s really cheap to join and you get the E&T mag with loads of cool stuff about engineering inside.

Highly recommended !!!!

Fun fun fun… The park is lots bigger than I expected and the roller-coasters are quite fun. The biggest problem is that you wait in endless cues to get on…but that’s normal for most fun parks.

I did manage to go on all rides in one day, but left the park with the last bus 1930- if you actually decide to stay all day, after 5-530 the cues are much smaller.

The most interesting rides were Oblivion and Air. Oblivion is a purely simple concept- a vertical free fall. Amazingly cool and fast.

Well Air was a new concept for me, because you get to stay on your belly, not the normal seating. It’s really cool, you can imagine driving one of the future space-crafts/ futuristic bikes, like the babies from this link 🙂

Well… tuning is cool — no matter what people say everything can be tuned! It’s basically adapting something to your particular need, and enhancing performance in a particular direction(this is usually done sacrificing other areas) – take cars for example : get a very popular chip-tuning, actually a remap of the engine, that is supposed to give you performance and reduce consumption– come on… how is the poor engine suppose to run faster, better on less gas?  this example goes to most domains: computers- more power-> more heat-> larger electricity bill… and so on.

It’s funny how most people relate tuning with cars (thank you Fast and Furious — btw first and last films are great ) but tuning goes for everything.

I really really love it! It’s hard and sometimes seems impossible but the feeling you have when a project you work on succeeds it’s just amazing, similar to building something from scratch. I’ve been doing this with most of my stuff… from the car I had to cd-players speakers toys… anything.