All posts by Tomáš Andrle

Adam Audio T7V studio monitors review

May 23, 2019NewsTomáš Andrle

I do not need everything to sound great. I prefer hearing things the way they were recorded. Good or bad. That’s what studio monitors are for.

With that in mind, I started looking around for entry-level studio monitors to replace my old pair of Edirol MA-15Ds. I decided to get a pair of Adam Audio T7V speakers. It was obviously a big step up.

The speakers look very elegant and clean. It seems a bit like they were deliberately designed to look more simple than some of the higher models – bass port, on/off switch and indicator are all on the back. Nothing wrong with that though, I like the design a lot.

I love the sound. There’s so much detail and depth. I keep revisiting my favourite tracks just to hear all the new things I can discover. The signature “ribbon tweeters” are awesome and I doubt there are any higher frequencies I’d ever be able to hear from any speaker at all.

John Cleese, listening to “Shake Break Bounce” by The Chemical Brothers on T7Vs

There’s more than enough power for my small semi-treated room. My desk was just big enough to let me put them in the proper “triangle” layout.

The Edirol MA-15Ds had an optical input and I had them hooked up directly to my iMac. For the Adams I had to get an external USB sound interface with separate left/right balanced outputs. I got the affordable M-Audio M-Track 2×2 with a nice big volume knob.

I also added a subwoofer. Necessary? No. Would I keep thinking about getting one for the next 6 months after getting the speakers? Yes.

The sub does bring up the lowest frequencies and gives more punch to heavier music. However, this 2.1 configuration brought me some disappointment at first.

My sound interface was plugged into the sub and the speakers were connected to the sub’s output, just like the manual said. I tried to level things out using the sub’s crossover and volume knobs. This turned out to be very hard and frustrating. I couldn’t find a balanced “flat” setting.

I’m sure that pairing the T7Vs with one of Adam Audio’s own subs is more straightforward and could have saved me the trouble but it’s also way over my budget.

Luckily, I figured it out. I plugged the speakers into the sub’s other input! Both the inputs are just soldered together so the T7Vs effectively get untouched source input. Now I can easily tune the sub without affecting what goes into the speakers. Win!

Overall I’m really happy with this new setup. Great sound for a great price.

★★★★★ / ★★★★★

Repro shutdown announcement

January 8, 2019ReproTomáš Andrle

The Repro iOS app and website will go offline next week.

It’s been an interesting project. I built it from scratch and learned a lot making it. Wrote an iOS app, handled user feedback and went through several updates, later I also built and maintained a server backend API and an accompanying public website. Overall, I still like the idea but the thing is that I like some other ideas even more and need more space to pursue those.

Bye, Repro!

Tiny Player for Mac 1.2.8

December 18, 2018Tiny Player for MacTomáš Andrle

Tiny Player for Mac version 1.2.8 is out now. This update brings the following improvements:

Volume control in status bar
Show # and duration of selected tracks
Add option to export playlist with selected tracks only
Scroll to last played song on launch

Gogs

November 22, 2018NewsTomáš Andrle

As I lean towards self-hosted software, I recently switched from Bitbucket to Gogs.

Gogs turned out to be one of the best web-apps I have used in a long time. It’s easy to install and maintain, with a simple and fast interface.

The issue tracking and wiki are quite minimal but work well. I do miss an equivalent of Github’s “gists” to hold small snippets of code independent of any repository.

Running on a standalone $5 Digital Ocean VPS.

UPDATE: After using Gogs for a while on a small VPS, I ran into problems with RAM consumption for larger repositories/commits when doing git pull. This fixed it:


git config --global core.packedGitWindowSize 16m
git config --global core.packedGitLimit 64m
git config --global pack.windowMemory 64m
git config --global pack.packSizeLimit 64m
git config --global pack.thread 1
git config --global pack.deltaCacheSize 1m

Rant: fman criticisms

November 20, 2018NewsTomáš Andrle

On this reddit thread a bunch of people criticized / made fun of the fman file manager and how the author had spent over 3000 hours making it.

Some argued that making a general file manager application was “easy” and the author of fman had spent way too much time making such a simple app.

Yes, you’re wrong. Anyone who goes to make a tool as general and versatile as a file manager deserves huge respect.

Doing a UI prototype for two pane file list that lets you browse files is EASY. Making a file manager that actually helps you manage files is HARD.

Let’s see what needs to be considered when we try to COPY A FILE:

Cross-platform
All filesystems
All OS versions
Network volumes
Filename length limits
Case sensitivity
Special character encoding
Handle and report errors
Detailed progress indicator
Estimate remaining time
Pause/resume
Interactive options to overwrite/skip/ duplicates
Symlinks
Hard links
Correctly copy attributes, even when support varies between src/destination
Sparse files
Special files such as /dev/zero
Block size (20 byte file can use 4KB of disk space)
Quotas
Channels
Compression
Encryption
Optimize for SSD/HDD
Optimize for same-volume and cross-volume, cross-device copies
Sandboxing

All this must work 100% of the time, on 100% systems, otherwise someone is going to lose their data.

I don’t even know if fman actually takes care of all that, but my point is that I can imagine one could easily spend a good portion of development making JUST THIS and I would consider it a great achievement if it actually worked.