Alpha in 2018
Contents
Sometimes the office needs to be “enhanced”… …in short, get rid of the boring, brick, gray walls… why not putsome plastic against it? That ooks a lot cozier! Although not everyone agrees with the choice… Ah well: the person who sits there the most likes it!
ROON
In 2018 we will take the final step towards working with ROON. We have a business license which allows us to activate multiple devices. That helps, because our ‘mobile’ NAS is also equipped with ROON. For ‘on-site’ demos for example. Meanwhile, the entire office runs on the ROON server: an AMD Ryzen pc with 8GB RAM and an m.2 nvme-ssd. Quiet, economical, fast, reliable.
Switzerland
In 2018 your editor and Yung Lie made a very special road trip through Switzerland (Dutch articles, but English video) together. We visited: Weiss, Stenheim, Illusonic, PSI and Merging. Not only was it a very instructive week (midweek) during which we covered 3000 km in 3 days, it is a beautiful country with very friendly people. Everywhere we were welcomed with open arms and we were able to film without censorship. This is undoubtedly worth repeating!
Acoustics at home
There are those projects that make you think: what am I doing?! Why…. oh why…. Well: this is definitely one. Once upon a time, your author ended up on a diffuser calculator website. Somehow the idea was born to make a custom diffuser. For the living room. The reason is that when you turn up the volume in that room, an audible reflection came from the back wall. And that was very anoying, for it was exactly in the vocal area.
After some measurements we determined in which area (frequency band) we had to ‘diffuse’. In the calculator we calculated how long and wide the rods had to be. In the end we made three diffusers. Honestly: it turned out to be beautiful, but man: what a job!
Backups and networking
About once every six months some maintenance is needed again. Then we clean up some cables, pull new ones, make extra lines and check all backups. In 2018 a 10Gbit network has been installed for video editing. At that time a new backup schedule was also made, because we are now partly editing from the 10Gbit network.
New racks and Cinema
At the end of 2018 we made an investment in two new hi-fi racks. That year we visited Bassocontinuo and were impressed by the craftsmanship. Although the entry-level series is not finished with leather, it is a beautiful piece of furniture. When Harro Tillema – and later Quintijn Bulterman – said goodbye, we also returned his furniture. The nice thing about the Basso racks is that we can determine how much space we want for each level. So later we can just lower or raise a level.
In November we also rented the other half of the room and – in consultation – placed a wall to test Custom Install speakers. And of course also projectors and surround installations. Now, although AV is not the focus of Alpha Audio, it’s fun. And we can learn from testing it.
Fresh blood
We get into an e-mail exchange with one of our loyal readers, Geoffrey Vanhouwaert. In it, we ask at some point if he’s interested in writing an article for Alpha. Now, we’d suggested that before at audio fairs, but we tried and tried. Fortunately, Geoffrey – G for collegues 😉 – wanted to try… the rest is history. He is now our (midrange) bookshelf specialist and Benchmark Audio fanatic.
Traffic and restyle
In 2018 we had 1,600,000 unique visitors to the website. That’s a growth of 33% compared to the previous year. Also that year – November 2018 – a restyle was done. That’s the current design as you’ve been used to it for about 1.5 years now.
