Another Saturday sat by the keyboard paws at the ready as I type up a kind of spontaneous post on what has been a pleasant sunny afternoon here recovering from a migraine yesterday that put most things on a hold. Mine are what you call classical with the aura and tend to last typically three days where everything is super sensitive to the slightest sound or flickering light for days after and it's not uncommon for me to have involuntary spasm down the left side of my face.
One thing I have been doing more of when I have been able to is reading stories around the staples of my boyhood as I start to reconnect more with what it was I loved about it and for me that included soccer. Reading Dan Freedman's Jamie Johnson football centred series which also is being made into a tv series on CBBC over here is helping in recovery of what I was all about as over the years people have tried to push more toward their own ideas and that's not working cos I just loved being that boy however out of the ordinary the odd interest might of seemed at the time, it was all that I and critically my peers lived for back then. It's that I want back. Earlier on the week I was a bit busy tidying around the shelves my stereo lives being old-fashioned enough to have a complete set of separates rather than either an all in one system or play everything from a computer. I needed to get to the connectors of the original compact disc player to unplug it and remove ready for a newer more expensive model as the rest of system is capable of a more higher standard of reproduction and many of recordings I have and enjoy are so well recorded would be a pity not to take advantage of all they have to offer. Where this ties in with this is blog is because music forms a part of my age regressed schoolboy side, I carefully considered how to tackle the physical side of it to minimize the inevitable pains involved in doing it when your paws are like mine, breaking it down to chunks doing a bit at a time and I managed to get it done fairly straightforwardly. Learning to think through tasks to make things better for me has been one the things I have been learning to do over the last few years and it seems to coming together now.
When I started my formal education apart from the question of uniform which was kept purposely simple in Infants and a bit more mature in Juniors, it was usual to put us into interlocking vests and Y Fronts usually white or pale blue given our school unlike some hadn't formal underwear rules. Thy were normally made from cotton, sometimes fully covered, other times what was called 'Stringed' literally criss-crossed except for the actual Y fronted bit and a bit of a religion given the fuss made about making sure we couldn't get cold from the slightest gap. Later on subject to 'school rules' motifed briefs started to creep in with colourful designs and logos such as 'Concealed Weapon' came out, the latter causing much mirth amongst us although I was very much a traditionalist preferring white Y fronts.
In the era of my childhood somethings were different and one was that for ideas that are more talked about today their wasn't many words available to described them and indeed a key number of terms we use today just had no equivalents back then. That made the process of thinking and talking about them difficult because you literally didn't have the language for it.
There always was something 'different' about me compared to most of my peers and if we were to write this in mathematical language where B would equal Boy (and Male) and G would equal Girl (and Female) I'd be B` relating to but not being identical to B. I loved my school uniform similar to this except the shirt was grey and the sweater was red and wearing my shorts, wearing them way past junior school even into adulthood even and while I was curious about girls uniforms never really had a jealous wanting for them. In those days there was more rigid gender roles and it was more that I wanted to do a few of the things they did as much as I loved being a boy and spending most of time with boys in boys school uniform. When talking about this time, I feel the that while I was very much masculine and would never trade that away, I was pushing for that bit of space that allowed the full expression of that boy pushing at the edges from the norms of the era. I was always a willing participant of boys pe and sports even though with my disabilities playing was far from easy feeling at ease with boys close up and play fighting with the best of them.
I picked myself up and got back in the game showing more 'balls' than many of my peers did loving that time as difficult as playing could be so you couldn't say I was a 'mommy's boy', quite the opposite, just a little different that's all. In the language we use today, I was exhibiting some gender fluid traits that were tolerated more in girls than boys (plus some girls do wear shorts in school today) that were frowned upon not so much by the school but by other adults and other children who had invested a lot in their own gender roles and were not prepared to have their system interrupted by a gender-fluid biological boy at the time. For me though I never wanted to be a girl just the kind of boy I was and still am proud of my own gender.
It's been a while since I posted anything major around how I enjoy one of my big interests, music, since the last addition was replacing the Turntable a couple of years back to improve the sound of my records and getting a quite remarkable amplifier to take that sound loud enough to fill the room when driving my loudspeakers. It may seen an odd topic to post on a middles blog but as music and what I have heard it from has been an interest from around the age of nine getting involved across actual childhood in building up stereo systems it's a valid part of age regressed life for me. I have three main sources of recorded music, records which was what I grew up with, compact discs that after a brief period with pre-recorded cassettes I moved to shortly after they came out and downloads increasingly lossless and so-called high definition better than cd ones at that. The last cd player I had was a 1994 model by Rotel which was a high quality model bought as a stop gap when it's predecessorhad a sudden death in April of 2013 but I had been hankering for something better for a while and I spotted this reconditioned and warranted that appealed. Enter the Marantz SA 7003
It's a compact disc player with a difference: it plays the physical form of high definition recordings known as Super Audio Compact Discs (sacd) of which I had a good number as mine had a player for regular cd players and the super audio cd layer that I have bought over the years for the excellence of their regular cd layer sound. The main benefit of such recordings isn't that the highest notes are more extended although they can be, it's that because the usemore smaller samples of analogue sound when it reassembles it it is that much more accurate and smoother.
It has a few sockets on the back you need to wire up and being a very quality piece of equipment these are gold plated having the line outputs to couple to your amplifier, digital outputs for either digital recorders or external conversion of its digits to sound and a twin pin IEC ("kettle") socket for the mains lead. That was fun as one wasn't included and didn't have a spare at hand, so being only familiar with 'figure of eight' and three pin IEC ones I wasn't sure I needed to order a special lead up but as it happens you can use a three pin lead on a device with the IEC socket in two pin form.
One big improvement on many players is the draw that holds the disc is not floppy plastic like some cheap computer dvd drive but is solid and is designed to reduce vibration when it spins the disc. The case is also well made with plenty of metal. The internal electrics use good quality components such as Cirrus digital to analogue convertors and high quality modules for taking the sound and sending that through the outputs.
Originally this player had a suggested retail price of just over £600 being seen as a middle market model within Marantz's range offering something from the more expensive range for those who could pnly afford something better than a basic regular player.
Having had this for a few days on both super audio cd and regular discs the improvements in disc transport and conversion of those digits to sound is certainly amongst the best I've ever heard, sounding more life-like. Being able to hear childhood favourites sounding better helps to take me into regressed headspace bringing back lots of memories when I'm with my stuffies and colouring.
