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What's up abt?
It's been awhile. I told you guys I was gonna be busy, and damn I was.
Bought a house, moved, and got settled in (what a great safe subdivision that far exceeded my expectations). Of course, the house is nice but location was far more a concern of mine.
Since the last time I was here, I got a lot of toys.
New phone (Samsung note 5)
Bought a haswell and skylake i5 x360 envy
Also bought some yamaha dtx electric drums and am putting together a home music studio. For the drums, i am running real time vst software. Addictive drummer 2 and superior drimmer 2, i bought a smaller hp x360 13t with an i3 skylake 6100u...which really is a gem, it's the same as my 4 thread i5 in every way accept without turbo. Which, is not locked on and often throttles in the convertible anyway. At least for the apps that I care about.
The electric drums with vst software is amassing, back in the day I used to play in a band and recording drums was such a task and often the results were lacking. Found out today's studios use triggers and drum vst software, even for rock bands. The results are out of this world. Vst software uses real samples that are recorded in perfect environments. The really interesting thing is the ability to Control the individual mics used on the samples.....anyway, it's really made me a believer.
So, building my studio, I realized I needed more expansion slots than the haswell Intel microATX board gave me, I have another x58 board and hooked up the i7 920 for cubase 8, which is far more than enough.
I literally gave away my haswell 4770, the motherboard, ram, ssd, harddrive...everything but the case and psu.
I did not want to buy another motherboard for haswell, I only bought it cause I got a good deal....260 for the i7, 8gb ram, and a cheap Ole Intel board.
I always planned to go with broadwell e anyway.
Whenever that POS comes out.
Let's see, what else....
Oh, bofox. I bought a freedom pop phone for my son. Great concept but just about useless where I live. Although the site said it would work in my area, it's completely useless.
We have WiFi at home and did not need freedom pop to take advantage of that.
To bad though but no worries. Worth a shot.
Got to go. Missed you guys, glad to be back
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Welcome back. 
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Good to see you again Ocre!
Congrats on the move, where you live makes a BIG difference in quality of life.
Rollo Jr and I are using Note 5s as well, and also love the phone. It's just a high quality device, screen is a pleasure to use.
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Hey ocre! It's good to have you back. It looks like you have gone on a bonanza. New house, new computers, plus a bunch of other stuff. All that cheap gas in the USA has you guys spending all your money. 
My big purchase was a $110 motherboard. I just can't compete with you! My daycare costs are bleeding me dry!
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What are you using for sound output on your setup Ocre? Just curious, I am a big fan of good audio 
Quote:It's just a high quality device, screen is a pleasure to use.
The gateway OLED drug Rollo- I knew we would get you one way or another
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(03-07-2016, 05:42 AM)SickBeast Wrote: Hey ocre! It's good to have you back. It looks like you have gone on a bonanza. New house, new computers, plus a bunch of other stuff. All that cheap gas in the USA has you guys spending all your money.
My big purchase was a $110 motherboard. I just can't compete with you! My daycare costs are bleeding me dry!
I remember the Daycare days. It took wind out of our sails too. We actually decided to put off things after some bad feedback we were getting. My daughter was 2 when my wife decided to stay at home with her. She done that for a few years u til my daughter started pre school.
Sickbeast, your family us young and the odds are good that over the years you will grow your income. Daycare is a big money suck but for us the tide shifted after the both kids got in school. Of course, we had our kids dead smack in the middle of the great recession. It was tough for many people we knew.
But yeah, the kids got to school which freed up some cash and then our next plan was to save save save. Cash flow increased and we stuck with the program. We saved up an impressive nest with plans to buy a house. Everything fell in place, as planned.
We did take on a loan for the house, so....I am no longer 100% debt free. Don't feel bad about that, especially the low interest rate. With renting, we were throwing away over 10k a year, so now at least there will be something that money goes for.
And we live in a really young subdivision. With just about everyone here having kids and being a young family. It's great to have a community that looks out for each others kids.....its loke picture perfect-with a various ball fields, running track, play ground, you name it....even freaking volleyball, it's a great place to live
It's really unimaginable to have such a wonderful oasis these days, it is more than I ever imagined.
I guess we have lived in the country for so long, a community was a concern of mine. All it takes is one bad neighbor. And of course, I live in Tennessee, which i am not a native here. A Yankee...
Lol.
Anyway, now that we have our house, I am not so tight up when I comes to money. Much more relaxed. Still don't have any credit cards, so that there is no pressure.
Anyway, didn't you buy a home Sickbeast?
It might be that you did things somewhat in reverse order from my perspective. But that is fine, we should end up in about the same place. Give it a few years. My advice, which is not specifically to you but to everyone, don't mess around with credit cards and such. I think they hold us down. It takes awhile sometimes to get some of the things you want, but often you find out that you don't want to even buy that junk once you have saved up all the cash.
I can tell you that this philosophy works well for me.
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(03-07-2016, 09:30 AM)BenSkywalker Wrote: What are you using for sound output on your setup Ocre? Just curious, I am a big fan of good audio
Quote:It's just a high quality device, screen is a pleasure to use.
The gateway OLED drug Rollo- I knew we would get you one way or another
Honestly if I could get a good 60" 1080P plasma for $1250 vs a 60" OLED 4K for $2500 with it's digital processing, I'd buy the plasma.
OLED is still at leading edge of price curve and feature set, has some growing up to do. Can't see spending what it costs currently on what it is currently, not enough bang for buck for my upper middle class sensibilities.
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03-08-2016, 01:15 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-08-2016, 01:21 AM by ocre.)
(03-07-2016, 09:30 AM)BenSkywalker Wrote: What are you using for sound output on your setup Ocre? Just curious, I am a big fan of good audio
Hmm. Just started patching together this, i have a lot to learn about recent hardware....some of the stuff I have is old but I think it will do the trick....I will update and expand but I have just got started, at this point.
I are different computers. For the Edrums and practicing, vst in real time is all about latency. I talked to many people and thought that USB sound inerface was the best route. But on a whim, I thought I would try this program called asio4all. Which, well....exceeded expectations. Now, this computers main purpose is to provide live vst sounds in real time and to record the midi from the edrums. So mainly, it takes the edrum hit and reproduces amassing vst drum sound for us to hear while we work out and practice songs together with other instruments. We really didn't need this ability, the yamaha dtx532 sounds pretty good all by itself. But, it's nothing compared to the sound of perfectly recorded real drums thar were captured in world class studios in the perfect condition. This is what modern drum vst software offers, it's such an incredible day we live in. Vst drums not only let anyone in any studio anywhere have access to perfectly recorded drum sounds for their drum tracks, it is also now how the big budget studios have gravitated to. It's just really hard to record great drums and your environment changes everything so dramatically, from one day to the next, just the temp and humidity have an impact on the drum sound making engineering a task. Everyone in the industry now uses vst in some way or another. The mic drums are replaced by perfectly recorded drum sounds via special software or they use trigger mics instead and don't even record the sound from the drums at all, just the signal from the hit which is just the data of which drum was hit and its velocity and impact force. That data is used in the vst plugin and the sound of perfect and beautiful drums are created.
I guess I am rambling. It just blows my mind how far things have come in the last 20yrs. I play drums and have in a band. Anytime you record, the dead give away of low budget used to be the drums. Because great awesome drums on a record took years for studios to figure out, it takes special and unique sound studios and techniques built just for capturing drums. The fact that today we have software and this ability to reproduce such amassing results, on the fly, anywhere by anyone. It blows my mind.
But since I have a real drumset, play real drums. Love them....the sound of the yamaha dtx 502 edrum module, while good, was lacking for me. I had vst software and wanted to be able to play those sounds, not only on a recording, but to play them in real time with the band.
So for that HP x360 laptop, the single most important thing was latency. It is a pretty huge issue. When you hit the edrum, it must go thru the edrum module, into the pc, then out of the pc, into the PA, and out of the monitors. It had to do this in just a few milliseconds. Or it is a problem, it's hard to play with other people if you have latency.
I looked at several options and ended up disabling the beats software on the laptop and using asio4all. The results were great.
Since we use some yamaha large wedge monitors and a create PA, the sound quality of on board HP x360 with the asio4all driver, it's great. We practice and play at a louder volume. You van yell over it, but if I sing without a mic...you can't hear it. So it is pretty loud.
The whole purpose for thus pc is to collect midi and to play awesome vst drum sounds according to the edrum that is hit. My wife is playing on the drums, and it sounds really amassing just to jam out. So it's inspiring our songs right now.
As for the studio...we haven't mixed anything down yet. We are working up songs at this point. I am using some old stuff from a studio I had in the early 2000s. The sound card is roland rpc-1, which sounds really good. I have no idea how it compares to modern sound cards but back in the day it was extremely impressive.
I have a windows 7 driver and am using it with an SI 24 external inerface. Of course I am very willing to update all of that, if I find its lacking. But so far, I am just learning cubase 8.5. It is all new to me. I was a logics guy, but don't have a mac these days.
We have a ways to go.
I want to record the music I wrote over the years. No hurry, just want to have that record of my life.
I am more a singer song writer kind of guy. I played in a band in my teens and early 20s. Mostly hard music but not metal....well, not the metal other bands were playing.
Back then, I was told we sounded like the pixies. Although I never heard them, I went back and lostened....I guess some of our songs could be in that category. But, geez....I have a lot of different sounding songs. All over the place, from light to hard, soft, punk, sad, happy, love... ups and downs....everything
So over the years, since my band, I wrote song after song. Many of them I won't record, but there are so many I want to. Some songs I am putting together. See, I didn't have any plans of playing these songs in a band so there is a lot to work out. I have so much I just want to record, but so many need pieced together
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(03-08-2016, 12:02 AM)ocre Wrote: (03-07-2016, 05:42 AM)SickBeast Wrote: Hey ocre! It's good to have you back. It looks like you have gone on a bonanza. New house, new computers, plus a bunch of other stuff. All that cheap gas in the USA has you guys spending all your money.
My big purchase was a $110 motherboard. I just can't compete with you! My daycare costs are bleeding me dry!
I remember the Daycare days. It took wind out of our sails too. We actually decided to put off things after some bad feedback we were getting. My daughter was 2 when my wife decided to stay at home with her. She done that for a few years u til my daughter started pre school.
Sickbeast, your family us young and the odds are good that over the years you will grow your income. Daycare is a big money suck but for us the tide shifted after the both kids got in school. Of course, we had our kids dead smack in the middle of the great recession. It was tough for many people we knew.
But yeah, the kids got to school which freed up some cash and then our next plan was to save save save. Cash flow increased and we stuck with the program. We saved up an impressive nest with plans to buy a house. Everything fell in place, as planned.
We did take on a loan for the house, so....I am no longer 100% debt free. Don't feel bad about that, especially the low interest rate. With renting, we were throwing away over 10k a year, so now at least there will be something that money goes for.
And we live in a really young subdivision. With just about everyone here having kids and being a young family. It's great to have a community that looks out for each others kids.....its loke picture perfect-with a various ball fields, running track, play ground, you name it....even freaking volleyball, it's a great place to live
It's really unimaginable to have such a wonderful oasis these days, it is more than I ever imagined.
I guess we have lived in the country for so long, a community was a concern of mine. All it takes is one bad neighbor. And of course, I live in Tennessee, which i am not a native here. A Yankee...
Lol.
Anyway, now that we have our house, I am not so tight up when I comes to money. Much more relaxed. Still don't have any credit cards, so that there is no pressure.
Anyway, didn't you buy a home Sickbeast?
It might be that you did things somewhat in reverse order from my perspective. But that is fine, we should end up in about the same place. Give it a few years. My advice, which is not specifically to you but to everyone, don't mess around with credit cards and such. I think they hold us down. It takes awhile sometimes to get some of the things you want, but often you find out that you don't want to even buy that junk once you have saved up all the cash.
I can tell you that this philosophy works well for me.
Yes I did just buy a home almost 4 years ago now. We paid $400,000 for it and today it's worth at least $500,000. So we're quite happy with it, despite all the problems (we had some water issues in our basement among other things).
As for the credit card debt, yes, you are right, with one exception. The MBNA 0% balance transfer promotion for 1 year is an amazing deal. I put my student loan onto it and it's allowed me to just hammer away at the principal of my debt without paying any interest. In another year I will be eligible for a home equity line of credit so when that happens, that's what I'm going to do.
I'm very happy to hear that you were able to buy your first home! That's really exciting. It sounds like you've found a great spot to raise your family. All the other stuff sounds great as well.
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One of my closest friends (in NYC, but we visited each other several times a year) just died today. My phone died today. The downstairs fridge died today.
Freaky, creepy. Weird... Strange.
She was only 29 years old. Body gave out battling against critical pneumonia, after tumors were removed from the brain and the spine.
Anyway, Ocre - nice to see you again here! About Freedompop - it uses Sprint's 3G/4G LTE coverage, but Sprint's coverage sucks compared to Verizon's or AT&T's. It's only good for the bigger cities.
You got exciting hardware, that's for sure! I'll be sharing the several tech "toys" that I got for my family so far this year......
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Sorry for your loss 
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(03-09-2016, 12:43 PM)BoFox Wrote: One of my closest friends (in NYC, but we visited each other several times a year) just died today. My phone died today. The downstairs fridge died today.
Freaky, creepy. Weird... Strange.
She was only 29 years old. Body gave out battling against critical pneumonia, after tumors were removed from the brain and the spine.
Anyway, Ocre - nice to see you again here! About Freedompop - it uses Sprint's 3G/4G LTE coverage, but Sprint's coverage sucks compared to Verizon's or AT&T's. It's only good for the bigger cities.
You got exciting hardware, that's for sure! I'll be sharing the several tech "toys" that I got for my family so far this year......
Sorry to hear of your loss.
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Wow, 29 years old, that's so sad.
Apparently they have developed a new treatment for cancer where they extract part of your tumor and infect a bunch of mice with it. Then they determine which type of chemotherapy works best to kill the cancer, and then they use that chemo on you. There was a guy in 2014 where the doctors gave him a month to live, then they did this treatment on him and now he is still alive today and he is completely cancer free. So there is hope.
My wife knows someone quite young with cancer as well, it's very sad. It's a horrible disease. I lost all my grandparents to it. IMO we should be spending more money on curing cancer and less money on the military. Worldwide. We need all the governments to work together on this. I realize this is a pipe dream but it would really be so beneficial IMO. The same goes for super rich people. Bill Gates and that Facebook guy look like they are doing a lot of good things with their money but there are so many of those guys that just horde it all and then blow it on fancy cars and stuff. I know if I had that much I would want to make a difference in the world.
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Hm, interesting method of chemo testing.. well, I'm not a believer of chemo myself anyway. It's merely treating the effect and not the cause. Some might think the cause is all genetic, but I think that 99% of people have capable genes - just that they're incompatible with certain foods or stuff like shampoos, deodorants, etc. What might be one's medicine could be another's poison.
Well, we're gonna miss her.
Hey, Ocre, don't bail out on us - I didn't mean to derail this thread!
What kind of music do you like the best? Give me a youtube video favorite! There's a youtube thread here.
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03-12-2016, 05:19 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-15-2016, 06:52 AM by BoFox.)
Come on, Ocre! You need us!! You need our tech advice!!
Yeah, Sprint's coverage map exaggerates it a bit. They don't account for the trees, interference, and stuff..
Anyway, some things I got for myself and my family from Xmas: HP Slatebook X2, HP Split X2, Asus Transformer T300, LG G Flex 2 (fastest and sexiest phone ever for the last gen!!!) to replace broken/obsolete phones, HP Slatebook 14, a 17" Intel touchscreen 1080p laptop with SSD and HD - all with Windows 10 goodness, Galaxy S4 for one of my boys, LG G2 for another, lots of hard drives, even more motherboards, and so on.. too much to handle!!! It's hard to avoid all the good deals that Microcenter has with the open box items that are basically new condition (50% off, usually). Now I can't even find some of the stuff I bought! Let alone remember what I have... I gotta slow down!
Anyway about Skylake's EDRAM L4 cache that comes with Iris Pro (that's beefed up) - it might be what Intel's saving to try to suppress Zen's thunder. No idea if Broadwell-E will have L4 cache, but if the E series usually don't have such, then it'd just be in between Haswell and Skylake without the "Crystal Well". So magical of Intel to come up with that term, like as if it came by from fairy pixie dust.
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Here is a funny
Got an E-mail today from HostGator "We want you back 75% off"
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(03-12-2016, 05:19 AM)BoFox Wrote: Come on, Ocre! You need us!! You need our tech advice!!
Yeah, Sprint's coverage map exaggerates it a bit. They don't account for the trees, interference, and stuff..
Anyway, some things I got for myself and my family from Xmas: HP Slatebook X2, HP Split X2, Asus Transformer T300, LG G Flex 2 (fastest and sexiest phone ever for the last gen!!!) to replace broken/obsolete phones, HP Slatebook 14, a 17" Intel touchscreen 1080p laptop with SSD and HD - all with Windows 10 goodness, Galaxy S4 for one of my boys, LG G2 for another, lots of hard drives, even more motherboards, and so on.. too much to handle!!! It's hard to avoid all the good deals that Microcenter has with the open box items that are basically new condition (50% off, usually). Now I can't even find some of the stuff I bought! Let alone remember what I have... I gotta slow down!
Anyway about Skylake's EDRAM L4 cache that comes with Iris Pro (that's beefed up) - it might be what Intel's saving to try to suppress Zen's thunder. No idea if Broadwell-E will have L4 cache, but if the E series usually don't have such, then it'd just be in between Haswell and Skylake without the "Crystal Well". So magical of Intel to come up with that term, like as if it came by from fairy pixie dust.
Bofox, I am not going anywhere.
I don't have the time I used to but I love the ABT and will spend all the time here I can.
My schedule is a lot different these days but I am not going anywhere. I haven't posted anywhere but here, in the past 4 months or so.
ABT for life!!!!
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