Month: December 2010

Posted on

Phono amp is the missing link between the vinyl era and digital present

For the committed LP fan, especially those dedicated to listening to recordings of early 20th century musicians whose recordings may solely be available on vinyl, the shiny silver micro CD system in the corner of most modern living-rooms, perhaps purchased at an out of town supermarket, is an anathema. Suggesting they listen to CDs on an audio system without phono amp or phono preamp, is like asking Raymond Blanc to subsist on a diet of Pot Noodles. In pursuit of the perfect, most authentic sound, these fans will spend much time and money on the perfect phono stage while the rest of the world looks on bewildered at their predilection of a so-called obsolete technology.

Although these days only a minority of people under the age of thirty will have bought a 78 or 45 in their time, the ability to record and reproduce sound was so revolutionary that they remained in popular use in one form or another across a whole century from the 1890s right up to the early 1990s.  Once cheap CD players became as affordable as turntables, digital music reproduction became king, but the commitment of those dedicated to ‘genuine’ music recordings is such that the technology behind and the market for turntables, phono stages and cartridges continues to develop at the high end of the audio system market.

Indeed, many purists continue to use vinyl only, maintaining that digital music systems – CDs, and MP3 downloads – give a clinical and processed sound that is second best to the records of times gone by. Others may want to continue listening to their record collection without paying out large amounts of money to purchase duplicates in digital format – and, in any case, many albums may simply not be available on CD. The evolution of music playing has also seen an evolution in marketing and corporate strategy, and smaller parties are not economically worth updating. Consequently, vinyl editions of these artists are unique and irreplaceable.

This does not mean that vinyl cannot be combined with state-of-the-art modern sound equipment, though. You can keep the best of both worlds, linking your turntable to amplifier and speakers via a phono stage. The work of a phono pre-amp is to amplify the signal from your turntable to make it useful to the main amp; thus a phono amp is an indispensable component of listening to your old LPs on modern equipment, helping to keep the past alive without sanitising it with the vagaries of the new digital systems.

Please visit http://www.whestaudio.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

Home

4cfe04e055eb2

Posted on

Social worker jobs have changed a lot in the last 40 years

Social work jobs are tough and intense at the best of times, leaving a small amount of room for consideration of the past, and thereby achieving more perspective on the present. However, Brian Dimmock, a principle lecturer in social work at the university of Gloucester, has finished a project to change that. Recently the Guardian reported on his project to compile more than 50 face-to-face interviews with a range of people in all types of social worker jobs. The interviewees range from very young workers at the beginning of their careers to older people, who have been in social services jobs for over 40 years; from students in their first jobs, to managers.

The interviews also include a range of workers from various regions of the country. Dimmock’s research took more than four years, and the interviews are unedited, ranging from 20 to 50 minutes long. The main reasons for carrying out this project seem to be to gauge the mood, or level of job satisfaction, amongst social workers, and to see how they think about their own profession. Also, the aim was to test whether progress is being made in social work according to the workers, and to see what has changed in 40 years of support work.

One of the conclusions is that people find that the rise of the management culture can frequently be frustrating, since it is perceived to result in a reduction in face-to-face time with the people they are supposed to be able to help. This is accompanied with frustration at a higher level of bureaucracy: the amount of risk assessments, incident forms and other types of paperwork has augmented consistently over the past 40 years. However, there were positives to come from the interviews.

The most noteworthy of the findings, according to Dimmock, has been that people in social worker jobs have stayed so positive about their professions, despite the many obstacles that they face. The profession does seem to suffer from a perception that, to begin with, one starts off idealistic, and ends up becoming ‘world weary’ as a result of the frustration of not being able to make as much of an impact as one had hoped. However, this does not seem to be the case, judging by the people in social work jobs interviewed in Dimmock’s videos. Social services jobs still seem to attract people who are motivated to make a genuine difference to people’s lives, and often as a result of their own life experiences.

Please visit http://www.socialworkandcarejobs.com/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.socialworkandcarejobs.com/

4cfe2e690e5f7

Posted on

Telepresence video conferencing uses the latest communications technology available

The future of video conferencing has arrived. Audio visual conferencing has developed in leaps and bounds since its inception, which arguably dates back to the late 1930s, when the German Post Office (Reich Postzentralamt) successfully created a network in several cities. These connections were made of closed circuit television systems, which were connected by cables. Since then a technique was developed, chiefly by NASA on the first manned space flights, to link televisual information using radio frequency links. This is the sort of link, still used today, by news teams to deliver reports from faraway locations. This kind of communication is all very well and good for high profile media presenters, or space expeditions, but it can scarcely be viable for businesses, educational purposes, or telemedicine practices: it is simply far too expensive. telepresence video conferencing, as we think of it today, uses much more economical technology, and so it is much more accessible to businesses and individuals throughout the world.

A good visual link enables you to communicate remotely to the fullest extent possible – visually and verbally. But the road to having the sufficient level of technology to achieve this has not been simple, since there have been a number of difficulties that have made things tricky. In the 1980s a breakthrough was made when developers used Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) digital telephony transmission networks to support compressed audio and visual transmissions, with some amount of success. In the 1990s, however, video conferencing founded on Internet Protocol (IP) became available, which amounted to a revolution in the industry. This is because among the implications was the fact that televisual communications on personal computers was now feasible, and the race to release a widely available software solution had commenced.

Today, audio visual conferencing solutions are available left, right and centre, from the free, albeit relatively low quality, Skype and iChat webcam plugin services to high-end telepresence video conferencing firms supplying large multi-national companies. A huge range of solutions are available, and can be catered to the individual needs of any business. Video conferencing is said to be the way forward for global communications in the future, so some communications companies are competing to stay on top of the game as far as the technology is concerned. In an age where almost everybody in the western world already seems to have mobile telephones, it seems only a matter of time before we are all communicating with mobile video technology as well.

Please visit http://www.edgevision.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.edgevision.co.uk/

4cfcf38601107