Ornoth

Although it didn’t start out that way, I guess this qualifies as a “memorabilia” post, given that it deals with stuff I’ve kept for the past 33 years…

Everyone has their own way of relating to significant purchases like a car, computer, television, camera, or stereo. Some people love buying new stuff when it’s on sale. Others pride themselves on getting a bargain by buying used. My M.O. has always been to buy the absolute best I can find, mostly irrespective of cost, then making it last as long as humanly possible… often long after newer, better things have made it obsolete. I take pride in having top-quality stuff and keeping it forever, and because of that I often form an emotional attachment to the objects I’ve acquired.

I can’t say that my first stereo was one of those things. It wasn’t very noteworthy, but it provided a lot of pleasure during my high school and college days.

But as I graduated college, got married, and moved into the workforce, digital audio arrived in the form of compact discs, and in 1992 my cheap high-school era stereo was decidedly worn out and in need of replacement. And my first job after college provided the necessary cash to splurge on something nice.

As fortune would have it, my then-spouse was working at a local electronics specialty store called Leiser and could get top-quality stereo components at cost. We wound up buying a hand-picked ensemble, spending around $1,500 on equipment that would have retailed for around $3,200 (which translates to about $7,000 in 2024 dollars).

I really loved that system, and was always proud to show it off. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but first let’s follow its history.

The majority of that system stayed with me following our divorce and my half-dozen subsequent moves, although I used it less and less over time, and the remaining components spent the last decade-plus stored away in their boxes…

Until recently. While noodling around YouTube I stumbled onto a tiny product that is essentially nothing more than a Bluetooth audio receiver with stereo outputs that could be hooked up directly to the auxiliary input of a traditional preamp. Such a device would allow Inna & I to stream any audio from our computers or smartphones directly through my audiophile rig. That was enough to spur me to finally dig up my beloved 33 year-old components and set them up for our enjoyment in 2025.

Of course, a couple of the old pieces are gone. The CD player that we received as a group wedding present from several university friends eventually self-destructed, and there wasn’t any point in keeping the old cassette tape player from my high school stereo. And I’d tossed my huge trunk-sized Infinity 7 Kappa speakers when the cones had dry rotted. I’d also discarded my old speaker cable and patch cords, but those were easy to replace.

But the most important three core pieces of my system were still there – my preamp, equalizer, and power amp – which needed little more than a thorough dusting. Lemme do a little show-and-tell about those, because I still hold a lot of affection for these three components.

Let’s start with my graphic equalizer. An EQ is useful to boost or cut specific frequency ranges in an audio signal. Got speakers that sound tinny? Use the sliders to boost bass and midtones. Don’t want to wake the baby on the other side of the house? You might quiet the bass a little while leaving everything else normal. Got a room where one speaker has to be placed in a back corner? Boost the left channel or reduce the right.

My 12-channel Denon DE70 graphic equalizer is a quality and useful piece of equipment. It’s always provided great service, and I find its lit bank of 24 faders visually appealing. It’s a bit unique in that the faders for the left and right channels are interleaved as paired green and yellow LEDS, rather than the more common setup that uses two physically separate banks of sliders. And there’s my little Bluetooth receiver perched at top left:

Next, the crown jewel: my power amplifier. A power amp has just one job: take a microwatt “line level” audio signal and boost it to the tens or hundreds of Watts necessary to drive one’s chosen loudspeakers. It’s the final device in the audio processing sequence, connecting to and controlling the output from your speakers.

My power amp was manufactured by Carver, which comes with a bit of backstory.

Bob Carver was a legendary audiophile engineer, especially known for his innovative and impressively powerful amplifiers. I was first introduced to his work in high school, when my friend Paul showed me his brother’s stereo, which included Carver’s M400 old-school vacuum tube power amp, a radical-looking 7-inch square black cube that could pump out 200 Watts per channel: a ridiculous amount of power for a home system at that time. It made quite an impression on me!

The Carver TFM-4.0 power amp that I bought in 1992 is one of Carver’s followup models, offering a ludicrous 375 Watts per channel. It’s a great amp by a great engineer, but because Carver only produced this model for one year, it’s a rare and collectable component even within Carver’s exclusive lineup. Like the M400 that Paul showed me back in 1981, its only display is six sets of LEDs to show the power level of the signal it’s sending to the speakers; and in all the years I’ve owned it, no matter how high I pumped up the volume, I’ve never been able to light any but the first, lowest power level LEDs. The thing is a 23-pound workhorse!

That just leaves my preamplifier, which is like the central conductor of a stereo system, orchestrating inputs from various sources (e.g. CD player, radio tuner, turntable, tape deck, microphone, and now even Bluetooth devices), sending a normalized signal out to the EQ and back, and then downstream to the power amp and speakers.

Like my EQ, my preamp is a decent piece of equipment. Being a CT-17 preamp/tuner made by Carver, it matches my power amp, but doesn’t have anywhere near the same cachet as his power amps. But the built-in radio receiver is a convenient combination.

Which brings me to the final, missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that kept me from setting up my stereo over the past decade-plus: the lack of speakers.

A good stereo is worthless without good speakers, and for a long time I wasn’t able to justify spending a lot of money on a set that would do justice to my other components. But I finally found a set of bookshelf speakers with positive reviews, that wasn’t too exorbitant, and which – if I bought them refurbished – would fit neatly within the credit card rewards bucks I was about to liquidate.

So let me introduce you to my one brand-new component: a set of Polk Audio R200 bookshelf loudspeakers. While I haven’t had them long enough to form a strong opinion of them (or bond with them), they seem to be doing a good job so far. They’re noteworthy in having a very flat response, which means considerably less tweaking of the frequency curve on the equalizer than I’m used to. I only wish I could move them a little farther from the wall, to better distribute the bass.

Although this didn’t start out as one of my official “memorabilia” posts, overall I’m delighted to have my old components back in service again. Despite being 33 years old, they still deliver great sound quality, and it’s really nice having a Bluetooth connection to stream music at will from any of Inna’s and my laptops and phones. I’m really glad I lugged this equipment around with me for all these years!

Time for a grab bag of Buddhisty observations based on some recent readings, dharma talks, and workshops.

At a recent talk, Ajahn Geoff was asked about the Buddhist concept of Right Effort: specifically, how to cultivate the discipline to perform actions you don’t want to do, but which you know will have positive results. To my surprise, he responded by outlining my longstanding belief that you must be guided by how you will feel on your deathbed about the choice you made. I’ve mentioned this guiding view of mine in blog posts from 2005 here and 2003 here.

My belief that the brahmaviharas of metta (lovingkindness) and karuna (compassion) are very similar was confirmed by Narayan at a recent CIMC workshop. The main difference is that compassion is more specifically targeted at suffering, whereas metta is a more general friendliness toward all, irrespective of the conditions of their life.

The phrases Narayan uses for compassion practice are “May I care for your [physical] pain” and “May I care for your [emotional] sorrow”. I feel that “May I” is semantically much weaker than “I do”, and “care for” is weaker and more vague than “care about”. So the phrases that speak to me most compellingly are “I care about your pain” and “I care about your sorrow”.

While on the topic of the compassion workshop, I should mention the following. Although I am currently halfway through my intended year of intensive metta practice, my current intention is to follow that up with a year of intensive karuna practice. That’ll cover the first two brahmaviharas, but I do not plan on devoting the same time and energy to the remaining brahmaviharas of equanimity and sympathetic joy.

When someone expresses dismay with the phrase “It’s not fair!”, I have always taken glee in pointing out that “Life isn’t fair, and you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed if you expect it to be”. I have recently begun to appreciate that although life indeed isn’t fair, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have compassion for those who suffer from life’s injustices, and take action to remedy them.

The two figures on the table behind the teachers’ platform at CIMC are Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (aka Guan Yin, Chenrezig), and Manjusri, the bodhisattva of transcendent wisdom. It seems a bit odd to have them so honored in a Theravadin meditation center, but it does underscore how relaxed CIMC is about borrowing from other Buddhist lineages.

We are often so preoccupied with planning about the future or reminiscing about the past that we aren’t paying any attention to the present moment. We must be present for our minds to process the sensory input we receive in each moment. If we are absent, one might say that we are “Out of our minds”. Are you “out of your mind”?

One of the observations in the Pali Canon is that our egos exhibit certain seemingly contradictory impulses: the desire to exist, and the desire to not exist. These can be seen, of example, in the desire to “leave one’s mark on the world”, or the parental impulse to live solely for one’s offspring’s benefit, losing oneself in something other than one’s own life. The Buddha stated quite clearly that these are not helpful preoccupations. However, many Buddhists also espouse the idea of cosmic unity: the view that we are all one entity, one living expression of universe, rather than many unique and separate individuals. To me, this seems to be just another, more politically correct manifestation of the desire to not exist. Submersion in some anonymous universal being is just as much a manifestation of the ego’s desire to find oblivion as any other human activity.

One of the ways that karma works is by one action setting up the conditions that influence one’s future state. For example, if we choose not to pay back a debt, we have created the conditions that cause others to mistrust us. Thus our bad acts indeed precipitate negative reactions from others, which impinge upon our future lives.

In “Walden”, Thoreau writes about mankind’s advancement of science and contrasting lack of progress in the ethical sphere thus: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Technology is a tool that multiplies our capabilities, but it’s up to man to create something meaningful with that enhanced capability, and our philosophies haven’t advanced in any meaningful sense in the past 2000 years.

One way of looking at mindfulness is being mentally and physically present and open to the beauty in each instant of life in its fullness. If there is so much beauty and joy to be experienced in this world (and I believe there is), that raises the question of how to avoid being overwhelmed by it. At any given instant, I am presented with all kinds of sensory input and myriad potential objects of attention; so if I am to appreciate any of it fully, how do I choose what part of that experience to focus my attention on? This difficulty is compounded by the Buddhist affinity for what is called “choiceless awareness”.

One of the reasons western society is so focused on acquisition as a method of seeking happiness is the very affluence we have achieved. Consider the experience of a child going through a mega-warehouse toy store. The child is presented with thousands of wonderful things that create and fortify his sense desire. But even though his parents might give him numerous toys that far exceed what children in most other cultures would have, no parent can buy everything in the store, so the overwhelming majority of that child’s experience is being repeatedly told that they cannot have what they want. This cultivates an incessant feeling of lack, which over time solidifies into a longlasting sense of dissatisfaction, with a particular focus on acquisitiveness as the solution to life’s inherent disappointments. The scenario of a child surrounded by toys—seeking happiness from material objects they cannot have—is played out throughout adulthood as we are enslaved by our compulsive desire for the newest electronic gadgets, a sleek car, a wonderful home with the nicest television and kitchen appliances, and a trophy spouse. But ultimately it is the very profusion of consumer goods available to us that makes us feel deprived, impoverished, and unloved.

Most American adults suffer from some form of self-esteem issues. As a result, our childcare and education systems have changed to place an immense emphasis on cultivating self-esteem in our children. Today’s youth have grown up in an environment where they are not criticized, they are not disciplined, and they never face emotional hurt. However, since they have rarely if ever seen one of their peers suffering and in emotional pain, they have also never learned the skill of compassion. And even if they do see another person hurting, their own lack of trauma means they haven’t developed the ability to empathize with another person. To one who has never been hurt, the sight of another person’s suffering brings up feelings of aversion and disgust and fear rather than compassion; others’ suffering becomes something that divides and separates people rather than unites them in sympathy. By putting so much effort into raising children with a strong sense of self-esteem, we have accidentally raised a generation of youth who are self-absorbed and stunningly lacking in the virtues of empathy and compassion.