Be Excellent To Each Other

I get my cheap stuff from Tesco or debenhams sales

Pretty much everything I wear is from M&S.

We have a really crap M&S it does not do the full range.

for my work clothes. Everything is from M&S or Dunnes Stores (which is essentially Irish M&S).

Richer Sounds is a cheapy shop. I've spent around that on my stereo.

When I win the lottery, I'll easily spend tens of thousands.

That makes it even worse. How good can a CD sound?

Right. I'm off. Have a wonderful weekend. Everything fitted into the Ka, so I'm three hours away from a bottle of wine. Cheerio!

I bought a load of jumpers from Primark once. They were a pound each, and I bought five of them.

I took them home (couldn't be bothered to try them on) and none of them fit, so I sold them to Zeppo.

"Pretty good mate", is the answer.

My stereo cost £6000 and it only plays one CD at a time. Er, and that's it. I love it; not only the way it sounds but also the way it looks. Those towering, glowering thermionic valves and slabs of solid polished aluminium of both the monoblocks (and even CD player as well, which also has all valve stages) do it for me, as do the cherrywood PMC OB1i speakers.

I'm the first to admit that it's a great extravagance (albeit that said, I've had 10 years' faultless service and great pleasure from it, and counting, so at £600/year, £50/month, it's not too bad I reckon. Man-maths(R) strikes again ).

Hifi, cars and motorbikes are passions of mine. By comparison, others piss £50+ a month on Sky TV subscriptions, £250/month on fags and many thousands on one-off holidays etc.; it's their money so who am I to criticise? All I can say is that it works for me!

I have to say, I do like the look of a bit of sexy audio gear.

Here's what I'm on about Cras. You either adore this kind of thing or hate it with a passion; it's very avant garde, to put it mildly:

http://www.vickers-hifi.co.uk/retail/shanling.html

The speakers are much more conventional looking, but far from conventional in their design:

http://www.dagogo.com/View-Article.asp?hArticle=852

Oh, I can absolutely see the appeal of beautiful shiny tech, but I wonder if a £1k system is enough to play a CD to it's full potential. They don't have *that* much quality headroom to justify £5k+ do they? That's a genuine question, by the way

To be honest mate, I can't even cite an objective specification/performance argument at all; the valve monobloc amplifiers are feeble (50W RMS) and their THD figures aren't great either. Typically for me, only an entirely subjective argument can be made (the type that Doc normally drives a coach and horses through ). To my ears, valves sound beautiful. Honeyed, relaxing, effortless (at least at low/medium volumes; they soon become muddled and overworked if you try for 'loud houseparty' amplitudes; they cannot hack it). I've a troubled soul and they soothe it. That is the only justification I can offer.

(That aside, I guess it's like anything - the Law of Diminishing Returns applies. A £200k Ferrari 458 Italia is a beautiful thing to behold, but is it really ten times better than a £20k Golf GTI, or three times better than a Porsche GT3? etc.)

We have a valve-based record player from (wild guess) the late 50s in the office that the theatre department has bought as a prop. It still works, very well. I was very surprised by the quality of the sound coming out of it. Very impressed.

Doesn't surprise me at all mate.
I've always been obsessed with thermionic valves.

When I was a kid, I loved nothing better than going to junk auctions from house clearances etc.; used to pick up huge, solid oak audiograms and the like for 50p or a quid - paper round cash. They were sometimes duds and electrical safety left much to be desired (many hadn't been on for years), but I used to love that bass-rich, mellow sound even then; even that trademark 'burning dust and solder' smell when you switched 'em on.

(Of course, being the little tyke that I was, I used to rip them to shreds and make my own speakers etc., but no-one else wanted them after all).

It's confirmed my motherboard won't take more than one stick of RAM on the plus side 4GB sticks exist.

I reckon my motherboard might be the same. It did have 2x2gb but one stopped working and I'm still not sure if it's the board or the RAM.

I'll get round to fixing it one day.

I think I spent about £15k on mine.

But most of that was on golden cables.

And about the same on lights to go with it.

That's what it costs to get your hands on a Bluetooth speaker that's really good at making tables vibrate, I guess.

Oh, it made tables vibrate

Close.

We had eight of (an older version of) these, for starters:
http://www.martinpro.co.uk/product/prod ... erformance

And four of (older, again) these:
http://www.martinpro.co.uk/product/prod ... duct=t-rex

And we had a bubble machine. It cost £30. And when we switched it on, people went nuts.

Sigh.

My old band had a bubble machine which our singer once tried to put on his head during a song. Because it wasn't a sealed thing, he just ended up with bubble mixture all over him for the remainder of the gig.

Yeah, I know.. cool story bro.

It would appear my office has mice. I cite for evidence the mouse that just ran over and climbed on my foot, looked at me, then scurried off down an under-floor cabling hatch.

View from my hotel

I don't listen to CDs.

What media do you use?

Lossless files through a DAC, and vinyl.

*splutters*

Since when did M&S do three t-shirts for a fiver?

I think every office I've ever worked in has had a vermin infestation at some point. People eating at their desks, big storage cupboards that are left undisturbed for ages, cabling ducts and suspended ceilings all must be perfect for them.

I'll have you know I got here before the marketing push really kicked off.

The Kraken is a fucking amazing boozes. Don't like rum? Fuck you, mix The Kraken with your favoured cola and get shitfaced. Honestly. So drunk. More in the bottle. I'm off to get it.

Oh, it's far cheaper, but it sells the same stuff, has the same people advertise it and the same 'own brand' labelling (more or less). I often stock up on shirts when I'm visiting the in-laws.

Katy Perry has a really nice bottom.

NSFW

That could probably do with a NSFW tag or changed to a link

And this is just the usual type of car you'd expect to see on the A34 on a Friday evening

It was on the Daily Mail site, it's not like it's porn or anything

Well, I know I wouldn't like to be caught looking at it if I were at work.

It's something you don't want to be scrolling past in the office. I've stuck it in spoiler tags.

I know I don't have a job, but:

1) It's not for anyone to decide what is and what isn't NSFW. It's up to your boss. Therefore one should ALWAYS er on the side of caution with anything even remotely racy. Your opinion, his opinion, my opinion, her opinion, none of it matters. If there's flesh or gore, it's NSFW. Someone's boss might take action for something as innocuous as a girl in a bikini. It's not worth the risk, and it's frankly disrespectful to other BEEXers who visit this forum from work in good faith.
2) Spoiler tags don't stop the image being cached. NSFW images should always be a link.

I thought we'd already established this years ago when we set this forum up?

Aye, if a CDC was somehow deemed NSFW then a bare arse is pretty obvious.

I'd hate for anyone to catch me on the Daily Mail website too.

It is a very nice arse though.

From the rules. They've been there since day one!

Bloody rules.I couldnae be arsed trying to shop that funny blue fella onto your new avatar

Oh don't get so precious about it.

Anyone who thinks this forum is SFW is kidding themselves, that's why I don't browse or post during the working day, if I'm posting during the day, it's because I'm off work.

A picture that's considered suitable for publication on the Daily Mail website is nothing compared to some of the content that gets posted here, just because they might be words instead of pictures, doesn't mean they won't breach about 90% of workplace internet guidelines.

I apply the 'boss test' to my internet use at work, i.e. would I be comfortable reading/posting/looking at whatever content it may be if my boss was stood behind me, if the answer is no then I don't do it. I also availed myself of a copy of our internet use workplace policy and guidelines, and BEEX breaks them in a pretty spectacular fashion, pictures of Katy Perry's arse or not.

Just because you don't read BeeX at work doesn't mean that you should treat is as though nobody else does either.



The spoiler tag was me. Because it was an attachment not a hotlink, I couldn't turn it into a link. The URL to that image is based off beexcellenttoeachother.co.uk, so isn't going to flag web filters if they don't flag on the site itself.

Don't be such a dick about it then.

That's not my point, my point is that if people think a picture lifted from the Daily Mail website is inappropriate for their workplace, then I pretty much guarantee that the rest of BEEX is as well.

I'm trying to be helpful here, I'd suggest that people have a read of their workplace internet usage policies and decide whether or not they'd be happy to have their BEEX history and postings made during work time, and the content of those threads/postings, placed under any sort of examination.