November 20, 2016

  • Simaudio Mind 180, Part 15

    During all four years I was at UC Santa Cruz, the beds in the dorms and apartments were always separated. If you wanted to stack them in a bunk arrangement, you had to ask maintenance for the dowel pins.
    image
    Now that Student Housing crams more students into the same units, the beds now come stacked. There's just no room to separate the Twin XL bunks.

    When I moved into the Crown-Merrill apartments (pictured above), my housemates and I cobbled together enough electronics, to form a stereo system. We did not have an entertainment center or audio/video rack, so we had to make do, with stacking the components, one on top of another.

    My roommate Eric was, uh, a bit on the rotund size. Guys would point to Eric's man-boobs, and kid that he was "stacked." Moreover, Todd's girlfriend (I forget her name) would occasionally sleep over. In the morning, she would walk out topless, and make breakfast. She had good-sized boobs, and was considered "stacked." Alas, the hungry Eric was more interested in the stacks of pancakes.
    IMG_3087
    To get started in this review of the Simaudio Mind 180, my current household decided to go small, and stack it with the matching Moon 100D. Again, after making the connections (both physical and wireless), downloading all of the apps and software, organizing the sources, we used the Mind app (I use it on an iPad), to send digital data to the Moon 100D.
    IMG_3093
    I moved into the Crown-Merrill apartment at the beginning of the Fall 1991 quarter. On the musical front, that meant the dreaded grunge revolution. On the audio front, that was the time people already had CD players. Wanting even more out of the CD format, consumers now wanted to migrate to digital separates: CD transport and DAC. And the affordable DAC of choice then was the Audio Alchemy DDE v1.0. A quarter century later, DACs are the anchor, but the transport is now a streaming device, such as the Simaudio Mind 180.