Cleaning Time

My family and I will be moving to a new apartment come April or June. I've been looking for a quiet place since last year and I found this apartment for rent a few months back. This place belongs to my "Ate" Lorie, a not so distant relative. I told her that I could only moved in by April or June and she gladly have the place reserved for me. For the mean time, the least I could do is to well, have the whole place painted, applied varnish on the flooring etc... I also did installed some venitian blinds for the window panes.

[the master's bedroom as viewed from the terrace, the aircon rack is empty, I dont have an airconditioner :-) ]



[The flooring]




[We went there last Saturday to clean the whole place up, this is the kitchen with an oven and a coffee maker (and some rags too) that we brought for use]






[My two daughters posing on the terrace]





[My eldest son doing a mock cellphone calls]



[Posing posing]



[The terrace at night]



[My kids playing inside one of those build-in cabinets]



[The build-in cabinets makes a good sleeping room]



[King Kong Frago]



[Another terrace at the back]



[Computer]



[New Flat LCD TV]



[Beds for the kids]



[Bedroom in sepia]

Accoustic Testing

Now that I have everything cleaned up, it's time to test its accoustic property. Lying on the floor is the Marantz Slim-Series audio systems. The amplifier section is a 40W + 40W RMS amplifier/preamp with 0.001% total harmonic distortion (as per specs). Below it is the CD/DCC deck. On the background, you could see the Pioneer Tudoroki speaker systems.



The Slim-Series is the brain child of Ken Ishiwata, the chief designer of most Marantz products since the early 90s. What makes this component different is it's slim size, about 2.5 cm in height. An earlier version of the series can be found here

[Ken Ishiwata. Marantz opened it's first branch in the Philippines way back 2004, they pulled out after around 2 years... sad. One Marketing Manager from Marantz that I met in Shangri-La, Jeroen Vandenhurk, said they will soon have a marketing arm here though]





[A very thin profile, it practically fits anywhere on your component cabinet]



The CD deck is actually a CD and an a DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) player in one, notice the front loading mechanisms for both.



Unfortunately, the DCC was never been a main format in the Philippines, in Europe it once became popular, but alas, due the increasing titles for CDs, and the lack of support for the platform, DCC (together with the MD) never made it as a mainstream format to replace the analog cassette tape.

[DCC underside]



[DCC topside]



Unlike the analog audio cassette that stores data by varying the magnetic fields representing the analog audio frequencies, DCCs on the other hand records data in 0's and 1's, very much like the CD, but using a magnetic tape as a medium instead. Some players, like the one offered by Technics plays both analog audio cassette and DCCs on the same deck.

The system did sound great with Bass and Treble controls set to 'on'. The Todoroki speaker, in streo mode, wasnt able to reproduce sounds better when 'Tone Defeat' controls were set to 'on'. This button directly feeds the source to the amplifier defeating the Treble and Bass controls. I would suggest a better speaker when playing this component on this mode. Perhaps a Mardaunt Short or Canton speakers can reproduce the desired sounds (but a little bit pricey). In fairness, I have treid to hook this up before to Pioneer's CS-5070 speakers, and they sound great (a friend owns one).


[The Marantz system coupled to the Pioneer VSX system, notice the profile difference]