I must be getting cabin fever, strange things are happening to me. Even stranger than the normal thoughts that pop into my head.

I decided that I needed to add a sub to my stereo to bump up the bottom end.

Well there was a Hsu 12"  sub driver sitting in a box over in the corner, I'm betting that it would punch up the thump.

But it is sure a lot of  work to get everything dragged out of the garage to build a proper enclosure. And truthfully the driver is here for another project anyway.

So you do what you can do with what you have.

Nothing like the box it came in and a little duct tape.

It seems to work well enough at low volumes. Though if you push it, the driver kind of levitates. Kind of self porting itself I suppose. Maybe some more duct tape is needed?



Then the idea of playing some CD's through Dan the Amp entered my head.

You have to understand that I have been out of the disc game for years and years and didn't really have a proper player. So what to do?
It then occurred to me that my wife had bought a real cheap WallyWorld DVD player years ago and it was sitting in the storage shed.

So I donned the correct personal protection equipment as required for these crazy times and headed out into the Zombie infested wilds of the corn fields of Central Illinois.
After a bit of digging through a pile of plastic storage containers, the player was located and brought back into the house.
No shots were fired, no lives were taken, a successful mission.

So the cheap WallyWorld DVD player was plugged into the wall and against all odds it lit up, hell the remote even worked. The dollar store batteries had lived outside for at least 3 years, incredible!
 
When I say the DVD player was cheap, I'm talking less than $20 cheap. The kind of player that your mom buys to hook up to her made in East Pakistan TV set.

So then I used the line out of the player to hook into Dan the Amp with interconnects that cost 10 times what the player cost.

Guess what, it sounded terrible, shrill, no bass, no mids no nuthin'. What to do?

Well then the idea popped into my head of what would happen if I hooked it up to my Grace DAC?

After a half hour of digging around for a digital interconnect that actually worked (it took 3) and hooking the player to the DAC, I made the discovery that I wasn't smart enough to remember how to manipulate the menu of the Grace DAC to be able to use the digital input instead of the USB . I needed the manual.

Have you ever tried to find a owners manual?
While I keep them along with every other scrap of paper that comes my way, my storage facility looks like the paper recycling center in a mid size city.
Yes to the world I try to look like the calm organized Engineer that I am paid to be. But way inside of me is a packrat that hasn't thrown away a magazine, ever. If you need motorcycle magazines from the mid 60's until now, I am the guy to call.

Luckily for me the manual was stuck inside of a Cycle magazine from 1987 that caught my eye as I was digging through the mess.

So then I was able to get everything hooked up and in the correct mode.

Hmmm, well it is more than passable now. If you keep throwing better equipment at the cheap stuff it improves.  Kind of funny how that works isn't it?
So now I can listen to some old CD's with some bass augmentation. It only took me 6 hours. At least I've got nothing but time, cough cough.
I've really got to stop drinking these diet Dr. Peppers.