A reorganised LP collection, the stereo, 6 Nations Week2

Yes, it's all go here. I bought another LP holder as my collection was getting a bit crammed in and overflowing into the TV table. I took the opportunity to reorganize things a bit too, there's now a box for PT/No-man, a box for Marillion, a box for Queen/Fish/Steve Wilson (other), and another box for 'everything else' which seems to include a sizeable amount of Tom Waits and funk. Inspired by this, I took another look at my stereo system to try and sort out the SACD playing

I've got a nice DVD/SACD player (Cambridge Audio DVD99), hooked up through an Onkyo TR- SR670 AV amp   (apologies for the link thingy, but eh it's a nice picture) which does everything I want very nicely, and spits out sound (currently 5.1) to some Kef 1005.1 speakers. All of which was my present to me on moving countries. All sounds nice, but it wasn't playing SACDs through the Toslink cable - although it would do it through the HDMI connection. Which all seemed odd to me, mainly cos I'm not an AV person. I'd thought the Toslink would give a better quality connection so had given up on the SACDs for the meantime and had even considered selling a couple of them (the Talk Talk one in particular, having seen what it's currently going for). However the other night I decided to look into this, and HDMI does give as good, if not better, sound than the Toslink. So I pulled out some Porcupine Tree DVD-As and tried it, in both DTS and DVD-A format using HDMI and Toslink. I couldn't tell the difference, possibly the HDMI sounded a bit 'brighter' but I'd be the first to admit that may have been wishful thinking. And so I'm now connected by HDMI only from the DVD/SACD player, and happily revisiting my SACD collection. The initial tests were done using Peter Gabriel's Up and Talk Talk 'Colour of Spring' (which is in stereo, not 5.1, just high quality). Excellent.
Oh the LP player also goes through this, but that's obviously kept to stereo.

Yes, as I said, it's all go here.

I took the opportunity to hook-up a power saver device the power company sent me for free (yeah, now that makes sense!) which switches off power if the TV, Amp, DVD player are all in power save mode. This seems to work well, and the system is switched on by using the TV remote power button. Clever.

6 Nations Rugby Week 2 Part 1
The two games yesterday were a distinct improvement over week one. Scotland looked convincing against Wales, validating my Scotland as the dark horse pick. Then went to pieces in the last 10 minutes and managed to lose. Very similar to watching Wellington, although in Wellington's defence they've been far more consistent the last couple of seasons, and they aren't an international team. Dan Parks had an excellent game and controlled things well, the forwards stood up to the Welsh pack nicely.The Scots were helped significantly by the Welsh trying to keep things in close, one-off the ruck was about the end to it. Until the Scots stupidly got players sent off. While they were winning. Dicks. The coach seemed rather pissed by all this.
The French dominated the Irish, who also stuck to one-off the rucks whereas the French seemed happier flinging it around in French fashion, without losing control. Their forwards certainly stuck to the gameplan and held the Irish down. Reasonable game and this will put the French as the team to beat.

Overall, it's still not that exciting to watch, and I'm getting more tempted by Sky so I can watched the Super14. Damnit.

Food in Shepshed
Avoid. The pastie was advertised as award winning vegetarian pastie (mushroom and stilton), which it may have been, once. It would have benefited from being heated up using an traditional oven rather than the new fangled microwave, and using tasty mushrooms rather than small unopened white buttons. Sigh. I used to go to cafe's to get inspired for new things to cook.

Me.