Life is wonderful . . .

[stevev@greylady.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender)]

My current stereo system consists of an Aiwa walkman, although
fortunately a pretty good model.  For a long time I'd been using
this 1.5V adapter with it, even though it takes 3V, because the
1.5V seemed to work well enough.  Of course, it didn't take me
long to discover that some things with really high recording
levels would sound distorted when used with the 1.5V adapter
instead of 3V worth of batteries.

So a couple of days ago I finally got a 3V adapter and then
everything sounded louder and the distortion went away.  But then
I noticed this other problem.  First I noticed that the tracks on
the other side of the tape would sound faintly in the right
channel, and after that noticed that the left channel was very
faint.  So I looked at the tape head and saw it was tilted at an
angle, then figured out that there was this screw that appeared
to be involved with aligning it, then cobbled together a
makeshift tiny screwdriver by sharpening up this piece of metal,
then clamped the head back down to where it was straight again.

The end result of all this is that the seemingly deteriorating
quality of my tapes has been an illusion caused by an
underpowered, misaligned walkman.  Now even _The Sensual World_
sounds terrific; most of the background hiss I was hearing was
from bad playback and not the engineered-in variety.  The Dolby
works a lot better now too.

I also finally got a VCR of my own, and I can watch my entire
video collection, consisting of _Live at Hammersmith_ and _The
Sensual World Videos_, at my leisure.  (_The Whole Story Videos_
is on order.  I can hardly wait . . . )

So merry Katemas, everyone!