Parkour & all things AV

A blog dedicated to the art of Parkour, and the technical aspects of audio and video.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

And more photos!






Some more photos. These are just a small selection of the whole lot. You'll notice that there aren't many shots of us actually doing parkour amongst all these. That's because when were were actually training, we were too busy to be taking photos :-) Look out for the video soon though!

More Lisses pics






Just a few more photos from our trip

Lisses trip photos






I was hoping to have written up a full report of our trip to Lisses by now. Unfortunately I haven't had the time yet due to work and parkour training funnily enough! Briefly though, we got to train with Yann Hnautra, some of the other Yamakasi & David Belle himself! We did at least some training every single day, and attempted to burn up the last of our energy on the very last day by crawling around the lake! After 1600 paces we decided that we'd probably done enough, and considering the fact that we were only about half way around, we decided to give up. It was a good week of training, and I think we all came back fitter & stronger. Here are a few photos:

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Ready For Lisses

Tomorrow Dave, Will, Danny & I fly out to Lisses for a week. It's been over a year since my last visit, and I feel that my Parkour has improved a lot since then. Whilst the last trip was good, this time I'm more prepared for it both mentally & physically. Recently I've been doing more strength training in preparation for the trip, and I feel that I'm currently in the best shape I've ever been.

After a few days we'll be joined by TCT. Last year our trip overlapped with theirs, but we only got to train with them for a day before it was time for us to head back home (with Owen who had an unfortunate injury on his first day in Lisses). This year we'll have at least a couple of days to train with them, and of course we'll no doubt bump into one or two other familiar faces while we're there :-)

I'll post a write up and photos as soon as I get back. Bye for now!

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Crap decor, great hifi






As I will soon be starting to upgrade many of the components in my system, I thought this would be a good time to document my current set up. I have identified a number of areas in which the performance of the system falls short of the standards of the theatrical dubbing stage, and will address these issues over the coming months/years with a number of upgrades :-) The time for compromise is over. The time for serious audio visual reproduction is about to begin! Here's a few shots of my current 'compromised' system.

Photos showing: The whole system, including high definition plasma showing HD content from Sky HD; The equipment rack along with the various components; The DVD/SACD player (the only component I'm 100% happy with at the moment); The subwoofer; One of the dipole rear speakers. Wherever possible, I've gone for THX certified gear.

A world of technology






A few more photos showing: The mess of cables at the back of the
surround processor/preamp; The Protools system & mixing desk; The
acoustic cabinet for the computer; The conditioned mains supply; Some
of my DVD's

Monday, August 07, 2006

From quadrupedal to quadraphonic



After spending the last 20 minutes crawling up and down my stairs in a bid to build some more strength for my trip to Lisses in a few weeks, I returned to my computer to find that the Torrent I've been downloading for the last few days has finally finished. I recently read that a high quality transfer has been made of the quad mix of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon album. In the 1970's there were a number of quadraphonic albums produced and released on both vinyl and quad 8 track cartridges. This was well ahead of its time really, and it's only recently that we've started to see multi channel surround mixes of music appearing on SACD and DVD-A. A few months ago a new 5.1 mix of Dark Side Of The Moon was released on Super Audio CD. Being a big fan of the album, I rushed out to buy this and was very impressed with it overall. But for die hard Pink Floyd fans, the original Alan Parsons quad mix of DSOTM was still the definitive version. In the last couple of years, DTS CD versions of this have appeared on the internet, but these were derived from Q4/Q8 tapes or the quad vinyl releases. Unfortunately these sources were subject to the ravages of time and were a long way from the original studio masters. With no prospect of EMI releasing the original quadraphonic mixes, somebody with access to the masters took it upon himself to ensure that the original mix doesn't get lost forever. Hence the recent DVD-A version! Considering the fact that this is essentially a 'bootleg', it's an absolutely faultless transfer from the original masters, and superbly authored with menus, on screen artwork during playback and Dolby Digital & DTS encoded versions for anyone with a standard DVD video player. But it's the MLP Lossless soundtrack which most accurately conveys the subtleties and dynamic range of the mix. In addition to the 2 front & 2 rear channels, an additional sub channel has been derived from the low frequency content of the main channels. On a properly set up system, this fills in the bottom of the frequency range nicely (and pisses the neighbours off at night!). The album is a fairly big download (3.43GB), and as BitTorrent is basically a P2P system and the bandwidth isn't guaranteed, it takes some considerable time to download. You'll then need to burn the disc image to a DVD. Trust me, it's well worth it though!!

I'm off for another listen now, but here's a couple of pics of me marvelling at the whole experience. Please try to ignore the crap wallpaper!

Britain's fattest teenager


I know that this doesn't relate directly to Parkour, but it certainly relates to health. I'm just watching 'Britain's Fattest Teenager', and it's downright repulsive to be honest. A stark reminder of what happens if you gorge yourself on fatty foods and do no exercise whatsoever! Here's a photo of me staring at the TV is disbelief at what I'm seeing.