Recent content by Frank Dernie

The bus station is mainly just long distance busses, London and airports. The local buses just have a stop every few hundred meters. There is a bus into the centre, where parking is expensive if you can find a place, the car parks are usually all full be 10 o'clock, every 10 minutes. If the...

I like walking and taking a bus into Oxford is the only intelligent way to visit the city centre.

In the north where I was brought up and did my apprenticeship all the local chip shops I ever went to cooked in beef dripping. I didn't discover that cooking oil was even a feasible alternative (it isn't really ;)) until I moved south. I get F&C from a mobile van which is here every Thursday, I...

I have a problem spending money on any sort of cosmetic work - iI am probably a lost cause.

Getting good fish and chips is difficult anywhere IME. I was brought up in the north of England, near Fleetwood, where most fish and chip shops were pretty good and a few superb. I have never had fish and chips I consider very good in London, despite living there for 3 years and trying a few...

Cosmetic dentistry is not a “thing” in the UK except some wealthy people, mainly girls. If your genes dictate crooked teeth, that is what you will have. Like me ;) I did consider getting something done when I got a bit more money but didn’t bother in the end.

A huge number of British companies have been sold to foreigners since the Thatcher “Britain is open for business” policy and the products often no longer made here or are unrecognisable due to recipe change, like much of Cadbury chocolate.

You do realise that the first harmonic of a 15kHz square wave is the third, ie 45kHz? So there is absolutely zero possibility of a human being able to tell 15kHz square wave from a 15kHz sine wave by ear is there?

If anybody working for me had ever designed something mains powered that needed a different mains cable to work properly I would know he/she was an incompetent fool and they would be looking for a new job. Any mains device which actually needed a different mains lead to work properly is a load...

All dome tweeters have an “oil-can” resonance. In the case of soft domes it is damped to reduce audibility but is in the audio band, in the case of a well designed metal dome it is too high to be audible and therefore pointless to add damping and increase the dome mass, but look like a scary...

I did consider that but decided based on the recordings I enjoy it would be a waste of money for me. I have listened to some music blurays and films both in stereo and in "low budget" surround (it isn't that low budget I have a Genelec 8341a centre, Meridian rears and a REL Studio sub it just...

Most of my recordings are stereo and my preference for "high fidelity" is more to an experience than anything else and I have never experienced a live concert from the middle of the stage, classical, folk or rock. I have been intrigued by Q-sound 3D effects on stereo recordings like Roger Waters...

I do too and this comment lead me to having a blissful evening yesterday enjoying 5 and 6 - almost overload even to me a Mahler enthusiast for almost 50 years now.

Mahler’s music is very dynamic, far more than most record companies are prepared to release to the public for use on normal playback kit, unfortunately, so every recording I know is compressed to an extent, though nowhere near modern pop. One of the joys of it is one moment a vast orchestra is...

These are all sad. He lost a daughter from Scarlet fever when she was very young.