Dark Thoughts

I discovered something pretty strange with my Laptop, just now. The S/PDIF (digital) output on the front of my NEC Versa P8100 doubles as the headphone output. Now that is nifty. Here I was thinking that my laptop has no headphone output, which was going to be problematic on my upcoming trip to China, because I wanted to use my wasted time at airports to investigate my new software (Korg Legacy Collection - Digital Edition) and I was afraid that I was going to have to share my discoveries with the rest of the Business Class Lounge.

Now I've discovered that I can noodle in silence :D

I was very skeptical about the NEC laptops when our office bought them, but I continue to be impressed by them. My only criticism is that there is only 1 PCMCIA slot and a couple of extra USB2 ports would be nice. Oh, and the Firewire output doesn't play ball with mLAN. My only other niggle is the short battery life. I can get maybe 2 hours from it before it's flat, which is pretty poor really. A docking station option would also have been nice, though I guess they had to keep the price down somehow.

Now my next dilemma is whether to take my good Senheiser Cans, or whether I can stand trying out my new Wavestation plugin with my iPod headphones...

Here's my review of the Korg Legacy Collection (Digital Edition) from my use so far.

Wavestation - Awesome, though I wish it had lots more User RAM banks and the ability to process live audio (like the A/D).
M1 - pretty much what you'd expect. Lots of bread and butter sounds. It's good to have all the ROMs. If you've ever used an M1, well, it's pretty much the same. A bit of a pain to load sounds and navigate through the cards, but overall, not too bad.
MDE-X - A friend of mine was raving about these FX. All I can say is that he obviously has never heard Kurzweil's KDFX or Lexicon or Eventide. These effects are pretty lame and the control sucks. I couldn't find a place to type values in and the knob position is pretty hard to read. The control is coarse at best, though fine control can be had by holding down shift, but even so, I spent way too much time trying to set my compressor than is desired. It was quicker to unload the plugin, and pull up a compressor on my KSP8.

Mind you, I only bought this for the Wavestation plugin. The hardware versions are pretty hard to find and still no where near as cheap as this plugin.

In other news, I'm down to 97.5 kg. It's been a while since I signed in, but we're still eating well and going to the gym (after a bit of a lapse after easter).

Blah...

Work to do...

So little time....