Mauritius

I have my dream HiFi setup: Audiolab and Elac

10 March 2021 By Avinash Meetoo 7 Comments

One of the “exercises” I love doing is imaging my perfect audio setup.

Four years ago, I thought that my dream combination would be a Nad integrated amplifier and Dynaudio speakers. Two years ago, I changed my mind to an Audiolab 6000A and the same Dynaudio speakers. Today, I now have my dream setup for listening to music:

an Audiolab 6000A integrated amplifier (and its review on What Hi-Fi?)
a pair of Elac Debut Reference DBR62 speakers (and a corresponding review on What Hi-Fi? and on AudioScienceReview)
a Google Chromecast Audio (which is now discontinued by Google but which still works wonders)

And, very interestingly, I purchased the Audiolab and the pair of Elac speakers in Mauritius. I got the Audiolab 6000A at Art of Sound (thanks Gilbert and Ravind) and the Elac at ED Electronics (thanks Hafiz). At both places, I dealt with real professionals who were also passionate about high end audio and music in general. Everyone told me that there is a definite market for high end products in Mauritius.

The equipment cost me around Rs 50,000. Quite steep but, bear in mind, that this is not an expense but more of an investment for years and years to come. At least, this is what I like to say to myself.

A big thanks to Christina. She is the one who made everything possible. And she is now an audio buff, just like me and so are our kids. Life is really cool.

How I use the UVI Falcon software synth and sampler

10 October 2020 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I have just written the following comment in Reddit to a question on whether UVI Falcon is worth buying. I personally think Falcon is worth it. I think that it was interesting that I share the comment here too:

I am a hobbyist as well and I bought Falcon in October 2018 with the 30% discount. (Since then, I’ve upgraded to 2.0 and now 2.1 for free.)

I have a number of UVI expansions and sound libraries, most which I got for free from UVI. On the other hand and by choice, I’ve bought World Suite, BeatBox Anthology 2 and Synth Anthology 2. (PS: I also got Digital Synsations for free from UVI). For me, this represents a decent amount of money invested over the past two years.

What I have now is a formidable amount of patches, most of them good for electronic music (which I do) and very complex & fun to play with. I also love World Suite as it is so inspirational.

But, here are two things I have noticed: (1) I have only used a small subset of the patches up to now (because there are so many of them) and (2) I don’t really use Falcon for programming new patches (because I already have so many of them — and when I want to do some programming, I tend to use a simple subtractive synth like OB-Xd).

In other words, while Falcon is a formidable synth and sampler, I tend to use it for its expansions and libraries.

(PS: In the past, I sampled my Kawai K4 synthesiser using MainStage. I have created patches in Falcon for them and it’s easy and fun.)

I also own other massive synths with a lot of complex patches e.g. AIR Music Technology Hybrid 3 & Loom II, Applied Acoustics Systems Ultra Analog VA-2, iZotope Iris 2 and KV331Audio SynthMaster but, now that I have Falcon, I tend to use them less. In fact, apart from VA-2 and SynthMaster, I have not really gone in depth in any of the others (which I got for very cheap through deals).