Today I had to pay £52 for the privilege of finding out that my old G5 2GHz Dual Processor Mac is dead. But I felt the need to write about it because of the injustice of it all.

It’s taken a painful and long journey which I will attempt to wrap up in just a few paragraphs.

We bought the Mac from Jigsaw in Nottingham. The G5 Dual Processor had eleven fans (!) so it made quite a racket. Mine, even more so, because one of the fans decided to squeak which was incredibly annoying and detrimental to my work.

So it went back to Jigsaw who had it a few days, said they thought they’d fixed the problem and returned it. The squeaking was a lot better but not completely gone.

Instead, something much worse started happening. Now, on regular occasions the Mac wouldn’t start up. It also would crash if the energy saver came on, resulting in ALL eleven fans going at full blast. The first notice I would get would often be when I was informed that there was a “jet engine” taking off in the loft.

The Mac couldn’t go back instantly because I was so busy, but the startup failure was getting worse and worse so go back to Jigsaw it did. They diagnosed a logic board failure, replaced it and sent the Mac back along with a HUGE scratch to one side of the computer which Jigsaw then strenuously denied. Thanks!

A year later, or so, I couldn’t sleep, got up one night and tried to turn the computer on but it refused to start up. The Mac was now out of warranty and Apple Care and I needed a computer urgently, so we purchased a new Intel Mac Pro. The old G5 languished in the loft.

Until today, when we took it to an Apple repair place, with the intention of getting it fixed to use in the office we’re about to move into on Monday. By the time we got home there was a message on the phone saying that it was a logic board failure. And no Apple Care. That’s a £650 repair bill on a computer which is worth £800 in good working order.

The problems with the startup and energy saver only occurred after Jigsaw had it the first time to fix the squeaky fan, so I blame them for effectively killing this computer.

It seems so unfair that a logic board for a Mac can cost £500, that a really fast and useful dual processor G5 can go from being my working computer to useless and literally worthless with one press of the power button.

This “component” is something I’ve been planning to buy for some time as the starting point for investing in good foundations for my hi-fi.

I’ve long understood the idea that cables and stands do make a lot of difference to the audio and have had a stand, turntable shelf and half-decent cables for years now.

But so many people were writing about Vertex AQ’s products and how good they are, that I became more and more interested. They sell three main types of product; equipment supports, mains filters and cables. The suggestion is that these items are as fundamental to the system as your components are.

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I’ve suffered from tinnitus now for about seven years.

I’m also a big, big music lover. I am actively seeking out new music and bands all the time. Not only do I have an insatiable desire for music but I have got hooked on reproducing music, to try and get it sounding as realistic as possible.

Hence my audio electronics, my building of kits and speakers, my search for the audio truth (within a certain budget of course).

So, you might wonder how tinnitus and music get on with one another. It’s not an easy combination for me.

My ears ring constantly, the left more so than the right. I should point out that while it is there all the time, it’s not so intrusive that I cannot work and live normally, most of the time I actually forget about it, because with normal background noise and attention on other things it does get pushed into the background.

The worst time is when I’m tired, the ringing can become really unbearable because it’s so intrusive. Also I really miss absolute silence. And, silence is really what you need when trying to listen to music.

The other thing is that the tinnitus makes the sound distort; high frequencies are especially bad. It often means I need to wear an ear plug in my left ear. When I go to see gigs I sometimes use both ear plugs, sometimes just the left one, depending on the volume. Same for the cinema.

However there is some salvation in the form of alcohol. Drinking a bottle of beer really helps the ringing enormously—drinking two bottles is even better! The alcohol really dulls the ringing, taking the nasty high frequency edge right off it and leaving me to listen to the music in (relative) peace.

The result is a bottle or two of beer makes for a much better listening session. Red wine doesn’t seem to have the same effect, you might be interested to know. And more than two bottles of beer doesn’t remove any more of the effects of the tinnitus, it just makes it harder to put the needle on the record!