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"There's no substitute for good songwriting," he begins.

William Barrington-Coupe comes clean.

Here's where we separate the musically inclined geeks from the musically inclined geeks with decent computer sound systems. Jeff Wong sent along the URL to <I>Deutsch's Musical Illusions</I>, so I checked out the examples on my laptop. I got nuttin'. Typical male-type guy that I am, <I>then</I> I read the technical note:
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" In listening to these illusions, it is best to use equipment with a flat frequency response so as to avoid spectral distortion. For example, enhanced high frequency transients tend to degrade the effects. And features that alter the signal in any way, such as spatialization features, should be turned off. Also make sure that the playback amplitude is not too high. With many sound systems, this amplitude needs to be set at a different level depending on whether you are listening through headphones or loudspeakers, and you might want to determine the appropriate settings before you begin. When you are listening to the stereo illusions through loudspeakers, it is best to be positioned equidistant between the speakers, with one to your left and the other to your right."

<I>Air and Space</I> has a fascinating article about the mechanical naughty bits of the Wright Brothers aircraft. You can all but smell the hot oil.

Not every disc is an artistic or performance winner, but some of us seem to end up with more junk than we'd like to admit. Forget about sound quality, what percentage of your music collection is great music?

It's funny how things sometimes have to hit you in the head before you actually notice them. When Jon Iverson and I were cruising CES 2007 in January, we were stopped in our tracks by <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/107soolooscdslot/">Sooloos</A>'s media server technology. Sooloos <I>got</I> the whole no-compromise audiophile approach, but what really knocked us out was how thoroughly it utilized the metadata from AMG (All Media Guide): Feed the the Sooloos server a disc and it would access AMG's database and collect artist name, album title, track names, cover art, genre, <I>mood</I>, side-man information, and even "associated concepts."

Carson City, NV loudspeaker company Wisdom Audio has been aggressively reorganizing itself lately. The first part of the program was re-uniting founder Tom Bohlender with erstwhile partner David Graebner to refine and perfect the magnetic planar speaker technology used by Wisdom's hybrid planar/dynamic loudspeakers. Then, in October 2006, the company appointed industry veteran Mark Glazier <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/100906glazier/">president</A&gt;. On February 8, Glazier announced that Jon Herron would join the company as vice president of sales.