Closing Your Eyes to Listen to Music
Scientists say your brain does it for you. Now, I'd like them to reverse the experiment to see if that's why okay home theater can be "good enough," but so-so hi-fi seldom is.
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Snake Oil
Maybe we need a new word for over-advertising results.
The Real Wilfred Owen
Jeremy Paxman argues that the last lines of "<I>Dulce et Decorum Est</I>" were not meant cynically.
New Crit on Popular Music
Wow, Mark Steyn is even crankier than I am.
To Hell and Back
Jay Allen Sanford describes his horrifying descent into crack addiction and homelessness. It's not a pretty story, except that he did make it back.
What technology is your main amplifier? What brand and model is it and why did you choose it?
It's been several decades now since the tube <I>vs</I> solid-state debate began, with no end in site. Now we have some digital (PWM or class-D) contenders. What technology is your main amplifier? What brand and model is it and why did you choose it?
Olive and MusicGiants Team Up
<A HREF="http://www.olive.us">Olive Media Products</A>, manufacturers of audiophile-quality Olive music servers, has partnered with <A HREF="http://www.musicgiants.com">MusicGiants</A>, the leading site for CD-quality music downloads. Olive's well-received Opus line of digital players now allows users to download, store, manage, and play large collections of CD-quality music directly from MusicGiants without needing to buy or rip CDs, select track by track, or use a computer. (You can find John Atkinson's positive review of the Olive Symphony <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/406olive/">here</A>.)
The Van Gelder mystique
Music Matters Jazz, a new audiophile label, starts up this month, reissuing classic Blue Note albums on 180-gram virgin-vinyl LPs pressed at 45 rpm. The test pressings I’ve heard sound extremely promising. The people involved in the company certainly know what they’re doing (Joe Harley of AudioQuest, Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray of AcousTech, Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records, who is more familiar with the Blue Note vaults than anybody).
Zucker Says the Darnedest Things
When we last heard from NBC Universal's CEO Jeff Zucker, he'd refused to renew the network's yearly contract with Apple's iTunes Store, leading Apple <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/090307nbc/">to immediately pull NBC shows</A> from the store rather than have them yanked midseason. In addition, Apple managed to control the story so that NBC came off looking clueless and greedy. You'd think Zucker would have learned to keep his mouth shut from that media drubbing.
Vinyl Daze
This last week has generated more mainstream coverage of the vinyl world than we've seen in, say, the last 20 years.