Rumor is that the suits at MTV are beginning to kvetch about the expense of having bottled water delivered to the NYC offices of the network. Man, when the bottled water bill gets up on the bean counter radar nothing good can come of it.
Also, I made one other change when I removed the Ayre gear from my system: I switched from the Ayre–supplied and –spec'd Cardas cables to Furutech Evolutions. Incidentally, it was right around this same time that I read <a href="http://www.bluebirdmusic.com/Build_Your_System.htm">Jay Rein's essay</a> on system synergy.
Another subway pun, this time the title refers to the project that created the London Underground. Must be something in the air (hah, I slay myself) today.
Not as in counterculture, but as in the London Underground, Cool tour of unused and abandoned stations. Gosh I love this stuff—the only thing better is actually sneaking in yourself.
I'm a complete sucker for jargon. Specialized vocabulary identifies you a an insider and, whether you mean it to or not, it reveals a lot about your group.
My buddy Jeff Wong and I were talking about the collector's mentality on one of our bike rides recently. Jeff observed that there are two major strategies for collectors who have it bad: Try to collect <I>everything</I> and the other is mine a tightly defined subgenre.
Last week we asked which <I>Stereophile</I> writer you would like to have come visit. Reader Jay Valancy suggests that a more interesting question is which writer would <I>you</I> like to visit?
Ultimate Ears, the headphone company that specializes in in-ear monitors such as the <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/headphones/1204ultimate/">UE-5c</A>, is developing a new model slated to join the <A HREF="http://www.ultimateears.com/superfi/superfi.htm">super.fi</A> family of products. During the prototyping period, the design crew referred to the new model as "XXX" (triple X).
Slim Devices, the company best known for the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/306Bstph.html">Squeezebox<…;, has announced what it is billing as "the most advanced networked audio system available." At <I>Stereophile</I>, we hear this claim all the time, and it usually means that a computer peripheral company has added another USB port to a product aimed at the MP3 crowd.
The audio diaspora is split on the subject of bass. Some audiophiles—surely the majority—consider the reproduction of low frequencies purely in terms of the weight and drama it adds to sounds with significant bass content. Others—the generalists—take a much wider view of the significance of extended bass response, noting that an audio system's ubiquitous high-pass filters are unusual in Nature and suggesting that this is one of the factors that separate, at the fundamental level, live sound from its poorer reproduced cousin. When John Atkinson wrote on this subject more than 10 years ago (<I>Stereophile</I>, November 1995, "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/75">As We See It</A>"), he quoted a memorable line by Kal Rubinson that encapsulates this latter view: "Something in Nature abhors a capacitor."