Bernstein, who would have been 80 on August 25, was one of the 20th century's most important musical and cultural figures. He composed scores for numerous plays, movies, and musicals---West Side Story perhaps the best-known of them all---as well as symphonies and operas. For many years he conducted at the annual Tanglewood Music…
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The Library of Congress has honored American composer, conductor, writer, and teacher Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) with an online preview exhibit from The Leonard Bernstein Collection, one of the largest special collections in the Library's Music Division.
It's well known among designers of power amplifiers that the class-A and -A/B amplifiers (referred to as linear amplifiers) used in the majority of car, home, PC, and pro audio systems are notoriously inefficient. They can consume vast amounts of power and yet waste most of it---as much as 80% or more---as heat. They require large power supplies and massive heatsinks, which drive up system weight, size, and cost. On the other hand, class-D amplifiers, using Pulse Width Modulation switching technologies, have good power efficiency but sometimes questionable audio fidelity. (The Spectron…
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 everything and the other is mine a tightly defined subgenre.
I tend to fall more into the "everything" category, but I lack the funds to really be comprehensive in any of my passions. Poulpe Pulps took the other direction—it specializes in pulp magazine covers featuring octopods.
How silly I thought at first, but the more I examined these covers, the cooler I thought the collection…
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.
This collection of Medical Slang is brash, irreverent, and profane. It may strike some folks as callous, but, having worked in hospitals, I know you have to develop a pretty black sense of humor to keep from being overwhelmed.
My favorite? Hard to pick, but it might be: "Dagenham - (psychiatry) or "Three Stops Beyond Barking": severely disturbed/mad (based on British train station names)"
OTOH, there's something almost…
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.
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.
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 Jay Rein's essay on system synergy.
I had already been using a Furutech e-TP609 power distributor and Evolution power cord. These accessories have been quiet constants.
You might remember that when I reintroduced the Musical Fidelity gear to my system, I heard a dramatic change in the overall sound. It was a change that I preferred.…
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.
Talking to Amy Lombardi who is a friend who also works in the music business, as opposed to just another business associate, she mentioned that Neko Case's new record, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood has Sound Scanned over 100,000 units in the U.S. alone. Good for Neko.
Metaphors help us understand the universe, but what if they're really helping us get it wrong?
"When you're carrying a book with the big fat title Embalming." Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has written a gentle update to The American Way of Death. Putting aside her statement that "death is a big, huge bummer," it sounds interesting.