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A Thanksgiving Turkey

Microsoft's Zune, that is. Andy Ihnatko's Chicago Sun-Times review is pretty much perfect. Don't write him off as an Apple cultist, however. He gives props to the PDDs that get it right.

"Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, 'What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?'

"Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place."

Ouch! "The Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World…

When Does Passion Become Obsession?

Waaay before it becomes audiophilia. A documentary about the Audiophile Club of Athens.

Screeching and Honking and Spewing, Too

***

3.
Madison Avenue at 39th Street can be an ocean of hardhearted buses. Normally, these buses all look and sound the same: Black and white orca whales, screeching and honking, and spewing stinking fumes into my already stinking air. I hate them. No offense to any real orcas out there.

Anyway, this morning, a special bus-monster stank up my air. This one was dressed entirely in black and covered in a JBL speaker; a whole whale of an ad shouting and stinking up my morning commute, claiming something like, "Take them anywhere," or "Listen to them spin," or…

Take a Chant

John Marks sends along this link to an Orthodox web radio station, which, as Monseigneur Marks points out, offers "more varieties of Chant than thou canst a stick shake at!"

Verily.

Mgr. Marks does warn, "about 20% of the programming is reading from psalters and prayers and historical sermons and letters, [which] might disqualify it for some." Not me. Compared to regular commercials—and especially NPR's non-advertisements—I find them awfully low key and atmospheric.

Thanks, JM. AncientFaith Radio just rocketed to the top of my iTunes radio playlist (a trick I learned from…

Data Can Now Be Stored on Paper!

Despite the Oh, really? hed, this is kind of a fascinating article.

OTOH, Ars Technica ain't buying it.

So <I>That's</I> What That Apple <I>vs</I> Apple Suit Was All About!

Are the Beatles coming to iTunes soon?

Edumacate Yourself

"Epact is an electronic catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, the British Museum, London, and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. Together, these museums house the finest collections of early scientific instruments in the world."

John Atkinson gave me a lavishly illustrated book about early scientific instruments one Christmas. I gaze at it for hours on end—as I will now do with Epact.

Via Grow A Brain.

Coming Soon!

Wes will begin filing his reports soon.

Robert Lockwood

Whenever I fly into one of those, "I gotta get rid of some of these CDs" moods, I inevitably settle on my seemingly endless boxes of blues records. But then like magic, hard–edged questions like "Do I really need 15 B.B. King records" eventually morph into expressions like, "Damn, I haven't heard this record in a hundred years." I am genetically unable to dump blues records.

Strangely enough, while it was pouring rain in New York all day Thanksgiving Day, I stayed in and got into the blues records, this time not to weed out the weak doggies, but to find my Robert Lockwood Jr. discs. The…

Nothing Could Be Finer

Than to blog hi-fi from China—or at least, that's what I thought when Original Audio's Ping Gong and GuangZhou Hi-Fi 2006's Zou Dao invited me to attend the largest audio show in the Celestial Kingdom.

I fly over on Wednesday, November 29 and promptly lose a day. I start blogging from GuangZhou Hi-Fi 2006 on December 1 and will continue through its final day, December 3.

While in GuangZhou, I'll also visit an audiophile's listening room and go shopping in the city's audio market. I'll also visit E&T, which manufactures chassis for high-end companies, both Chinese and…