Not sure whether this has been mentioned, but there's a new Kickstarter project for a portable headphone amp with bluetooth connectivity, an onboard DAC and, oddly, a bass boost.[=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/427722258/vampeo-v1-bluetooth-portable-headphone-amplifier]Link here[/]. I was...

This month's Uncut lists their 150 albums of the decade, and in my view while the overall list isn't bad, the top ten is not that great: 1) White Stripes, White Blood Cells 2) Bob Dylan, Love and Theft 3) Wilco, A Ghost is Born (with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at 35 and Sky Blue Sky at 138) 4)...

DavidMahler's personal list of 100 Greatest Albums of Pop/Rock/Soul got me wondering on what basis we could cut down the multiple appearances of Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen etc. that this sort of list...

This just in from 4AD: Quote: Alongside the re-issue of the nine Dead Can Dance albums we are releasing a limited edition of 1500 box sets containing all albums in Hybrid Stereo SACD format (which will also play on regular CD players). The box set will comprise all nine titles...

Having noticed that Priest is about to release a new double album, Nostradamus, which conforms to the new fashion of releasing super deluxe boxed sets including vinyl, I decided to fill the gap in my knowledge about this band. Checking on Amazon.co.uk I was delighted to find a nice package...

It seems likely that this has been discussed here before, but I don't remember seeing it. Perusing the lyric booklet to the new Elbow album, The Seldom Seen Kid, I found the following note: Quote: Turn Me Up! To preserve the excitement, emotion and dynamics of the original performance...

Despite the fact that I'm a massive fan of early Genesis and other early prog bands, I've never made in-roads with Yes or Rush. I haven't really tried with Rush (though I seem to recall hearing and liking Grace Under Pressure). With Yes there's the problem (for me) of Ian Anderson's vocals. So I...

I've been listening to Phish and Umphrey's McGee recently, but I have no idea about the jam band scene and would like some advice. It turns out that all the fans of these bands hate all the other bands and the other bands' fans, so trying partisan forums looks like a non-starter. Can someone...

My second thread with a peculiar iTunes problem in less than a week ... this is getting stupid! Right: my iTunes (7.6.0.29) has taken to "losing" podcasts. I have it set to "Keep all episodes" and have disabled autodelete, but it seems to be junking about three a day, and they are not ones...

Of no interest to US listers, I guess, but Play.com now do DRM-free downloads at a fractionally higher bitrate than iTunes for a cheaper per-track price. Bitrate is 192kbps or 320kbps and cost is £0.70. (No, I don't work for Play.com!)

I've been ripping to iTunes in AAC and recently stepped up to 256kbps. Now I find that after ripping, some tracks, for no apparent reason, have tags that cannot be modified. Is this some obscure, unsuccessful attempt to stop user modification at high bitrates, or a bug? In either event, is there...

I've noticed that on torrented file descriptions it often says "Do not encode to a lossy format or sell this recording." I get why the second request, but why the first? Is it purely to prevent lossy files overwriting the lossless ones and becoming reintegrated into the torrent, is it for...

This is a sort of alternative to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea is to take the band or performer mentioned in the previous post and get as far away from that performer as possible in one step (which you have to explain!). The step doesn't have to be a person, but obviously those are the...

A boxed set of all PF's studio albums (including,for these purposes, Ummagumma) is coming in December, mainly as a marketing exercise. I'm assuming that these are all the existing remasters, and it so happens that I don't own most of those recordings. That said, I'd like some guidance from the...

I searched in computer-as-an-audio-source but didn't find a thread on this problem, so I thought that I'd ask here. I'm trying to use my Micro DAC with Vistas, and the driver properly installs and everything says that it's working. The test sound even plays correctly! But ... the sound still...

At the weekend I bought a Tesco Value DVD player: £17 odd (that's $35 to US forumites). It's got an SPDIF-PCM output option through a coaxial Digital-Out, and is - as I write - playing into my Mini stack. Other than that it has the "audiophile" feature of not having any sort of display. So...

So my Shure E4cs arrived in the post this morning. I tried them with the factory-fitted soft flex sleeves but all I could hear was the gentle hiss as they slid back out of my ear canals in five seconds, so I switched to the triple-flange. Bingo! Comfortable, isolating fit. No customs for me...

I got hit this morning with a £100 ($200) import fee for my Headroom Micro Stack, so there goes the budget that I had planned to spend on a nice high-end pair of IEMs. With what I've got left - £126 - I could buy UE super.fi 5 EBs, Ety 6is or Shure E3cs. I could stretch to E4cs, or even...

Pure Digital DAB 2000 at the manufacturer's site Pure Digital DAB 2000 at Play.com I found this while looking for portable players with digital outs. It looks like the facilities are very good - mp3 (on SDs), fm and DAB - and it'll even record DAB to SD at the press of a button. Given the...

Now that I'm moving away from using the onboard amplification on, say, an iPod, and am investing (or about to invest) in decent headphones, a headphone amplifier and probably a DAC, I've run into a source. I'd like to get a portable transport, but while there's no problem getting a cheap DVD...

I have the HD 650s on order and will be listening to them and burning them in from the headphone jack of an Arcam amplifier ... less than ideal, but it'll have to do until I solve my amplification problem. I've got about $800: actually about £600, so p&p, taxes etc. make a huge difference to...

While exploring the muscular lows of the Triport IEs today I decided to give another spin to Metallica's St. Anger, an album that I have never listened to on headphones before. By all standards that album sucks, except ... wow, it's like I never heard it before. Instead of its sounding like...

Not having heard any of the headphones that I'm considering buying, I have trouble visualising their merits, but since the 650s seem to be pretty much the "best" headphones in their price class, I wanted to check something. I'd be grateful for comments on the following assumptions: 1) "With a...

Amazon seem to be selling these headphones for $127. I was considering the top headphones in class (the 880s, 650s and K 701) but have been struggling to decide between them after hearing bad things about them all. Would it be completely stupid to shatter my future budget and order the...

Ever since I bought my Bose IEs I’ve been revisiting my desire to have a really nice headphones set-up, and I’ve been working out my possible preferences. My budget is, ahem, not yet in place, but I’ve drawn some conclusions and would like some advice please. I’m planning to buy the Headroom...