For your entertainment.   Shame about how rarely these simple tests seem to get run these days.

Not when I got this in the mail today. It's disappearing pretty quickly (amazon.com is out), but amazon.de still carries it. $120 to the US, shipped. That's $3.75 per disc for top shelf Messiaen (unless you mark down for Murano's piano work).

After doing quite a lot of ABX testing on low levels of harmonic distortion, with my ER-4Ss and ATH-A900s - both of which I am an enthusiastic supporter of and have owned them for around 5 years - I've found that the A900s eat the Etys for breakfast when it comes to being able to resolve smaller...

Justice For Audio Quote: Justice For Audio is an organization endeavoring to unite fans of music, musicians, and industry professionals in a movement to end the practice of excessive loudness and overcompression in the production of music. Our goal is to broaden the public’s awareness...

Leo Ornstein Everything about this guy exudes cool. An internationally known composer, writing groundbreaking works with names like "Suicide on an Airplane" at the time of Ives and early Stravinsky, and yet lived till 2002, whose biography includes the phrase "was rediscovered in a Texas...

I'll prefix this by saying that this whole story is in no small part my own fault. Still, I really need to rant. I bought LiveWires as a birthday present to myself last year. Support was pleasant etc, the impressions went well, the wait was not terribly long. I got them in the mail, tried...

So I just got a 0404 USB in the mail last night. Plugged it in, installed the drivers, bluescreened once, the usual Creative driver jazz. So far I've only tried it on Foobar. I was successfully able to work around the issue where switching a song takes 10 seconds in ASIO by zeroing out the...

After I bought my Lamy Safari, and looked woefully at the cheapness of manufacture of my Moleskine, I began to wonder what the "perfect" journal would be like. Something that will last well beyond the usual journal, and isn't designed solely (or even partially) for aesthetics. The...

I'm listening to my Etys on my Ipod, which is plugged into an AC adapter. When I stood up just now, I hear a momentary high-pitched noise in my right ear, followed by a sharp (but very light) pain - like a pinprick. Everything was fine after that. It's a totally bizarre thing that I'm willing...

Time to be a party pooper. Looking back on my gear purchases over the past, um, 2 years, the only piece of major gear I've bought is an iPod. No headphones, no speakers, no sources, no amps. (Ignoring the analog rig side of things, and even then, I'm being quite skimpy in my purchases, and...

My gf and I are starting intro swing classes (eventually heading into lindy hop) and are working on starting a collection. So far, we've picked up Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Darin on CD. I'm going to pick up Oscar Peterson - Night Train and Count Basie - April in Paris on yourmusic; I couldn't...

Everybody but plaidplatypus bailed on the after-meet. Tossers, all of you. Random impressions. Keep in mind I'm not a particularly picky listener.The Zhaolooser was fine. I'm not really a tube guy at all so I can't comment a whole lot on them. First experience with testing line-out adapters...

Yes, it does in fact work on 5Gs. No, it's not "true" gapless. There's still a gap, but it's very very small, and possibly imperceptible on some stuff. About on the scale of a pop on a vinyl record. EDIT: I found a workaround.

(Mods: This thread approved by jude.) For a while now I've had it on my mind to get a group buy started on turntable test records. Currently the going price for a new test record (HFNRR) is about $45. A complete run for 1000 records, including sleeves and 180g vinyl, is somewhere around $3000...

So my MMF5 has what appears to be a single-phase AC synchronous motor. The 120V cables goes right into it, and there does not appear to be any significant power supply circuitry on it. I strongly suspect - nay, I know for certain, numerically - that this has virtually zilch power supply...

So I'm going on a biz trip in a week and I needed something to store music. My 1G iRivier player would be woefully insufficient, and as it turns out I already have 30GB of MP3s that I own, and I'm sensitive to good resale value, battery live, and value added features like video. So I was...

Simple Solution Pet Stain & Odor Cleaner. Yes, this is doggy doo cleaner. Note the ingredients:"Purified" water Detergent Enzymes/bacteria Minor fragrance Isopropyl alcohol So, if you let the fragrance and the questionable water quality slide, this has all three ingredients used in the...

A person who loves to hear himself/herself listen. EDIT: I say this in self-deprecation.

I'll be heading to the ARC tomorrow (I don't think I have the stamina to stay there for the whole two days), and I was wondering if any Austinites were planning on going too. Last time I scored big on some cheap used Zappa CDs and the bargain bin LPs, and I'm hoping to continue on that angle...

I've been seeing a couple extremely annoying issues with my PAD, that I'm only figuring out now that I'm doing needle drops fairly often: Virtually no recording software will actually capture from the card 24-bit clean. Instead, what usually happens is that the signal undergoes some really...

Bleep.com has been the giver of much good stuff recently. First they released Hangable Auto Bulb last week. I bought the FLAC version, it rocks, you should get it. Today I logged in to see if there was anything new I was interested in. To my utter shock and glee, the featured album was none...

www.austinrecords.com. This weekend only. It's billed as the largest sale of recorded music in the US. I've been there before, and it indeed has a lot, although their electronic music selection is quite spotty. I've been there a couple years ago, and 90% of it is vinyl and is sold at...

I've been listening to this since Monday (couldn't wait - bought FLAC), and so far the most I can describe it is that it's like watching an hour-long train collision - in a very, very good way. Utterly mesmerising and impenetrable. Though it is opening up to me after about the 7th listen...

Good news. Quote: The album is available to pre-order in Warpmart now, and for the first time ever will be dowloadable from Bleep in FLAC lossless audio. What's almost as cool is that the entire album is legally previewable in 128kbps MP3 (this isn't new)... without breaks between...

As was fairly well known to fans, the new NIN US tour tix are coming up on varying days based on the venue. Well, today the Austin and Houston tix went up at 5pm. I can't go to the Austin show (Autechre is playing the same night) so I was planning on getting tix from a friend for the Houston...