- Joined
- Jan 11, 2007
- Posts
- 1,944
- Likes
- 40
Attention: I'm posting below a few choice quotes from a sci-fi novel that may gross out some people.
KW Jeter's novel, "Noir" (1998) portrays brutal punishment for copyright infringement - agency enforcers basically harvest the spinal cord and brain stem of people dealing in stolen ideas. To further deter violation of copyright in this future society, the spinal cords are used as trophy cables in various gear, including high-end audio.
P. 245 of the paperback:
"There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner's music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish" [...]
P. 249:
" 'Thus we approach audio nirvana.' Turbiner pushed the rack back into place - he had left the curve of the trophy out in front, a think ribbon snaking across the carpet - then commenced the intricate sequence of powering up all the equipment in the proper order. A fiery glow cam from inside the ranks of NOS Sovtek 65512's, the dome-headed vacuum tubes lined up across the tops of the amps like combustible soldiers."
P. 255:
"Actually, it did sound better. McNihil had known there would be an improvement, but hadn't been quite prepared for this order of magnitude. The bass coming out of the subwoofer was deep and clean, with no cheap'n fuzzy boom box reverb; the drum strokes hammering out from the back of the invisible orchestra were as tight as the heads on the timpani themselves The old guy had had a good setup before, but now McNihil could sense the actual physical structure of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw responding in synch to the music, a nearly subliminal tremble coming up through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes."
P. 260-261:
"In the cables lacing up Alex Turbiner's stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who'd thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him. Conceptually attached to the cables, the old ones he'd already had and the new slimmed-down subwoofer cable that McNihil had just delivered to him, was a lot of audio-nerd gabble about the superiority of soft'n wet neural-based technology for high-end sound systems, coherent full-spectrum wave delivery, optimized impedance matching, the transfer function between synapses quicker than that throught he crystalline structure of metl conductors, et cetera, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda.
Only... it was bull. The Collection Agency knew it; everybody who worked for the agency, the administrators and accountants, the techs and asp-heads out in the fields, they all knew the basic shuckness of it. At the center of the cerebral tissue inside Turbiner's cables, running through it like the digestive tract of a mosquito surrounded by its minute insect brain, was a core of thin-film cryo-insulated stabilized quasi-liquid silver. The precious metal - made even more so by the expensive high tech that had transformed it - had the conductive qualities of ordinary silver, enhanced by the mercury-like room-temperature flow and lack of crystalline-structure inhibitory factors. That was why the cables sounded so good, rolled out bass like the shoes of God, made the percussion section's tubular bells ring like skinny angels. The brain matter scooped from the skulls of copyright infringers had nothing to do - in truth - with the sound the cables made possible, though the agency's claim was that it did."
(Now, I can only hope that Jeter is not on head-fi, lest he come after my spinal cord for his audio system...) If you know of any such gadget-loving passages of fiction, please post them here, or send me a PM.
KW Jeter's novel, "Noir" (1998) portrays brutal punishment for copyright infringement - agency enforcers basically harvest the spinal cord and brain stem of people dealing in stolen ideas. To further deter violation of copyright in this future society, the spinal cords are used as trophy cables in various gear, including high-end audio.
P. 245 of the paperback:
"There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner's music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish" [...]
P. 249:
" 'Thus we approach audio nirvana.' Turbiner pushed the rack back into place - he had left the curve of the trophy out in front, a think ribbon snaking across the carpet - then commenced the intricate sequence of powering up all the equipment in the proper order. A fiery glow cam from inside the ranks of NOS Sovtek 65512's, the dome-headed vacuum tubes lined up across the tops of the amps like combustible soldiers."
P. 255:
"Actually, it did sound better. McNihil had known there would be an improvement, but hadn't been quite prepared for this order of magnitude. The bass coming out of the subwoofer was deep and clean, with no cheap'n fuzzy boom box reverb; the drum strokes hammering out from the back of the invisible orchestra were as tight as the heads on the timpani themselves The old guy had had a good setup before, but now McNihil could sense the actual physical structure of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw responding in synch to the music, a nearly subliminal tremble coming up through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes."
P. 260-261:
"In the cables lacing up Alex Turbiner's stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who'd thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him. Conceptually attached to the cables, the old ones he'd already had and the new slimmed-down subwoofer cable that McNihil had just delivered to him, was a lot of audio-nerd gabble about the superiority of soft'n wet neural-based technology for high-end sound systems, coherent full-spectrum wave delivery, optimized impedance matching, the transfer function between synapses quicker than that throught he crystalline structure of metl conductors, et cetera, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda.
Only... it was bull. The Collection Agency knew it; everybody who worked for the agency, the administrators and accountants, the techs and asp-heads out in the fields, they all knew the basic shuckness of it. At the center of the cerebral tissue inside Turbiner's cables, running through it like the digestive tract of a mosquito surrounded by its minute insect brain, was a core of thin-film cryo-insulated stabilized quasi-liquid silver. The precious metal - made even more so by the expensive high tech that had transformed it - had the conductive qualities of ordinary silver, enhanced by the mercury-like room-temperature flow and lack of crystalline-structure inhibitory factors. That was why the cables sounded so good, rolled out bass like the shoes of God, made the percussion section's tubular bells ring like skinny angels. The brain matter scooped from the skulls of copyright infringers had nothing to do - in truth - with the sound the cables made possible, though the agency's claim was that it did."
(Now, I can only hope that Jeter is not on head-fi, lest he come after my spinal cord for his audio system...) If you know of any such gadget-loving passages of fiction, please post them here, or send me a PM.
classic audiophoolia!
