Certainly not *all* the music, of course, but this is a list of some of the music that made it onto my speakers and headphones during 2020 through this first half of 2021. 2020 In previous years, I’d been in the habit of writing down my favorite listens of the year in one of those […]
(non-existent third party commentator) Hold up. Are you really going to spin 2000 words on ripping CD music? In 2020? In the middle of a global pandemic? me: yes. Yes I am. NETPC: Dude, just use iTunes/Windows Media Player/whatever. me: Those apps use dithering and error correction on the music you’re ripping. They’re not bit […]
This weekend I took the plunge and sought out the newest version of Audirvana, my preferred, nay, favorite audio playback software. I’ve been using it exclusively for listening to my local collection of music on my computers for nigh 4 years now and I love it. But will I love 3.5? With a completely overhauled […]
After my kitchen stereo project, I’d been thinking about the next stage in my multi-room, RaspberryPi-based audio setup: The Living Room! I had, in a box, unused for probably ten years, an old NAD C272 stereo amplifier. A pair of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers were gathering dust down in the basement that used to belong […]
I’ve been a Sonos user for probably five years now. Initially, they were something of a marvel of integration and software polish, providing ease of setup and room filling sound for … they are not cheap. Their closed ecosystem was another sour note for me, but I pushed past that in favor of convenience. The […]
One day in March, 2018, I woke up feeling pretty good about the day ahead of me. Coffee, a little light internet and then a good two to three thousand words on my book. That was the plan, anyway. About three quarters into my coffee, my screen turned to black and white vertical lines and became […]
Last year, around this time, I was about a month into my iTunes replacement experiment with Audirvana+. I still get a lot of hits on those articles, so I thought it was time for a follow-up on how that’s going. That is especially relevant now that Audirvana has reached the shiny 3.0 milestone, with a […]
Awhile back I wrote a review of my portable digital audio player, the Fiio X3 2nd generation (Amazon US, Canada). The summary of that review was that this is a bare bones audio player, with a simple UI, that is beautifully-built with an attention to sonic quality. It sounds fantastic but has a few UI […]
a CD or “Compact Disc”, is a small, shiny round surface containing optically-readable, microscopic bumps used to encode music or data. They are an obsolete technology that existed in the latter quarter of the twentieth century and enjoyed a brief metamorphosis into the DVD (“digital versatile disc”) and Bluray formats at the beginning of the twenty-first […]
There sure is a lot going on in the world right now. Twitter’s a mess of US election coverage, overthrown governments and localized horror shows. Oh, and the Olympics are starting soon. What better way to tune out the noise than with some headphones and a great little portable music player? Sit back, crank up some […]
