The Audiophiliac

Paul McCartney is now saying the Beatles catalog won't be available on iTunes until sometime next year. Yeah so? Maybe I don't get it, but didn't the "digitalization" of the Beatles catalog happen more than twenty years ago when they put out the CDs? So why are iTunes buyers a vast untapped Beatles market? The catalog is already online--if you have a hankering for Abbey Road buy the CD from Amazon and rip it right now.

I could give a hoot about the long-running legal feud between the Beatles' music label Apple Corps and Steve … Read more

Todd Haynes' new Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There" stars Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw playing different aspects of Dylan's life. The film comes out later this month, but the soundtrack is here now. The 34 track, two-CD set mixes interpretations by what I call "Baby Bobs," artists, many born before the music was originally recorded, and "Boomer Bobs," Dylan's contemporaries. And curiously enough, the Baby Bobs mostly dish out for note-for-note recreations of the originals, while the oldsters veer off in different directions.

Jeff … Read more

As a reviewer I have to admit I've blown up more than my share of speakers over the years. I usually push the limits just before I finish the review and ship them back to their maker. Hey, it's my job and I like to see how loud they can go, and most of them survive my torture tests just fine, but some can't take the heat, like the Sony DAV-X10's poor little satellite I popped last week. The 2-inch "woofer" fell prey to my over zealous fun with Eminem's "Live From … Read more

Listening comes naturally, doesn't it? Well sure, everyone with normal hearing can listen, but what do they hear? What I'm talking about is listening as a focused activity--as opposed listening where music serves as background to something else, reading, driving, running, working, or washing the dishes--active listening can be a lot more rewarding. You hear stuff in your favorite music, maybe rhythm guitar patterns, overdubbed vocals, or instruments you never knew were there can suddenly jump out of the mix. It's stuff the band may have put a huge effort into perfecting, that you only notice when … Read more

Put that silly iPod away--this time it's the real deal--extreme hi-fi by and for fanatics. Chances are you've never heard a truly great sounding audio system, so it'll be hard to imagine living with sound that can take you to another place. The very best systems can summon up hot blooded performances of your favorite artists. It's music in the foreground, upfront and real--sure, your $29 plastic computer speakers can play tunes, but without a hint of passion, totally devoid of human spirit. It's merely music as background noise, a drone to fill in the … Read more

Natural sound as we hear it in "real life" is pure analog, but recorded sound is, with few exceptions, chopped up into digital bits. So other than live music concerts pretty much every note you hear is digital. Whether you're listening to an iPod, the internet, TV, CDs, DVDs, or the radio, they're all digital in one way or another. We have as a species evolved over the eons to hear analog sound, and it's only over the past 25 years that digital has taken over. And it hasn't been very pretty. The only … Read more

Great music, not just dance music, is supposed to get you to feel something. Which is, I think, the point. Daniel J. Levitin had a great Op-Ed piece, "Dancing in the Seats," in the October 26th New York Times examining the question of how profoundly we're affected by the sound of music. Levitin, a neuroscientist, runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal. Levitin observed that "Our species uses music and dance to express various feelings: love, joy, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, and friendship." Oh, and when everything's clicking … Read more

Playing music and movies really loud is a lot of fun, too bad most of you are missing out on that part of the experience. Obviously, the speakers built into TVs aren't up to the job, and that's the way 80% of you experience TV. HTIB owners are likewise out of luck. Yeah, they may boast of having "1,000" watts on tap, but if you believe that, well, puhleeze! That 8 pound amplifier may, on a good day, squeeze out a few hundred watts.

If you really want to feel something when you're watching … Read more

Granted, home theater and multichannel sound go together like peanut butter and jelly, but music, even now in the twenty first century is pretty much a stereo-only affair. Ergo, if you listen to more music than watch movies, ditch the hassles of the 5.1 channel, satellite/subwoofer model and get yourself a decent stereo receiver and a pair of really nice speakers.

Outlaw Audio's RR 2150 "Retro Receiver" sounds spectacular with music and better yet, it's a refreshingly simple to use alternative to all of the stupidly complicated seven-channel A/V receivers I've used.… Read more