catscratch

I'm with Dusty on this one; the kind of sucky neutral you're referring to isn't neutral in the slightest. It's a coloration that stems from desaturated tone color and insufficient dynamic range. It sucks the life and color out of music yet it is somehow considered accurate by a lot of folks. I think that live sound is the bar for true neutrality and accuracy, and live music has everything that these so-called neutral headphones don't: warmth, fluidity, dynamic range, punch, tonal richness, harmonic accuracy, texture, etc. A headphone that takes away the warmth and impact is every bit as inaccurate as a headphone that boosts the bass or puts in treble spikes in order to appear more detailed. Accuracy is musicality. Emotion is present in the music, and a truly accurate system should not get in the way of that. None of the serious professional rigs I've heard sounded analytical or boring in any way. But then again I only heard a few.

Ditto. At the risk of necessary seppuku I have to admit that I really loved the HE90 when I heard it, colorations and all. It's just so wonderfully euphonic while still being really detailed and fast. The bass had some real weight too even if it was a bit one-note. It's a great headphone for just relaxing and immersing yourself in the music without over-analyzing it. I haven't heard the HD800 or HE60, but in an optimal rig, it's HE90 >>> HD650 > HD600. However I do prefer the HD600 over the HD650 in most rigs; while the HD650 scales higher the HD600 is much better balanced. Still, I am a fan of the Senn sound and like all three quite a bit.

Did anyone catch the Paul Willams / Sergio Martinez fight? Man, what an absolutely brutal showdown. And what absolutely amazing display of skill by Martinez. He did run out of gas in the end but to take on a fighter like Williams, with every single physical disadvantage stacked against him, and put on a show like he did, is a true mark of his quality. I was really impressed by the way he continually made adjustments as the fight went on and kept pulling out new things all the way till the end. As far as Williams, well what more can be said, he is physically the ideal fighter to dominate at this weight and he has a terrific set of fully balanced skills. He's the one of the most avoided fighters in boxing for a good reason. Purposefully not mentioning the outcome - go see it! This fight deserved to have the sort of fanfare that accompanied Pacquiao/Cotto, and I can't wait for the next one. Considering that these two are quite possibly the most avoided fighters in boxing, they don't really have anyone to fight but each other. Besides, this outcome was controversial, and there's bound to be a rematch just for that reason alone. Does Floyd want to prove his quality? Fight Pacquiao, and move up one weight class and fight Martinez. Or Williams. Preferably both.

Spectral - "Diffuse." One of my favorite albums and I simply cannot get over how extraordinary the production is, at least as far as electronic music goes. Shpongle 1 and 2 were good but this is on a completely different level - as dynamic, uncompressed, fluid, organic, layered, and multidimensional as anything I've ever heard. The music is pretty off the wall too, extremely difficult to describe as it completely defies genres and spends its time somewhere between dub, progressive trance, and Goa. It's somewhat similar to Jaia in feel at times especially when it comes to organic fluidity, but the last time I heard this kind of frankly insanely obsessive attention to detail combined with a complete and utter disregard for genre conventions was on some of the early Nile albums (to make a strange cross-genre comparison). Spectral's older stuff was classic Goa but here they were really in new territory, and there hasn't been anything much like it since, either. This came out on Blue Room Released but whereas label-mates Juno Reactor, X-Dream, Raja Ram, etc went on to have illustrious careers after Blue Room folded, Spectral went bust. Too bad, this is as good as anything Blue Room ever put out. I may have ranted about this disk multiple times already. But that's only because it rules so very much.

My 2500 had three previous owners and all of them tried to make the steely treble go away with burn-in. The poor thing was downright crispy by the time I got it but the steely highs remained. Not enough burn-in hours, I think. Maybe 2500 is a reference to how many hours it really needs? And maybe try blue noise if white and pink noise didn't work? What about burn-in blocks? I know we have cable elevating blocks made from a wood with special properties just for the occasion, but did anyone ever try to make headphone elevating blocks for burn-in?

I had a Proline 2500 for a while. It didn't kill me to listen to it but for the price it just had too many flaws. The tone sucked, plasticky and artificial, the highs were steely and the bass was boomy. It was reasonably detailed and pretty dynamic but then again the SR-003 is worlds better for less, and so is the HD600 for that matter. If you don't care about tone and want an artificial "hi-fi-ish" sound then go for it, but otherwise there are just too many better options for the same price. I think a lot of the Ultrasone hate comes not from the headphones themselves but from idiots like Sovshiller and Peter fucking Pinna shilling them all day. If you look at the headphones themselves, there's nothing to get emotional over, one way or another.

Mayweather is content to fight underweight has-beens and market them as world-class fights. Against Manny he'd have his work cut out for him and he'll probably dodge that fight if possible. If not, look for Floyd to be 40-1-0. Heck, if Floyd fights Cotto, Mosley, or Clottey, he'll be 40-1-0. No disrespect to Floyd, he's a top tier fighter, but Manny's becoming something else entirely. Cotto was a machine, and look what happened. But I do have to wonder how much of that is the psychological damage from that loss to Margarito, and yes, I do believe that Margarito's gloves were loaded for that fight. The difference in his punching power between the Cotto fight and the Mosley fight was stark. On a different note, I love Arthur Abraham's style and it will be really interesting to see what happens in the Super Six. I'm down with him taking the whole thing, but we'll see.

Not if the elephant has leet kung-fu blocking skills with his trunk! I actually prefer a bit of tube color in my amps or somewhere in the signal path in general, so it sounds like the WES would be appealing to me. But it's all academic at this point.

I like the HD600 a lot, and it's one of the few dynamics I can say that about. If I were less financially irresponsible I could probably have stopped with the HD600 and would have been happy. But then again the O2 is similar in many ways and better. But then again again, the HD600 is cheap enough that you can just get one to mess around with. A source that's good with the O2 will probably be good with the HD600. Also, run it balanced, you'll speed up the transient response a bit. It won't be fast, but it will be faster than SE at least. For music that requires speed the HD600 just won't do on most rigs, but for everything else it's nice. An amp with some tube color can also liven it up a bit.

It would be worth it just so that you could harass them about the Mk2.

If you're getting a KGSS built specifically for the Koss, up the bias voltage to 620V/630V or whatever the Koss needs, I don't remember off the top of my head. Don't know much about smooth Jazz except that a) it's not Jazz and there's no point in getting a system for smooth Jazz specifically since it is just about the worst music out there for actually judging a system, which is why every vendor uses it and every audiophile publication pushes it as hard as possible. If you want to find out what a system is made of, load it up with something demanding. Otherwise, an HD600 with a decent tube amp is all you'll ever need, and even that is probably overkill.

The last ultra-tough RPG I played was Evil Islands, quite a few years ago I might add. That was a blast - seriously hard and required intelligence at every step, and also emphasized stealth elements (every character could stealth regardless of class and had to), but cut out anything that was unnecessarily annoying - autosaves that you couldn't go back from, being needlessly punished for dying, being stuck because you forgot to do something at an earlier point, etc. It basically treated every encounter like a puzzle and then let you sit back and solve it, without ignoring some rudimentary twitch skill and typical RPG tweakery in the process. It was fantastic. But if you left your brain at the door you wouldn't get past the tutorial. I will probably try this, but from the review above it sounds like it will be annoying rather than difficult. There's nothing that I hate more than a game putting in an annoying unnecessary mechanic just to keep a player on his toes. Hopefully this is not what this game is all about.

At times like that, I generally listen to darker, heavier music, especially stuff that makes my brain feel like a sponge that's being wrung out. Cathartic, if you will. Cheery upbeat stuff has no chance to break through the wall of depression, pathetic self-pity, and generally being emo that has a tendency to sprout at times when I feel particularly wretched. But beating the shit out of yourself with music or exercise will make you feel right again. So, general favorites for troubled times: Lots of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, especially Rach 3 Beethoven - Tempest, Moonlight, Pathetique sonatas (wish I could still play them but haven't touched a piano in over 10 years) Bad Brains - Bad Brains Nile - In Their Darkened Shrines, Black Seeds of Vengeance Dissection - Storm of the Light's Bane Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse Nevermore - Dreaming Neon Black Astral Projection - Trust in Trance Juno Reactor - Beyond the Infinite Ra - To Sirius (this album is like Trust in Trance's evil twin) As far as music that affects driving - I remember "Joyrider" by Flexitones was a disk full of very upbeat, funky dub that had a speedometer reading 130mph on the cover. That's where the needle stayed every time I put the disk on, if there was room do it (and often when there wasn't). Good thing I don't listen to it on the road anymore.

This would be a logical next step, but having had both the UM2 and ES2, which share the same drivers, I can say that the custom fit makes as big a difference in the sound as the drivers used, if not more so. I wouldn't expect a universal-fit JH13 to be anywhere near the custom. Too bad that I didn't get to hear the universal-fit demo. It is important. There may not be much directly audible information past 15khz or so but overtones and harmonics matter greatly to tone, and if you overlay a tone that's past the range of hearing on top of a tone that you can hear, you will hear a difference. Not being able to reach 20khz definitely hurts your ability to portray tone correctly. We'll suck it up and buy it, and then rave about how awesome it is. Considering how quickly balanced armatures are improving, or at the very least how quickly their implementation is improving, we will probably see newer and better customs come out on a regular basis, and the prospect of how far the technology can go is pretty exciting.

Solid photography. Frightening parade. I remember similar parades in the Red Square once upon a time a little too well.

The 717 is polite and mellow. If you have a source that's polite as well you will have a very laid-back sound. Somewhat like I got out of the 840c. The Opus is nowhere as polite, and the system is more forward and impactful, but has its own problems. I think a forward, dynamic, slightly bright but not edgy source with great attack is what the 717 needs. Of course what the O2 needs is something a lot bigger than the 717, but that's another story.

Quick, somebody attach a turbine to Werner Heisenberg's grave, maybe we can get some free power! Seriously, that's just beautifully demented. Made my day.

Sounds a bit like a plasma tweeter in reverse, minus the plasma or the tweeter. A friend of mine was working on a mic that was pretty similar, though the project was stalled by technology limitations at the time. This seems like it's actually feasible though.

Sample the best Russian Imperial Stouts if you can find them - Dark Lord, The Abyss, Kate the Great, Old Rasputin, Stone Russian Imperial, Sam Smith's Imperial, Founders Russian Imperial, Kentucky Breakfast Stout, and so on. Also sample the very best IPAs, though I know less here than I do in stouts, maybe some more experienced hop-head can chime in. I do think that these are the two styles that American breweries have taken to a peak that's not found anywhere else. Also, try some American-brewed Belgian-style beers. Allagash makes some really good ones as well as some pretty mediocre ones. But Allagash Odyssey is one of my favorites (as is Allagash Four, if it comes out well, it's hit or miss with this one). I also like Ommegang Abbey Ale (more than their Three Philosophers Quad), but that's just the start and nowhere near the end, or the best. See if you can find any Lost Abbey beers there. But yeah, Grawk's list is great. I'd add the following as well: Allagash AleSmith Stone Port Brewing/The Lost Abbey Founders (their stouts rule) Are there any Trappist beers at events like this? I can't help but think that climate change has affected hop quality since there's been a global drop in the quality of most Belgians, but Orval is still good, and Rochefort beers have been hit or miss, but still good at their best.

Hah. One of my friends loves Lukyanyenko and actually knows him personally, and did some illustrations for him. I'm not a fan, tbh. But there are plenty of reasons to learn to read Russian even without him

I don't think it's a lost cause, but it is a trend that's firmly entrenched, and if it is to be reversed, then it will have to happen one little step at a time until there is a trend in the opposite direction. Radio uses its own compression to normalize volume levels, so I well and truly have no idea why this keeps going on at least from a rational, sober perspective. Maybe if you have a shuffled playlist the loudest song will jump out, and yeah there's that whole idea that psychoacoustically the louder material will sound better. But when you restrict dynamics so much and induce so much clipping, the brain gets fatigued listening to it all since it's really like a constant wall of white noise - there's little to no variety and nothing for the pattern-recognition machinery in your brain to work with. IT'S LIKE A GIANT BOLD ALL-CAPS SENTENCE THAT GOES ON AND ON AND ON WITH NO END IN SIGHT AND IT'S STILL GOING AND GOING AND GOING AND YEAH LOUD MUSIC IS EXACTLY LIKE THIS JUST HAMMERING YOU IN THE SKULL OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND THERE'S NO VARIETY AND NO CONTRAST AND NO RELIEF AND DON'T YOU JUST WISH THIS SENTENCE WOULD JUST END ALREADY BUT IT'S GOING AND GOING AND GOING AND THERE'S NO END IN SIGHT AND NO VARIETY AND CAT JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY! *stop button* You don't have to be a mastering engineer to notice it. Everybody does, even if they're not aware of what it is that's making them turn off their music. I can't for a moment think that this hasn't contributed in some way to the major labels' financial problems. I also have had a lot of music that I like rendered unlistenable by hot mastering, but I'm still fortunate in that the genres I listen to are largely immune from this - mainly because they're run my small labels that put a premium on sound quality. But some of my favorite metal, like Alchemist - "Trypsis" has been killed by hot mastering and I can't listen to it, even if it is great music. Whole decades and genres of music lost. This sucks. But it won't go on forever.

I also have the option to read Lem in Russian, and that's much closer to the original. Still there are some English translations that are pretty good. The later Lem - Fiasco in particular - is still superb, but the utterly despondent bitterness and hatred of humanity makes them challenging, even if you happen to agree with every word, like I do. Very, very different from the humanist enthusiasm of the early works.

I have a hard time seeing Lem as a hard to read author, unless maybe you're talking about some of the later works like Fiasco. But that's a very different Lem. The early works are some of the most witty and compulsively readable pieces of SF I ever read. Still, translation matters and if you have some horrible gobblygook translation then it's a different story altogether. Gene Wolfe wasn't necessarily difficult but rather demanding of undivided attention. Without the atmosphere and total mental commitment he would have a hard time captivating his audience, I think, but if you can get immersed enough into his utterly alien thought processes then it's one hell of a reading experience. I liked "Book of the New Sun" but "Fifth Head of Cerebrus" was even better. Swanwick's "Stations of the Tide" actually reminded me of Gene Wolfe a lot, and no big surprise there since Swanwick lists Wolfe (and Proust) as one of his major inspirations. Tolkien is pure escapist fiction, but antiquated. Still love the world, though, and always will. Try reading some of the non-Narnia C.S. Lewis, like the Space Trilogy. That's way more dense and demanding, but also absolutely sublime in parts. Now, if only I could get past his rabid religious zealotry and demonization of everything outside his point of view. Proust takes the cake for this one (duh) but I wouldn't have it any other way.

From my friend who works for Doug Sax.

I hear that in the industry the Apogee is nicknamed "the Apology..." I wonder what that says about its reputation?