Classical Convert

Cheap Earbuds Suck

Gizmodo has a comparison up of replacement earbuds to the ghastly buggers that come free with almost every MP3 player out there. However, their conclusion is that those ubiquitous bright white iPod earphones actually sound quite good… when compared to a bunch of other crappy earphones. The comments in the story have some interesting recommendations though (but naturally span the range from clueless Britney fan to overly prodigal audiophile)

What would be really interesting to see is a review encompassing the key $20-$50 range, which is more typical of people who want decent sound quality without paying extortionate and exorbitant amounts of money. I’ve been pretty happy with my $45 Sennheisers. They’re about 3967 times more comfortable than the ergonomic monstrosities which I got with my player, and sound a hell of a lot better.They also seem like a good balance between cost and quality, given that they tend to be used in a noisy environment.

If only I had one of these…

 My research would go so much quicker, better, faster, etc.

Technology years are kind of like dog years: when comparing historical documents they seem about ten times more out of date than the numerical gap would indicate.

Reversed Singing

Can you work out which song this is?

You will at the halfway point, at which the video is reversed. This scallywag is singing the phonetic reversal of the song, so that when played backward it sounds normal again. Sort of.

Black Lodge, anyone?

It’s really hard to get re-reversed speech to sound good. We used to try doing it on the computer (record a sentence, memorize how it sounds, record your version of it, reverse that and play it) and just sticking together a reasonably long sentence is a tiresomely tricky process. I suspect it’s impossible for humans to vocalize the necessary noises accurately, which is why it always sounds somewhat off.

Present-ed Music

Two CDs received by moi, ich, ik, me over the brief but very pleasant (and already being missed) Christmas excursion to Maine are:

Which got stuck on my ultra-selective Amazon public wishlist so it must be something that was particularly attention grabbing when it got all aural up in my ears. It hasn’t had any listening time yet due to not being available on the CDDB — the database which mp3 ripping software uses to work out the names of tracks (which, incidentally is how the Hatto scandal was detected). I’m extra lazy when not officially at work, so couldn’t be bothered to spend the five minutes required to type in the track names. The Naxos info for this recording is here.
The other CD I got is (was?):

This was on the hitlist due to: 1) me wanting to own every available Shostakovich opus, but also 1++) me especially being fond of the late (post about Op. 100) pieces. Until now these had been unfamiliar. After a couple of listens all of these pieces sound WONDERFUL. The main event, Op. 119, is a 30 minute cantata-ey type piece in the style of his symphony No. 13. Very, very similar, in fact - but since I flippin’ love Op. 113 that’s not necessarily a negative thing at all. Op. 131 “October” is a vibrant little nationalistic number commemorating one of the revolutions, it reminds me of the driving 2nd movement of the 11th symphony. The 3rd piece on the CD, op. 42 ‘Five Fragments” are a set of five precursors to the desk-drawered and schizophrenic 4th symphony. Some of the fragments survived the transition basically intact, others I can’t place so well. All are interesting, but short. The Naxos CD info is here.

More thoughts as they get processed! Anyone else get anything interesting for xmas?

The Digital Gramophone

This is old but interesting. Some guy noticed that if you look at the grooves of a record with a magnifying glass you can actually see the encoded soundwaves. Naturally, he decided to stick them in a scanner and attempt to extract the sound by analyzing the scanned images, with limited success as you can hear by means of the file on his website.

This reminds me of those laser based record players. Except, you know, way slower and about fifty thousand times worse quality.