It’s not a $500 ethernet cable, but you’d better be in serious need of serious silence to drop $2500 on a door. Mind you, it weighs about 110kg. (And is cheap compared to other acoustic doors.) I want a wall of them for my deaf old neighbour who likes watching his pr0n at 2am on Saturday evenings.
Hard disks are cheap; cultural preservation is forever.
(Mind you, I still so so so want one of these.)
Bonus: The earliest known sound recording — 1860, seventeen years before Edison.
The drink of audiophiles. The only thing I can see wrong is it’s far too cheap. (Spotted by Wechsler.)
(Bonus link: a magnetic thing that actually does something useful.)
Exact Audio Copy is the Chuck Norris of CD rippers. It turned a rotted old demo CD-R by the Deadites (from back when CD-Rs were blue) that wouldn’t even play as an audio CD into playable music in just seven hours. I think one second of the original 17-minute EP went astray. And the DVD drive didn’t melt. Linux and Macintosh users will be pleased to know that EAC works flawlessly in Wine, and of course the Linux users can still alternate with cdparanoia.
(My current yak shaving is reripping all my CDs as FLAC. Disk is so cheap.)
From 1956: the lost work of genius of car stereo. You can tell it’s genius from its independent rediscovery (check the video).
A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the “directional markings” on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.
I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.
Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.
— from Amazon customer reviews of the finest cable in existence.
And to think Denon used to be respectable. Dig this US$500 1.5 metre ethernet cable for audio use. ‘Cos the professional quality ethernet cables (at £47.50 for 100 metres) that banks rely on to transmit millions of dollars can’t possibly be up to the requisite snake oil quotient. This one beats the fine products of Machina Dynamica for the sheer audacity of the price tag. (This can’t be for real. Can it?) If I had a useful lack of ethics I wouldn’t be working as a sysadmin. Though I do have a kid to feed. Hmmm.
Update: Worse.
An excellent article on CNet, updating on the issue in depth.
Also: an interview with SunnComm, who did the copy protection on the Charley Pride CD.
The first major release of a copy-protected CD appears to be “Rock Your World” by Michael Jackson, according to Need To Know - the promo copies work on most CD players, but are unrecognised by current CD-ROM firmware.
This is a problem for all consumers - as the UK Campaign for Digital Rights points out, “These new CDs will play fine to start with, but underneath, the sounds have been subtly corrupted. Your CD player has to work much harder to play the music correctly, so after a few scratches, you’ll have tracks going wrong MUCH SOONER than with normal CDs. In truth, these CDs are not as good quality as normal CDs.”
The Campaign recommends a policy of taking back non-playing CDs as defective immediately (pointing to the ‘CD Digital Audio’ logo, which does constitute a claim that the disc meets the logo’s standards), or taking it back if it fails after a short time.
We have just set up a household MP3 server and it has changed our lives. Like a thousand-disc CD changer without the delays and clunking and whirring noises.
Ever played your ENTIRE CD COLLECTION on shuffle? You Will(tm). Shits on radio, fer sure.
You, like me, have a four-figure count of vinyl records that you have spent five figures on, and a two dollar turntable that’s needed a new needle for at least two years now.
Well, read about the ELP Laser Turntable and weep.
(No, that’s not Emerson, Lake and Palmer …)
