Chipamp

While working I’ve been listening to music on my Mac on my ER4s. Which is nice, but I don’t like wearing headphones all day. I didn’t want to go out and buy a set of high-end ‘PC speakers’, although something like the Fujitsu TEN might be fun for an afternoon. And anyway, since I bought my B1s, I’ve had a pair of decent speakers spare — either a pair of Neutron 3s, or Dynaudio Contour 1.1s, depending on which I keep as rears on my main system. So I decided to build an amp instead. Looked briefly at a few …

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes – On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands – There is more than glass between the …

Shards

We digital immigrants consider our (media-saturated post-modern) physicality as the ‘real’ world. For today’s young digital natives, their transmedial realities — the elseware of MySpace, Second Life and the rest — are equally valid. Unlike many, we don’t think they’re escaping from, or denying ‘real’ reality: they’ve just internalised the precept that all reality is socially constructed, and vanished off into someware more fun, of their own making. And why not? Their generation is busily — knowingly — creating their own be-ing. The rest of us, in denial, still privilege a ‘genuine’ reality, while all the time, we are also …

Audio

Good things with sound. My Etymotic ER4s died (after how many years of solid use?) — sent them off to the US for repair and the nice people at Etymotic simply replaced them with the current version. They sound excellent, and the new anti-microphonic cables are much better than the original ones. Much walking around London with downloads from Thinner‘s archive on scene.org as background. Also, managed to get a pair of ex-demo Vivid B1s. The equally nice people at Vivid even reconditioned them by replacing all the drivers before shipping them. And they sound amazing. Shame that they’re so …

Martyn Ware Interview

Uh forgot to mention — we recently got to talk to Martyn Ware for BigShinyThing. Read the interview in full on the site.

Documents with Tails: Blogjects

Evidently there’s a nice new ‘theory object’ neologism for the class of things of which Documents With Tails are members: blogjects. Thanks for Stephen for reminding me to read that paper.