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Are they danceable cables? At 2750$ per meter.
http://www.positive-feedback.c...

Sounds like the speaker cables that you've been using aren't very danceable.

The pen is an ordinary red overhead projector pen manufactured by Staedtler under the name Lumocolor. I had several of these pens in my desk at school, but the ones I had contained non-permanent ink, and you need permanent ink. Also, getting the pen directly from Belt is beneficial because it has undergone treatment ...

I scoured my CD collection, and found a CD I have two copies of, the La Femme Nikita soundtrack. Prior to altering either of them, I listened to both to determine if they sounded the same, and they did. I set one aside, and wrote my signature followed by "> o.k." on the case of the second one.

When I listened to both copies of the CD again, the results were so startling that I wrote detailed notes. Vocals on the unsigned copy were hard and plastic sounding, and the high notes were razor sharp. I found myself totally distracted, wishing for the song to end. The treated CD, on the other hand, provided beautiful, mellow-sounding vocals. The high notes throughout were subdued, which enabled me to concentrate on the music.

Dude, but if you're using a freaking LASER to read your vinyl, you'd damn well better have those $8000 speaker cables. I hear they make the music more "danceable."

Ahem. This is my excuse from now on when people criticize my dancing.

Yea, if you go to those Monster cables or perhaps these ones, your games might become "danceable".

ok, so how much can you trust a web article that has local file refs instead of normal http refs:

"[font face="Arial" size="2"]Pear Cable is no doubt a new name to you
                (though Carl Hruza
                [a href="file:///C:/FrontPage Webs/PFO/Issue21/pear.htm" target="_blank"]reviewed the Anjou interconnects[/a] back in Issue 21 and
                Adam Blake the co-owner and chief designer cable-guru participated in
                our [a href="file:///C:/FrontPage Webs/PFO/Issue30/pearcable.htm" target="_blank"]cable interview[/a] back in Issue 30), but they have been around for a
                number of years making very high-quality cables for the home and
                automotive audio markets.[/font][/p]"

(angles changed to brackets to show literal code)

link: http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue32/anjou.htm

file:///c:/blah.

niiiiice.

yeah, we believe you know what you're doing. yup.

This nutball spends thousands of dollars on SILVER POWER CABLES. http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue15/walkeraudio.htm Silver POWER CABLES. And he even uses one of these from the wall to his solid-oak-case brass-stool line conditioner. I suppose the Romex in his wall is silver too? I challenge any of these people to submit to a blind test without and with this $12,000 waste. I bet he wouldn't. Any amplifier worth its salt has an immense amount of isolation from its power input anyway. Silver audio cables are just as stupid. How cares about the .000000000003 watt you gain in the decreased resistance in the line!? Silver ain't gonna help against interference.

I'm going to nominate the Advent 201 cassette deck here. I got one as a hand-me down from my dad and it was really something special.

One of the design goals was that the user should be able to operate the unit in complete darkness going only by feel. To that end, controls were placed far apart, on a couple different planes of the unit, had distinct shapes, and switched in different directions. Stateful controls changed position enough that you could feel what state it was in without looking. There were no status lights (other than the VU meter) to look at as I recall.

Here's a picture:
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue16/advent.ht m

Anyway, ever since then I've always felt that user interfaces should be tactile and show their state in a physical sense. You should be able to make changes even with the power off, and you shouldn't have to look at indicator lights to figure out what's going on.

While a lot of appliances don't require this level of UI "analogness", it is something that should be carefully considered for automotive instrument panel design, since that is definitely a "must be operable in total darkness" situation.

To all those who think my above comment was "Flamebait" or a "Troll":

Firstly, I'm a Mac fan. I'm not a PC lover, a Microsoft fan, or a troll. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing the realities of my chosen community, and yes, Mac/Apple fans ARE still trendoids, far more so than PC folks.

Submitted as evidence:

Would the PC world pay forty bucks for a glorified volume knob? No, but these things have been on the Mac market for quite a while now.

How would a $100 trackball fare in the PC community? Pretty piss-poor, but these guys (and their ADB predecessors) were mainstays of the Mac community for years.

Fancy a thousand dollar low-end laptop? Mac fans buy them in droves. I've bought several.

Maybe a sixty dollar ONE-BUTTON mouse? Mac users buy 'em. By the thousands.

How about a $2,500 monitor? You'd be hard-pressed to find a Mac fan who wouldn't buy one if they had the money.

Thirty-five bucks for a small rubber sleeve? Three hundred bucks for a small pair of flat panel speakers? All of these things would fail miserably in the PC world, but there's a market for them in the Mac world.

That's not to say Mac fans (including myself) are stupid, merely that they (we) like gadgets, and are willing (if not always able) to pay a premium to get shiny goodies.

So, yes, Mac users are trendoids, but not stupid trendoids. If you want to talk about stupid trendoids, look at the "audiophile" morons buying $300 power cables.

They should glue some valves to the side, use deep cryogenic treatment on the mains cable for the battery charger, and include an integrated magic chip to automatically fix the CDs you copy on to it.

That's a good response and helps to clarify the differences. I'm interested in accurate quality conversions, and I don't play games much any more. There are a couple professional DSPs, UAD-1 and PowerCore, which are add-on DSP cards which you can use to process effects plugins that are specific to their hardware. And actually, the Emu 1212 has a DSP with effects, but I knew someone who bought one and returned it. Said he didn't like the quality of the DACs and the effects were sub-par.

UAD-1
http://www.uaudio.com/products/digital/ultrapak/in dex.html

PowerCore
http://www.tcelectronic.com/PowerCoreConcept

So it sounds like there could be some potential behind this new Creative card if Creative wanted to allow that to happen. What you said makes a lot of sense with the target towards gaming and what-not. My favorite card right now is Lynx Audio. Tight clock and great sounding DACs, but another great product that may work for some people, is Benchmark DAC-1. It takes a digital input signal, and is a little box that converts the signal to analog, and it is really good at it. Costs about $1000 but it may be the best converter for anything in that ballpark. So it has audiophile and pro-audio applications. It will be interesting to see how this Creative card goes once it's been out there considering there is at least potential both in the converters and the DSP even though it's geared towards the gamer/media consumer type. Anyways, just daydreaming here I suppose.

My 4th gen iPod does an excellent job driving my Beyerdynamic DT880's. Hell, it even makes my head rumble from the bass, and the sound is completely acceptable. Not quite up to par with, say, a Linn LP-12 but none the less I feel that the iPod provides decent sound.

Although I wouldn't be caught wearing the DT880's in public since they make you look like a total dork.

Apparently if you write your signature like this:

John Smith > O.K.

on the outside cover of a CD or record, the magic of quantum physics makes the sound better!

A review that includes this as well as the old "freezing the CD" psychological trick can be found here.