Ever since 2016 when Apple forced the issue by eliminating the regular headphone jack on its iPhone 7 model, some headphone manufacturers have necessarily responded by offering Bluetooth connectivity on their headphones. This is, frankly, unfortunate and totally unnecessary, but for Apple’s decision to make things more complicated for us, and clearly motivated by their […]
Good morning It has been a wild and crazy week, but have I got a lot to show you for the week that was. We now have details of our June 2019 UK touring online. I’m using the “land cruise” concept first offered in this year’s Christmas land cruise (still have the cancelled couple’s $500 […]
Good morning I must start off by thanking everyone who generously responded to the start of our annual fundraising drive last week. We had 40 kind people choose to send in some support. Depending on if one’s glass is half full or half empty, the half full glass perspective notes that we collected almost as […]
Good morning I hope you had a great long weekend, and that there’s still a generous measure of Indian summer for you to enjoy. It is certainly way too soon to start feeling the winter blues, but it is not way too soon to start planning an escape from that phenomenon. And have I got […]
Good morning You may have seen the story of the woman killed by a self-driving car in Tempe, AZ on Sunday. Any unnecessary death is of course regrettable, but the biggest tragedy of this unfortunate incident may be that this accident slows down and delays the continued development and deployment of self-driving vehicle capabilities. With […]
Here’s a very clever program that digitally compensates for the non-perfect sound coming from your headphones, creating a clearer, smoother, and broader frequency response, with less unwanted sound coloration. These days, the speakers/headphones are by far the weakest link in any sound reproduction chain. The storage and playback/amplification is all very close to perfect, it […]
This weekend marks the traditional start of summer. Here in the Seattle area, summer came a week or more early; and let’s all hope for a lovely Memorial Day weekend. The AAA are forecasting the most Memorial Day travel since 2005, with an increase of 5.5% in people flying, and 2.4% in people driving. In […]
It is a truism that no matter how much data storage capacity one has, in any context, one always fills it and wishes for more. There is a continual leapfrogging as between new applications and the new larger amounts of data they need; and the more or less balancing effects via increasing capacity and reducing […]
I wrote last week about the new Solitude XCS2 noise cancelling headphones. The quick summary of that review is that they offer verygood sound quality that is better than Bose, but their noise cancelling isn’t as good. Oh yes, and their cost is (currently) one third of the price of the Bose QC25 headphones ($98 […]
I was wrong. Okay, I’ve said it, can we move on, please! What was I wrong about? Well, for the longest time, I’ve said it is not possible to get high sound quality in any noise cancelling headphones. If you want highest quality sound – or so I’ve said – you should get ‘ordinary’ headphones […]
When Apple updated its website to reveal its new iPhone 6 units, it made one other change that it didn’t publicize. It deleted the ‘iPod Classic’ from its remaining range of iPod units – the Shuffle, the Nano and the iPod Touch. Although the other three models remain, none of them really address the basic […]
Recorded music has evolved enormously since its origins in the 1870s, getting better and better until reaching its zenith with the introduction of the CD at the start of the 1980s. Paradoxically, in the last 15 years, while technological advances now allow for a theoretically better quality of music to be recorded and played back […]