HiWire

We haven't had the "normal" Alfa Romeo cars in North America for decades (just the 4C and now the Giulia and Stelvio)... I still have a half-baked plan to import an Alfa Romeo GT (V6 manual) someday and modify it for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_Romeo_GT The only problem with Alfa Romeos is everything:

The Voyager – Jenny Lewis

Here's an Alfa 4C with a proper engine:

Back to the classics... the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake (still haven't seen the TV series):

Does Sony have a great sense of humor or what? 40th Anniversary Sony Walkman:

Happy Birthday!

Mashups – I need to get back to making music... these videos popped up after I was researching keyboards on YouTube today (the Yamaha Montage 8, Roland FA-08, and Korg Kronos X). Time After Time – Frank Sinatra / Earth Angel – The Penguins / Sh-Boom – The Crew-Cuts: Commodores / Maroon 5:

Found this composition bit while surfing YouTube (Why 80s Pop Music Sounds So Good): Bonus – gated reverb drums are old news to most of us, but check out the attached Spotify list in the description for a mix of old and new gated-reverb songs:

So... it turns out I had Jenny Lewis confused with Juliette Lewis... like, forever. Whoa. This changes everything

Cherry – Chromatics

? New 16" MacBook! This looks like a better value for money, with a new keyboard, speakers, mics, display (notice that they do not mention HDR), GPUs, up to 64GB RAM, larger 11-hour battery, and up to 8TB storage – also, it still has a headphone jack: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/apple-announces-16-inch-macbook-pro-with-new-keyboard-design/ I always thought the previous Vega 20 graphic processor (an expensive option in the 15" MacBook Pro and 21.5" iMac) was a low-midrange product, and the new AMD Radeon Pro 5500M (8GB GDDR6) looks like a huge improvement. Apple has discontinued the 15" MacBook Pros on the website, but they are still available in the refurb store (and probably for a little while longer in the brick and mortar stores). The 16" MBP is about the same price (at the base levels) as the Early 2019 15" MacBook Pros, so it's going to make them look really bad from a value standpoint unless you can get one for a steep discount – they are still expensive. It's interesting to see that they stuck with 802.11ac wi-fi – a lot of current high-end Windows laptops are shipping with Wi-Fi 6 now. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is an option on the Late 2018 Mac Mini and it may become standard on desktop Macs next year. It may also become available on Thunderbolt 3 adapters at some point. Apple doesn't call attention to this, but the 16" MBP uses the same CPUs as in the previous 15" MBP. They are wedded, like everyone else, to Intel's technology roadmap. This means that it will be a while before PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 comes out (current leaks about Intel's 10th-Gen desktop processors indicate they are sticking with PCIe 3.0) and we can expect to see 10-core/20-thread i9 processors in the next iMacs. Intel's mainstream rollout of 10nm processors has been pushed back into 2020 and 2021 so there may still be more products manufactured on their 14nm+++ process or a confusing hybrid lineup like their current mobile offerings with Ice Lake at 10nm, Comet Lake at 14nm, and both named 10th Gen. An update on newly-disclosed vulnerabilities in Intel's processors: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-reveals-taa-vulnerabilities-in-cascade-lake-chips-and-a-new-jcc-bug This is an evolutionary upgrade that fixes some of the old design's problems and increases the MacBook Pro's capabilities, at the cost of larger size and increased weight (with a larger power supply to match). Microsoft's new Surface X has been getting poor reviews because of it's ARM processor performance – Apple has had much more success implementing ARM designs on iOS. Ironically, the clever lid-opening scrolling on the new MacBook Pro's features page is crashing in my Safari browser but it runs just fine in Firefox. P.S. Performance tests from Barefeats validate the 16" MacBook Pro's performance potential and thermal headroom – TL;DR get more RAM, more VRAM for heavy processing: https://barefeats.com/16-inch-macbook-pro-shootout.html https://barefeats.com/16-inch-macbook-pro-adobe.html

I think it's on Cinemax / Amazon Prime / Hulu in the U.S. I'm watching both shows on Blu-ray – that's why it took so long to catch up. Back in the 90s, I watched Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Vanishing Son, and a bunch of other stuff (never watched Martial Law or Walker, Texas Ranger, though). It's always been a niche market with few breakthroughs.

Finally watched the first episode of Warrior. The violence and nudity seem a bit gratuitous (but not excessive) – we're in a post-Game of Thrones TV era, so I guess anything that pulls them in... they've also put a lot of swearing into the dialogue, which makes sense because of the low status of most of the Chinese immigrants (and it fits right in with post-gold rush San Francisco). Highly recommended. I'll have to stop myself from binge watching as there are only 10 episodes in the first season. I'm also watching the first season of Into the Badlands. It's a bit clumsier in writing and execution, but has its own charms as well, being a fantasy show.

Fox On the Run – Sweet From The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009 film) trailer – ratings are really bad on this movie, so I'll give it a pass but thanks for the sweet song (also to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 for bringing it back):

I agree. I bought a Bluetooth speaker for parties and such this summer and I don't care about formats, aptX, Apple AAC wireless or any of that for simple listening. If I want to listen to music on my phone or iPod, I'll rip it to 320kbps AAC or Apple Lossless, and my fancy-schmancy SACDs only get played on my Sony UHP-H1. Heck, a lot of my music listening is done on YouTube, which is terrible for sound quality.

I read that snippet in the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy voice in my head. Found a layman-friendly explanation with audio clips here: https://www.audiomasterclass.com/newsletter/the-difference-between-minimum-phase-and-linear-phase-eq-on-transient-signals-such-as-snare-drum I grabbed a copy of Sound On Sound magazine this month as I've been told we'll be recording musicians at work next year... it's fun to read about new gear, but I have to slow down to decode all the engineering jargon. Then I wonder if all those knobs and switches can be done in software instead of yet another box. More filter stuff from Archimago: http://archimago.blogspot.com/2018/01/musings-more-fun-with-digital-filters.html Leave it to the trolls to sound reasonable and objective: https://troll-audio.com/articles/linear-and-minimum-phase/

Found an interesting snippet re: MQA (I was contemplating the future of my little music collection and physical media in general – Blu-ray Audio seems to be DOA) https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/sacd-vs-blu-ray-for-audio-quality-sonics "Two main kinds of filter: Linear Phase and Minimum Phase (a third kind could be everything else in between). Linear maintains the phase relationship between ALL frequencies – this best preserves the timbre of instruments. Minimum Phase screws up the phase relationship and changes the timbre but it eliminates pre-ringing. Since music is all about the relationship between various frequencies then Linear Phase filtering will sound the most natural and if well designed the pre-ringing will not be audible. Minimum phase makes no sense unless you look at waveforms and dislike aesthetically the pre-ringing. That Bob Stuart is pushing minimum phase basically discredits him and MQA as a gimmick. He is pushing transient response (an engineering concept) over musical timbre (what we actually hear or how our ears work)." If companies like Sony and Pioneer (I'm talking about the mainstream) want hi-res to be taken seriously, they need to make it available in car audio and elsewhere, and digital streaming services need to update their libraries. The conundrum is that digital platforms evolve so quickly that the electronics are becoming obsolete faster than ever while sales of "mainstream" hi-fi products are shrinking. I don't subscribe to digital streaming services (or digital file vendors) because I don't want to deal with a limited library of titles. If I buy a disc, I can listen to it anywhere, without an internet connection, and I don't have to keep paying or have it arbitrarily revoked from my library. I can rip the disc to a variety of file formats, lossless, lossy, etc. and play it on any device I want, without restriction. I had to revisit this decision when I bought a limited-edition CD yesterday – the album is available for $10 on iTunes, but I decided to have the disc shipped for significantly more money. Am I becoming a cranky old man? Yes – but I'll still have the CD, which sounds better than anything Spotify can offer in 2019. This is what Sony has for high-res car audio (not great – I hope they are doing a better job with OEM systems – would that be Ford?): https://www.sony.ca/en/electronics/car-audio-hi-res-audio Here's Pioneer's list of high res products (starting at $300 for the portable player): https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Home/High-Resolution+Audio

Night Drive – Chromatics

... and the other shoe drops. Beats Solo noise-canceling on-ear headphones for rich kids: https://www.macworld.com/article/3449223/beats-solo-pro-review.html

Visited the music store yesterday and scored big: Midwest Farmer's Daughter – Margo Price Foxbase Alpha – Saint Etienne Painted Shut – Hop Along

Apple announced the new noise-canceling AirPods Pro yesterday. Looks like their Beats investment is going to start paying off soon. The 4.5-hour battery life is too short for my liking, but it well sell well regardless.

One of my not-at-all guilty pleasures ("What do you want to do with your life?" – "I wanna rock!" – Twisted Sister): High Enough – Damn Yankees And, on the theme of the law showing up at your doorstep (No to Bon Jovi): Hazard – Richard Marx Dr. Feelgood – Mötley Crüe

Schumann Piano Concerto in A Minor / Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat ("Emperor") Van Cliburn and Fritz Reiner (Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

Catalina has crashed on me a few times, even after the latest Supplemental Update. Also, there are no print drivers for my office printers yet. Definitely not ready for prime time at work.

I installed macOS Catalina on an external SSD drive on Tuesday and played around with it yesterday. It is definitely buggy – the App Store gave me a blank screen when I changed network settings and stayed blank after I restarted the app. The network settings pulled the wrong numbers from DHCP so I set them manually and it kept them after that. I ended up restarting the system to fix the App Store. I installed the Server app just to check it out. They've gutted (deprecated) all the functions, leaving only Xsan and User/Group management of devices. It was laggy starting up and also switching between tabs. On the other hand, everything else feels super snappy. I think they deliberately went through all the GUI/startup code to preload and optimize response times. Safari is particularly fast – loading the Wikipedia home page, for example, is significantly faster. I'll see if I can find time today to test Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Cloud apps.