HiWire

Nothing looked bad... the iPhone Air looks questionable, but I can foresee influencers showing them off in a few weeks. Apple has moved into making their own wireless network and modem chips, the N1 for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread and the C1X for 5G cellular. I liked the sound of better battery life in the iPhone 17 and the AirPods Pro 3 will be hot sellers. I found the endless health surveillance and monitoring from the Apple Watches a bit dystopian. The iPhone 16e seems to be a sales success due to its low price, so they'll inevitably release an update to that in a while.

It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

Tiny vinyl - 4" record format for Gen Z: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/tiny-vinyl-is-a-new-pocketable-record-format-for-the-spotify-age/

Ninja vanish! 🥷 Body Talk by The Deele (1984) from Miami Vice:

Happy Birthday!

I think a lot of the iconic clothes of Miami Vice were from Armani, too. Truly a giant in his field and a style icon.

Dea Matrona at Royal Albert Hall:

The gear sets on gravel bikes tend to be a bit shorter than on road bikes - you can upgrade them if you are making the bike do dual duty (and swap the mud tires for road tires).

Perhaps this will prompt Panasonic to finally add SACD playback on a DP-UB9000PC successor... probably not.

How old DOS games actually sounded (if you had money):

My first thought was a Schiit Mimir. I haven't heard one, so I didn't feel qualified to comment. Still, the price looks right and it might be a sideways upgrade (it may be too wide for your arrangement). All I've got is a tiny Schiit Fulla 2... it still sounds great. There's been a lot of new entrants in the field and I'm way out of date on new equipment. I listened to a Chord Mojo 2 but it didn't sound any better than my portable CD player's headphone output. The Benchmark DAC3 B would be the logical thing to compare, but they look expensive and I'm not sure it would be that much of an improvement. I've been curious about the Chord Qutest but it may be out of your budget range. Perhaps it's worth a trip to the local stereo shops?

It might be a binder of Apple printed documentation for the Lisa.

Upload, Season 4 just arrived (only 4 short episodes) Mixed emotions...

The Ford Mustang GTD design story:

It's interesting that Sony never released a portable HDCD, SACD, or Blu-ray player (which was probably wise). They basically (involuntarily) passed the torch to Apple and its iPods and iPhones. They're not audiophile devices, but I've compared my 3rd-gen iPod Shuffle to my other equipment and it sounds pretty good with Sennheiser and Klipsch earbuds. Looks like people are still running and modifying the Philips CD104: https://eiaudio.de/gear-and-review/cd-players/philips-cd-104/

Celebrate the 43rd anniversary of Compact Disc! Abba's eighth and last album (until their 2021 comeback), The Visitors, was the first commercially released CD (by Polygram in Germany) today in 1982: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/the-first-commercial-compact-disc-was-created-43-years-ago-today-nearly-one-billion-cds-were-shipped-per-year-in-early-2000s No, I don't own any Abba albums. I went down the optical rabbit hole again this weekend and concluded that anyone investing in SACD is going to spend a lot of money unless they buy used equipment. Your best bet is buying a used Sony or Marantz player. Yes, you can get DSD output from some Sony players' coax and Toslink to a compatible outboard DAC. Doing a little more digging - TEAC is your friend in old audio formats. There are lots of weird Chinese grey-market products and TEAC still makes several CD and cassette recorder decks - in particular, the TEAC W-1200 Dual Cassette Deck and the PD-301-X CD Player and FM Tuner. They're not audiophile products, but they serve a growing demand for vintage physical media. The cassette deck also has an ADC converter to output digital to your computers via USB. They also have a combined CD player/cassette deck in the TEAC AD-850-SE - a monster of vintage audio and karaoke. Good luck balancing it on your head. Some reviews say the PD-301-X CD player scratches discs, so buyer beware (I don't like slot-loading CD mechanisms in general). Some analysis and criticism on the W-1200 cassette deck output and mechanism (premature head wear?): https://www.reddit.com/r/cassetteculture/comments/1gcsvqj/teac_w1200_test_and_measurements/ If you want an optical drive for your computer or laptop, I recommend Pioneer's drives. I think these are the last high-end Blu-ray/DVD/CD burners that will be made, so get them while supplies last. Also, I learned that Cyrus Audio in the UK was taken over by its board manufacturer, SMS Electronics. They claim to manufacture their CD equipment in-house, which is really unusual for a small manufacturer - most hi-fi players use commonly-available CD and DVD lasers and transport mechanisms. They've discontinued their high-end XR lineup and introduced a new 40 series range. The 40 CD player is $4,000 (£2,995.00), which seems kind of expensive.

Car detailer Larry Kosilla from NYC Auto undertakes a full restoration of a 1991 VW Golf GTI Mk2:

James Hoffmann bought one of David Lynch's old coffee makers (an Italian Velox Ferrara Minibar design from the 1960s and 70s):

Hilarious - and yet people are still buying it. I remember checking out one of these things more than 10 years ago (the first RX100 was released in 2012). It was $650 then. The RX1R II was released in 2015 at $3,200 (gasp). They still haven't fixed the ergonomic problems!

More new cassette players - the azimuth adjustment and measurements are surprising:

RIP, macOS hard drive icon: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/rip-to-the-macintosh-hd-hard-drive-icon-2000-2025/

I re-addressed the question of drive cloning today - EaseUS seems to be getting some recommendations but the company is based in Chengdu, China and it comes cheap at $20 or less for their home Disk Copy software. I'm somewhat leery of using this kind of tool - I remember when they started showing up at the top of Google search results a few years ago and I was skeptical then, too (i.e., they may be paying reviewers to promote their software). Macrium Reflect X looks like a decent tool - it's not as cheap as EaseUS but they have a long history and a good reputation (Windows only). Acronis True Image may also be good - they add anti-ransomware tools which you may not need and some reviews noted a slower system startup (Windows and macOS). Both offer free trials and they start at about $50/year - subscription only. You can also use Clonezilla, which is free and open source. It was developed by Steven Shiau and the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan and it's been around since 2007 (Windows, Intel macOS, Linux, Unix). The Clonezilla interface is definitely more technical and less beginner-friendly than the other software. In my opinion, Windows is more of a serious candidate for drive cloning. Many tools exist at the enterprise level for backup and data management, but your average home/small business user doesn't do a good job of backup or disaster preparation. You can use these software tools along with an inexpensive drive/NAS to fully backup your system in case of data loss or hardware failure. Apple's macOS has built-in tools for backup (Time Machine), data migration (Migration Assistant), and disk encryption (FileVault 2). I've found that these tools work extremely well for most users - enterprise admins have more expensive and sophisticated MDM (mobile device management) software like Jamf Pro, Kandji, NinjaOne to run their Macs. Backblaze, a large cloud backup company, just released their quarterly drive stats for Q2 2025: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2025/ It's reassuring to see that most hard drives across the board have lower than 1% failure rates, with a few exceptions. Backblaze uses consumer SATA hard drives rather than more expensive enterprise drives, so your mileage may vary. It's also important to note that these are failures in operation - if Backblaze received a dead-on-arrival drive from their supplier, that's not going to go in their metrics.

I started with stock Panasonic headphones with my tape player and upgraded to Koss ear buds when they broke... the beginning of a long, beautiful journey.

L.S.G. - Into Deep (1999) Thanks, Dusty! Superstition Records (Hamburg, Germany) remastered the CD and digital files in 2014 - no vinyl release so far.

Bit of a link bait title, but I'm glad we're well clear of the lossy compression era in hi-fi CD players - I always turned skip protection off. The test album was Goldfrapp's Head First - pure synthwave ear candy. Head First is an almost entirely electronic album, with heavily-processed real sound from Alison Goldfrapp, a guitar, bass, and drums on selected tracks. I read that Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp were somewhat unsatisfied with the results of a rushed production process, but to me, it's a perfect gem. The anthemic, insanely upbeat pop tracks are well balanced against the more relaxed ambient instrumentals. To me, it's a touchstone, both a microcosm and a portal to classic 80s pop enchantment. Inspired by the video, I pulled out my old Panasonic SL-S160 from 1995, plugged in the Alessandro MS-1 and inserted 2 Eneloop AA 1.2V NiMH batteries and it sounded a bit looser and not as deep in the bass with its MASH DAC (with XBS bass off - this budget player lacks skip protection), but serviceable (volume is somewhere around 2 out of 10 with its scratchy old pot and decent channel matching - 2.5+ is deafeningly loud with the Alessandro MS-1) compared to the Sony D-EJ2000 from 2002 - the SL-S160 was an excellent match for my old student-fi Sennheiser HD 320 headphones with a nominal impedance of 100 Ω back in the day. Switching back to the D-EJ2000 on 1.2V gumstick battery with the MS-1 is a sonic revelation (perhaps not a surprise, comparing a budget player to a cutting-edge flagship). People underestimated the Sony when it was released (it came with horrible stock earbuds) - it has a much cleaner overall sound, far more separation, resolution, bass depth, soundstage, you name it - it blows the older Panasonic away in every category - you can hear things on the Sony that are completely obscured on the older player at the same volume level - younger people raised on iPods and wireless headphones have no idea what they're missing. It also demonstrates that you don't need a lot of power to drive the Grado headphones well. It was like comparing a landscape in a dark fog to a bright, sunny and clear day on a mountain meadow. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to finally test a Chord Mojo 2 - I used a Toslink optical cable out of the Sony D-EJ2000 to the Mojo 2 into the Alessandro MS-1 and I heard no difference. It was both reassuring and surprising. Obviously, the source and the headphones were limiting factors, but I walked away discovering that a $150 portable CD player from 2002 can match a $650 DAC from 2022 in my informal test (digital deathmatch!). Finally, I switched to my Arcam FMJ CD36, Headsave Classic, and Grado HP-2. Immediately, there was a change in tonality from the MS-1. It's actually hard to describe - they are in the same family and closely related, but the HP-2 emphasized different parts of the notes. The MS-1 was both brighter in treble and boomier in bass - the HP-2 had less emphasis and it was cleaner-sounding overall. I started to wonder if a pop album like Head First needed the distortion that is more evident in the MS-1 - was the HP-2 too controlled to enjoy non-audiophile music? After a few minutes, I settled into the new sound and I was able to hear a lot more - the full system had much more breadth and scope: treble was less emphasized, but more accurate and extended, with better soundstage, clearly-delineated layers, and better coherence in both the main voices and the background layers and effects. In particular, I heard the layered reverberations at the end of track 5, Head First, something I hadn't noticed before. With the home system, I heard new stuff from an album I'd played hundreds of times - was I taking crazy pills? It shows you that there's more to discover when you really listen carefully. Generally, I'm not an analytical listener and I don't seek out gear that emphasizes detail - I only do this when I'm comparing equipment. I also found myself at the limits of hearing fatigue - listening to the same short album (38 minutes long) three times in a row, even at safe volume levels, had a cumulative effect. Powering through this time, I was able to pick out additional little tunes that played in harmony in the background of the songs - they were barely audible on the other players, but the HP-2 gave them more space and separation. I like the word "holographic" that Joe Grado used to describe his new microphones. The HP-2 are not the widest-sounding headphones, but they demonstrate a giant leap from the plastic-bodied MS-1 coming out of portable CD players. At the end, it's a reminder of what happens when you climb Mount Head-Case. 🏔️ I had been easily satisfied with listening to what I had from 1995 for ten years - but after listening to better headphones and equipment, it's hard to go back. It's good to know I can still easily hear the differences between equipment. As a nice coda, the TTVJ Deluxe Flat Pads are holding up perfectly - no crumbling black foam on my ears! I'm doing a lot less headphone listening these days because I mostly listen out of my computer speakers or my stereo, but every time I get a chance for a full headphone listening session, I'm reminded of why I have such an intense relationship with and recall of great music (and such a large CD and SACD collection). Protect your hearing and enjoy the music!