HiWire

Community I skipped the 4th season, though... this just reminded me to get the 6th season!

Happy holidays! May your days be full of joy.

MOJO presents... beloved

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner One of the best books I've read recently. Milner strikes an excellent balance between tech-geekery and storytelling as he discusses the history of music recording.

Sometimes I miss the 90s:

2018/2019 should be good years to buy. Intel has started laying out the power with the Kaby Lake R chips this fall to compete with a revived AMD, so we can expect to see more cores in even the mainstream products. Weirdly, Intel and AMD have agreed to collaborate on graphics together, while AMD's former graphics chief is joining Intel. May you live in interesting times... Intel's Optane drives have started to ship – I'm hoping to see those in next year's Macs as well as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe 4.0, etc., which will provide a large jump in performance rather than the incremental improvements we've seen for the last ten years. One big question mark: where does Nvidia fit in Apple's roadmap? Apple hasn't shipped a Mac with an Nvidia GPU since 2013, but there are enough CUDA apps on macOS (and Windows) that you have to wonder if Apple is sticking with AMD and OpenCL despite overwhelming evidence that Nvidia's current lineup is more powerful and more efficient than AMD's comparable Polaris/Vega products: http://barefeats.com/nv_egpu_hic.html It's possible that Nvidia will cave and include more OpenCL and Metal support in their new products (they continue to release updated macOS drivers), but I'm not sure if Apple is a big enough customer for them to care, especially if they are locked out of Apple's OEM supplier group. Another question: will Apple allow a 3.5" hard drive into any future Mac? Part of being a pro, in my opinion, is having access to fast, local storage – they blundered with the 2013 Mac Pro by limiting it to 1TB of flash storage while hard drives are reaching 14TB with the latest helium models. It would be nice to have a case that can hold at least two 3.5" hard drives for 28TB RAID 0/1 rather than relying on an external drive for mass storage.

Turns out the RAM is not upgradeable: https://www.macworld.com/article/3242187/macs/imac-pro-shipping-december-14-ram.html Cash is king...

So the iMac Pro is supposed to be available to order on Thursday... anybody going to get one? https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/12/16766358/imac-pro-release-days-away-apple-phil-schiller At those prices, I'm not sure if there is going to be much demand, but I'm probably wrong. I'm curious if they have some kind of exotic cooling hardware (water cooling?) to handle the thermal output from the Xeon CPUs and the Vega GPUs. Both are pretty hot and there has been a lot of online discussion about de-lidding the Xeons for better cooling. Perhaps they'll decrease the clock speeds on the Vega chips and video memory as well.

Reviews of the DVD sets seem to agree with this, too. I'll finish the first season and see how I feel about committing to the rest later.

I'm obviously late to the show, but the first episodes have been fantastic so far. I'm disappointed that they only released the first season in Blu-ray... if I like it enough, I'll have to settle for DVDs of seasons two to five. The retro '80s soundtrack is great and they've done a good job with historical detail so far. The plot has some gigantic plausibility holes, but it holds together from a dramatic standpoint (i.e., a "realistic" espionage show would be incredibly slow, boring, and basically unwatchable).

Carrie Rodriguez + the Sacred Hearts – Lola

Matthew Sweet – Son of Altered Beast I've been wanting to listen to this one for years... finally found a new CD on Amazon.

No Doubt – The Beacon Street Collection

Blu-ray playback on the Mac is a pain in the ass... I looked into it a while ago and decided to do Blu-ray stuff only on my Windows computer. I've used Pioneer drives in my desktop computers since Plextor stopped making their own. This seems to be the latest one: https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Computer/Computer+Drives/BDR-211UBK Theoretically, it supports Ultra HD Blu-ray, but online reviews indicate a weird situation with HDCP 2.2 support and Intel SGX – you might need Intel's Kaby Lake for it to work. I think regular Blu-ray playback should be fine with something like PowerDVD. I wish VLC could add Blu-ray support... content protection is still a giant ball of fail for the consumer. The good news is that there is no region coding on Ultra HD Blu-rays.

Random YouTube delivers again... cheesy but entertaining:

It's that magical time of year again. Black Friday-Cyber Monday! I've been asked to purchase a PA system for speaking events, and I'm trying to narrow my choices down to 2 portable, compact systems. The Bose L1 1S is slightly more expensive, and it requires a power cable. The JBL Eon One has a battery for cordless use. I've read that the Bose sounds better and it has a wider dispersion pattern. Otherwise, the two are similar, with bass units at the bottom and compact built-in mixers. Does anybody have experience with this new generation of compact PA speakers? I think either speaker will be good, almost overkill, since we probably won't need them for music playback very often.

I'll have to make a point of visiting some cathedrals for their pipe organ music the next time I'm abroad. Also, I'll look into ways of synthesizing organs. There seem to be a lot of options out there (obviously, the most accessible way of doing it is simply playing an electric organ on a MIDI keyboard or in a program like Garageband): https://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/1102873-what-best-pipe-church-organ-keyboard-organ.html http://www.pykett.org.uk/choosing-a-virtual-pipe-organ.htm

Thanks, I'll check those recordings out! The breadth and history of the repertoire is huge. I think the modern view of pipe organ music mistakenly implies something solemn and monolithic when it is actually life-affirming, varied, and complex.

I was just listening to J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (a delayed reaction to Hallowe'en) when I had a bit of an epiphany... why do people send their kids to take piano lessons when they could be learning the pipe organ (common sense answer: because pipe organs are crazy big and complex and expensive and rare)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toccata_and_Fugue_in_D_minor,_BWV_565 The Wikipedia article suggests that Bach may have composed the piece to test pipe organs... do people use pipe organ repertoire to test their music systems? Listening to this piece on my computer speakers, I can understand why pipe organs are used for liturgical purposes because of their power and frequency range, but my interests are purely secular. I blame author Alan Bradley for piquing my interest – his detective/chemist heroine, Flavia de Luce, discovers a dead pipe organist in the church's tomb in the novel Speaking from Among the Bones (also, I strongly recommend the Flavia de Luce mystery series). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_organ Also, I always thought I was too dumb to understand them, since all those keys and pedals are kind of intimidating. A synthesizer would cut down on the size and complexity, obviously, but even electric organs are a bit complicated compared to the piano. Who else is interested in pipe organ music and pipe organs? I always thought pipe organ music was kind of boring as a kid, but I'm pretty sure that is because I only associated it with church music.

Reverberation Radio – meticulously curated classic and rare tracks (free podcast station on iTunes – some of the recordings are a bit lo-fi and/or mono because of their age, but the music is brilliant): http://reverberationradio.com/

I'm glad to hear that... have you heard about this AirPod audio hack: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16664958/airpods-bass-hack-diy-foam-covers-how-to I'd be hesitant to try it myself, but my bigger problem with Apple's earbuds has been that they always fall out of my ears. I bought a set of Sennheiser HD1 In-Ear wired headphones a few months ago to replace my old Klipsch S4i after they died (after 8 years of good service). They work surprisingly well for me with Comply tips and they're a huge audio upgrade over the Klipsch at a similar price.

I just realized it's going to be a pain in the ass to re-download all the apps because Apple removed the App Store functions from iTunes and my wi-fi is slow. First world problems... they should create a separate iOS section in App Store on macOS and Windows. That would reduce the downloading time, especially for people with multiple devices. The other thing I noticed yesterday was that I like the idea of wireless charging because you don't have to take out the Lightning headphone adapter. One foot stuck in the past, the other in the future... the reviews of Bluetooth headphones have not been impressive.

I'll give the wipe a try later on. There's nothing much installed on the iPad, though.

I used my iPad as a guinea pig for iOS 11... immediately noticed the battery drain and crashes in Safari and the App Store. I'm keeping my phone on iOS 10.3.3 until iOS 11 gets some major fixes. Battery life has been excellent with iOS 9 and iOS 10.

Moby – Everything Is Wrong (still great after all these years)