TMoney

Exclusive is mostly to not get beeped and booped at as emails and chats roll in. I'm mixed on spatial audio. With the APM and HD800 the stereo tracks sound correct, natch. Atmos spatial sounds like a good binaural filter at best, and a bad one at worst. Is that a game changer? I dunno.

Now Apple just needs to add a way to let the Music app take exclusive control of a DAC and switch bitrates as needed.

What knavery is this? I don’t know if this sounds better or worse, but it does sound different. Reminds me of listening to a binaural recording.

AirPlay to Mac is a pretty cool feature. Leave the Mac plugged in to a DAC and cast music to it from the phone/tablet. I like it. Lots of cool little features like that today. Nothing really mind-blowing, but some decent quality of life stuff. Getting rid of tracking pixels on emails is long overdue. Et tu, Google/GMail?

RIP

Concert tour announced today as well. They are in SF in mid December!

Japanese Breakfast - Soft Sounds from Another Planet I have been seeing her name around a lot lately but I have never listened to one of her albums before now. I like it!

Tom Waits - Glitter and Doom Live For those "after-a-holiday-back-at-the-office" blues.

If MQA was a nothing-burger that didn't add anything over lossless I would have just shrugged and kept using Tidal. Bit-perfect lossless is the goal. Those videos suggest that MQA tracks generated from hi-rez masters actually harm the sound vs. just having a redbook FLAC. That is totally unacceptable.

Connie Willis - Doomsday Book I had the hardest time getting traction with this one. It starts slow. The characters and setting are unfamiliar. I wondered where it was going. Then it picks up… and… it is devastating. Especially after the events of the last year or so. “Apocalyptic,” as one of the characters would say. It is very deserving of all the awards it has won.

I think I’m jumping ship to (cr)Apple music soon. Once lossless is ubiquitous, Tidal loses a lot of its draw. Edit: OK, just watched the video. Goodbye, Tidal. That video is so damning.

Anyone else watching Mare? I’m caught up with it but I’m not sure if it is a good show or just addictive with the darn cliffhangers and the whodunit?

On how human lifespans doubled. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/magazine/global-life-span.html I thought this was a pretty interesting read.

Esquire!? I think you mean regular squire. Happy birthday, Diablo JenkinZ!

The problem with office is that it is a gigantic amalgamation of features. Most office users use, say 15-20% of the total features. The problem is that the 20% I use and the 20% you use aren’t the same. As far as I can tell the only way to make sure the mobile app has all the features each office user needs is to use the full desktop level apps.

I spent the afternoon working from the iPad attached to my thunderbolt 3 dock. It is remarkable how close this thing is to being a desktop replacement. If WWDC brings us a little more love for iPad OS and the ability to run full MacOS apps like office then I could see totally replacing a laptop with the iPad Pro. Having a monitor, mouse, keyboard, DAC, ethernet, and power all connected via a single cable to a thunderbolt dock feels like the fucking future.

Happy birthday, Rob! Hope your weather is as nice down in the south bay as it is up here in Marin today!

Picked up the new hotness today. Holy moly this thing is big coming off the 2018 11”. The keyboard case was expensive but it feels great. HDR on the new screen is stunning. Nearly LG-OLED-like blacks and eye-searing brightness. All that is missing is Apple letting us run full desktop-Mac apps on this thing!

Jerry Lee Lewis - Live at the Star Club Hamburg They don't call him "the Killer" for nothing. The man can play.

Yesssssss! Finally something to put that PS5 to work. TLOU2 PS5 upgrade hits today! I know what I’m going to be replaying this weekend.

I'd guess there just wasn't a need for it until recently now that every streaming service is jumping on the lossless/hi-rez train. Probably an upsell feature on AirPod Max 2?

Agreed. They are not cheap but they are really good at what they do. I'm yet to meet anyone who owns them and doesn't like them. With wireless headphones I care a lot more about having a good connection with good range than I do lossless over AAC. I imagine Apple's engineers felt the same way.

I’m potentially interested. Let’s see how it ends up working out next month. The spatial stuff sounds like a gimmick, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

Happy late birthday as well!

End credits song to Those Who Wish Me Dead. I like this a lot. I'll have to check out more of this guy's work.