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A sizable tree missed our house by a few yards, and we won't have power for a while. Otherwise it's all fine. Power outage mostly seems confined to our development.

Got a fairly mild shake (NJ), nothing serious. I hope this isn't what Obama meant when he said he wanted to shake things up in Washington.

I kinda wrote off Melechesh after Sphynx; there were some great tracks on that disk but on the whole it felt like Melechesh really didn't have the songwriting sophistication to pull off what they wanted to do. So, I kinda forgot about them for a while. Well, they learned. I don't know if this is necessarily a brilliant album but there certainly is nothing quite like them these days. Totally distinctive black thrash (I guess that's the closest genre equivalent) with middle eastern melody woven into the riffs themselves; in fact this is modal music and if I remembered any music theory at all I could probably guess as to what mode it's in. Regardless, Melechesh does for black metal what Nile did for death metal, except that they still have the freshness and originality that Nile has recently lacked. They also have a lot of class - something in which most metal was always found wanting. Been kinda in a metal phase lately so there are a few recent additions.

Hopefully they don't do the typical Russian customs thing, which is to take your items hostage and demand a bribe to let them through. Always fun, shipping things to Russia.

First impressions: wow, what an analog-sounding DAC! Warm(ish), full, smooth. Kinda reminds me of the Rega sound, maybe a tad warmer and not quite as dynamic but the overall feel is similar. More detailed impressions to come soon.

Finished A Dance with Dragons. It's pretty much book 4, part 2. Compared to the first 3 GRRM got a bit better at describing internal monologue and his prose remains accomplished as ever, but in terms of plotting aDwD is pretty fail. It does pick up towards the end, but only just, and ends, unsurprisingly, on a cliffhanger. The series is badly in need of a good editor, and although there still are occasional flashes of brilliance the inspiration has definitely gone out of the books, and it feels like GRRM really has no idea where he's going with the story nor how to resolve the myriad subplots that he's dragged his characters into. Atmospherically successful; story-wise, a mess.

Both episodes were pretty solid so far.

I agree that the LoTR movies were weak. IMO it's not so much that the source material is unfilmable (I think it's borderline) but Peter Jackson is an overrated hack. He turned LoTR into essentially a bunch of Hollywood parlor tricks for the lowest common denominator. That might work in a horror B-movie but not in this.

K340 also had pretty bad reverb issues. Very echoey and colored sound in general. Not that I mind, it's still one of my favorite headphones.

Pretty much this. DT770s are certainly far from terrible but also far from great. I use mine mostly for gaming. They're amazingly comfortable and the isolation is good. Build quality is fairly tanklike but mine did develop a rattle in the left driver over time, and this is not an isolated incident. The bass is overblown but fairly well controlled. The mids actually have nice tone but are recessed overall. Highs are bit harsh and overemphasized but not as badly as some. Resolution isn't bad for a dynamic I guess, and they do sound spacious for closed headphones. Aside from not being very linear and a little harsh up top they don't sound that bad to me, at least as far as closed dynamics go. Certainly better than Ultrasones but that isn't very hard.

What? Top Gear fabricated? No! (insert sarcastic shocked expression here) Considering TG's apparent pro-British anti-everything else bias (especially anti-American) and penchant for fabricating, well, just about anything, it was only a matter of time. However in the interest of free speech I will side with TG on this. People should know better than to take them seriously. Plus as the article said, it stinks more of a PR move on Tesla's part. I think the whole Hawk Stratos debacle was far more telling of how TG operates (from what I've gathered, they instructed the Stig to spin the car twice and recover on the timed lap, plus there's a strong possibility that they intentionally sabotaged the car's brakes and generally portrayed it as a bucket of bolts built in a shack when really it wasn't. Of course the difference here is, Hawk was a small-scale manufacturer that got more sales and publicity from TG whereas Tesla may very well have lost money). To me the current Top Gear is like an old annoying but somehow lovable dog. It shits on your carpet and doesn't remember its own name anymore but somehow you can't get (too) mad at it.

Gah this is what I get for not having internet... but I would have backed out anyway. I'll pick one up later. Very much looking forward to impressions.

$4725 isn't enough savings to jump on it right away. If the price was better I'd say go for it but right now it makes sense to wait. Especially since this is not - as I understand - a limited edition headphone.

If it's less than $4k I may be in too. I'll have to check and get back to you.

I'm getting it, though probably not right away. Should have saved up for a bit instead of messing with this DSLR tomfoolery. Still 5D Mk2/24-105L is so nice.

Yay, bully stories... I was picked on a lot. I had a skull fracture from a brick thrown at me. Wasn't that bad when I was still 11-12 but after that I came down with some serious shit and was nearly paralyzed. Walked around with a cane, and besides, this was right when I came to America so I didn't speak much english... Yeah you could say I was picked on. Years and years on end. I guess it's fun to push the cripped foreign kid around and watch him writhe in pain on the floor. In 11th grade I was more or less recovering and able to take care of myself more. I sent up a 300lb football player to the hospital after beating the shit out of him with my desk in the middle of class. I should have been expelled, or sent to juvenile, but I got away with a week of suspension since most people in school more or less knew what was up. He got away with a few broken ribs. That more or less ended the bullying, at least when I wasn't by myself. I'm still a shrimpy little fucker, and maybe a little wider around the midriff these days, but I've been doing martial arts for a while, and not the happy hippy kind, so in a sense it's a good thing that that part of my life is long since over. Ironic, isn't it, that when you're able to defend yourself (and even if you really don't look it) you no longer have a need to, and when you're at your weakest, you do.

Seriously dude? You're giving Schumacher advice for how to drive around Monza, and you're wondering why we're laughing it off? Tyll is probably the most knowledgeable person in the hobby. Who are you? I also don't buy the whole "it's all a matter of opinion" line. No it's not, and yes, there are standards. Audio relativism - or whatever you want to call it - is outright dangerous since it creates an environment where misinformation spreads and substandard gear thrives. Reminds you of another forum, maybe? Now, I'm not picking on you specifically, no matter what the above post sounds like. But, you walked into the lion's den here. Don't act surprised that you got mauled.

Gorguts - Obscura Man, what the hell is going on... This has got to be one of the most relentlessly strange albums I've ever heard. It's simply suffering put to music. Tortured riffs from the slimy pits of the ninth layer of hell claw their way out through the ground and emerge to shriek their deranged cacophony into the air. Bizzare, meandering basslines not so much spill but vomit forth from a wall of twisted distortion. Drums that play out the internal malevolent rhythms of a buried and forgotten alien machine. It's discordant, thoroughly deconstructed, malevolent and cacophonous, it's the sonic equivalent of being dissolved, it's the sort of music you find you've recorded when you come down off a 3 day 3,000 mic trip where it all went very very wrong... and yet it all makes sense somehow. It's coherent and some insect way logical, and it very much has its own sound. Fucking brilliant if you ask me. Recommended if you ever listened to Nile and thought "man... this music makes too much sense!"

Skyrim. That's definitely #1. Also Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition; I'm hoping that it will come to consoles. Right now Marvel is all the new hype but I never liked those games, so in the meanwhile SSF4 is dead and I'm hoping AE DLC will revive it somewhat. Even if my main (Honda) got nerfed into oblivion. But at least I can (hopefully) use Gen again. Mortal Kombat 9 looks fierce. I don't know how well it will play, and there are some worrying signs that it may not be all that, but still I'll check it out. King of Fighters 13 is also on the menu, assuming that it sees a console release in the first place. I never tried KOF but the fundamentals look close enough to SF that I should be able to enjoy it. At some point I should start playing QuakeLive again (last time was 5 years ago in Q3), but I know if I do all the free time that I don't even have will disappear entirely. Last but not least, Heroes of Might and Magic 6. I really didn't like 5, but this is a new studio, and hopefully there will be a change in direction.

If this is your attempt to fit in, you're not doing a very good job. And no, it's not another tech forum. Read your welcome PM again, it should tell you what you need to know. And I suggest you stop and lurk for a while before you bury yourself even more. KBI was a lot more incoherent IIRC.

Westone 4. Still too bright. They fixed the bass bloat with the dual bass drivers but now they need to fix the highs. This is the "hey look at me!" sound, bright and flashy and in the long run, annoying. Why are there no good universal-fit IEMs? In the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, "How hard can it be?" Very, I'm guessing.

House heater died last night, and now I'm using tube amps to heat my bedroom. Never will I complain about how much heat the BH puts out. The rest of the house is cold as a meat locker (our insulation _really_ sucks) but my bedroom is a toasty 75 degrees. And all with the added benefit of listening to several really kick-ass systems!

First day of downhill skiing yesterday. Did pretty well, got off the bunny hill fairly quickly, but then I sorta went through a tree. Let me tell you, breaking a tree in half with your face really puts a damper on your day. Next weekend will be day 2. Let's see what sort of heroic falls and obstacle destruction I can come up with. Also, any tips for keeping fog off glasses and goggles? I did most of the bunny hill half blind with fog but it didn't matter. On actual slopes, though...

Founders Breakfast Stout. Every time I drink this it reminds me why it's one of my favorite stouts. I don't know why I don't drink this a lot more often... especially for breakfast.

Typical Monster behavior, trying to crush competition before it starts. Smart, too, if you take ethics out of it, but given how they spend their time bullying small business while Noel Lee drives around in a Bentley from West Coast Customs, that's easier said than done. I was reading through the Blue Jeans Cables' brilliant response to Monster's accusations and one thing caught my eye: Is this true? Are there any advocacy groups that can actually make this happen? I would love to see Monster piss off the wrong people, if only it gets them to change their MO, but I don't know if that's likely or realistic.