aerius

Dear god, that headband is something else. It actually looks like someone raided a dumpster for scrap metal and screwed it together to make a headband. This has got to be a new standard of Chinesium for me.

The Strait of Hormuz is closed for the foreseeable future and Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Iran, and possibly several others have already had their oil infrastructure hit and set on fire. We just had ~20 million barrels of oil per day get taken off the world market, and if the blockade continues long enough they'll have to start shutting down all the oil fields when storage starts running low. Once the oil fields are shut down they'll take weeks to months to restart production. Oil will not be available at any price. What we have here is what Iain M. Banks refers to as an Outside Context Problem in his Culture series novels.

Fill your gas tanks, shit just got real. Oil infrastructure in the Middle East is starting to go up in flames. North America will probably be OK, but Europe & Asia are likely to have fuel shortages soon.

Congratulations, the US martyred a moderate Ayatollah and he was instantly replaced by religious fundamentalist zealots who've declared a Jihad. The stupid. It hurts.

Glad you enjoyed it! Pelageya has been one of my favourite singers for the past 10 years or so, she has a really good feel for the music and how to interpret it. She could be singing anything from Soviet love songs to new age pop and it all somehow sounds right. Singing in Portuguese, just because And back to Soviet love songs

Any style, any language, and Pelageya always makes it sound good. From Jesus Christ Superstar And back to Ukrainian folk song

Revisiting the music of my early childhood

A couple years ago I finally remembered that my DAC can decode hi-res digital so I got a bunch of music to see if 24/96 and SACD were any better than plain old CD. The results have been mostly disappointing for me, most of the hi-res recording sound different but not really any better than the standard CD versions; I don't get the extra space, realism, details, and sweeter highs that hi-res proponents claim to hear. I've tried a lot of different genres from jazz & classical to metal and I'd say only around 10-15% of the music is better enough to make the hi-res version worth it, the rest of it is either marginal improvements or just different but not better. Overall I'm pretty disappointed, the potential is there with hi-res but like CD it's often limited by how good the recording & mastering was. I'm curious to hear what you guys think, has hi-res digital been worth it with the music you listen to?

This thread was so long ago that I don't even remember posting in it, I tried to take a guess at what I picked 12 years ago and the only one I got right was Black Sabbath. That one remains on my updated list but everything else is new. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath. Still one of the most fun albums to listen to for me, I've played it countless times over the years and it's still one of my go-to albums. Deep Purple - Concerto For Group And Orchestra. You can tell Blackmore's a bit sulky on some of the songs, but when he's into it it's fun as heck and shreds hard. Bob Marley - Babylon by Bus. Almost all my favourite Bob Marley songs on one album, with live energy & improvisation. Pelageya - Girl's Songs. Russian folk/rock/jazz songs, I don't understand a single word but Pelageya is such a good singer that it doesn't matter. Very interesting & different music than what I listened to for most of my life. Tito Puente - Tambo. Has more of a tribal/jungle beats vibe than his other albums, more percussion, less brass. Fun as heck, and it'll stress a lot of hifi systems.