aerius

A fellow Roy Khan fan on another forum showed me this one.

Mozart was a dirty composer

The style mix I never knew I needed

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.

I often listen to music in languages I don't understand. I find that if the music's good it'll still get the feelings & message across even if you don't understand a single word.

Sometimes I like to listen to silly music

Anything over 60 is fine, people stress way too much over cadence when it's really not that important until you're years into your cycling hobby. As a mountain biker, my cadence will go anywhere from 40-ish to well over 100 on any given ride, it's not a big deal. Yes there's an ideal cadence for max efficiency at higher power outputs which is around 85-90rpm, that's what you'd ride at if you're training hard or trying to win a race but for recreational riding and especially as a novice, it just doesn't matter yet. Ride whatever cadence feels best until you get serious enough about cycling that you're shaving your arms & legs for drag reduction & extra speed. 70rpm is perfectly fine and it's not going to wreck your joints or cause any bio-mechanical issues.

Joseph Crowe Audio horns. Heard these at an audio show last week and they've basically wrecked everything I thought I knew about audio and redefined what is possible. The performance ceiling in high-end audio is far higher than I ever imagined and much closer to live sound than I thought.

Listened to the CRBN again this year, but with a Mjolnir Audio amp this time instead of whatever they were using last year. It's mostly the same but better and the improvements are what one would expect from an amp upgrade. Dynamics are better, bass is filled in and hits harder, and it pretty much sounds like my home setup with the LCD-XC. Take my LCD-XC, remove the last traces of the closed headphone sound, move the perspective back a row or so, add more resolution, and that's the CRBN.