Dusty Chalk

90% of what I've been listening to lately is this YouTube guy who posts whole albums, Stoned Meadow of Doom. Just subscribe, and listen when you have bandwidth. Here's a latest favourite:

Meanwhile...This fucking RAWKS. Right up there with Leprous, IMHO.

Well, Sandbag sucks. They should know that any claims against the carrier usually are carried out by the shipper, rather than the recipient. Me: Them:

Happy birthday! (party favour noise)

Happy birthday! (party favour noise)

(squints) That has to be ironic.

Wait, what? (wanders off to look up impedance of the Sony MDR-Z7 headphones...70 ohms) I wonder what the input impedance of the Pico Power is. I bet it's less than 50 ohms. I wonder if that was the main difference in what I was hearing. You know, I actually preferred it out of the Pico Power, which was probably line out. So it might be alright with the Etys.

Okay, well then you don't need my report, but I'll give it anyway -- it's good. I wouldn't say it's as good as an external DAC/Amp, as I read elsewhere, but it's a good backup to my primary player. I prefer the Sony, but it's still better than any other phone I've used. Listened to Talk Talk's The Colour of Spring, Trio Italiano's rendition of Schurbert's 2nd piano trio, Kraftwerk's Computer World, and Porcupine Tree's The Sky Moved Sideways (all on Tidal hi-fi, downloaded for offline listening aka "cached"). It definitely benefited from the Pico Power, probably because I was using my Sony MDR-Z7, which are probably hard to drive. But yeah, good choice, same one I would've -- and did -- made/make.

Noice! I hope you get it!

Okay. Yeah, I guess I should stop pushing -- really, all I meant to do was, explain that once I went off the unlimited data plan, I developed conservative data usage habits, and they're fairly ingrained at this point. Not everyone has to have the same listening habits as me.

I don't have wifi for personal use at work, and I can't even use my work laptop to play music (not even foobar2000). That's why I started carrying around the Sony PDAP with me. You know you can cache stuff using Tidal on the app, right? Depending on which subscription you have, I think.

No, I've not opened it yet, I was going to wait until I heard back from Sandbag, but you're right, the first thing they're going to want is for me to open it and inspect it. Also, I was waiting until I cooled down -- I was livid yesterday.

Seriously. I was initially disappointed when I had to go back to the 2G plan, and recently upgraded to the 5G plan with my iPad, and I rarely go up much over 2G. 3G one month, but that's because I had wireless off and forgot. How on earth does anyone need 22G, much less 30G?

(wonders if Under the Skin, Gravity, or Ex Machina is out in 4K yet)

Also, Hazy Sea -- this shit is fabulous. link Also, Elder (which is not instrumental, but might be the most progressive of the stoner albums I've been listening to lately) . link I can't. Stop. Listening. to Stoner.

Well done! So what's the first thing you're going to watch on it?

I believe that's, "kings of off-topic". This is actually atypically close to on-topic for us.

garlic fries sound awesome right now

So I just went to the post office to pick up the first of the Nine Inch Nails vinyls, and some idiot decided to -- for the first time in my experience -- leave it outside in 90 degree weather, at the GoPost kiosk. There's no way to tell how long it's been out there (the tracking number says it was delivered on June 29, and the attached note says that if it isn't picked up by July 4th then blah blah blah, which makes me believe it was there the entire hot fucking weekend. God. Fucking. Dammit. I'll contact the NIN shop to see how they want to handle this.

I just got mine a couple weeks ago, haven't listened to music on it yet. Will load up some music and report back, but my main PDAP reference point is Sony's entry level one from a couple years ago, and my hearing has gone to shit in the last couple years. (I can't even tell the difference between Spotify -- lossy streaming -- and Tidal -- lossless -- any more.) (following thread as well, since was not aware of software issues and unfortunately did not pay $300 for mine, but fortunately did not pay $800 neither...alright, I paid $400 at B&H, but at least it was for new)

And yet still more My favourites so far are Electric Octopus and My Secret Karma -- both instrumental, but I prefer to think of it as "distilled". Cask Strength Stoner, if you will.

That's so great. Me: more stoner -- I'm going to have to get a microSD card just for all my stoner from bandcamp. I should probably buy more progressive and classical and jazz, just so I don't get profiled.