I am starting to feel a tiny bit of urgency that perhaps I have not accomplished as much over break as I had wanted. This ordinarily wouldn’t bother me much — after all, it’s a break — but I have a feeling that this semester is going to be a bit of a doozy in… Read More →
I listen to a ton of music, mostly in various digital format — CDs, downloads, and streams — but I do so through a occasionally painfully anachronistic system that involves vacuum tube amplification and single-driver, paper-cone speakers and enough cables to stress my wife (and my dad, a former old-school IT guy) out. And, yes, I’m one of… Read More →
This past week, I offered to write a response to a piece by Andrew Reinhard over at the journal Epoiesen. Having the opportunity to write a response there had been a recent bucket list thing for me since I started to work with the journal’s editor Shawn Graham to publish the paper and paginated version of the journal through The… Read More →
I’m totally enamored with J. Borgerson’s and J. Schroeder’s Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (2017) published by MIT Press. The book explores the remarkable world of album covers from the 1950s and 1960s not from the heights of pop music (which was still dominated by 45 rpm singles), but from more… Read More →
Over the holiday break, I read David Sax’s Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (Public Affairs 2016). It’s a popular book and Sax is a journalist who write on culture and technologies for a range of periodicals. His book is was intriguing to me not because he has an answer to… Read More →
I’m on the road for the rest of the week and flailing about to get ready for the new semester. If you’re planning to be at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting in San Francisco, make sure to check out one of the papers that I’m giving over the next couple of days. So,… Read More →
Over the last few months, I’ve begiun to wonder why audiophiles are so angry with each other and why journalists, bloggers, and ordinary people seem to take so much pleasure in criticizing carefully engineered gear, high resolution music formats, and other typical audiophile fare. Just over the past few weeks, for example, I have read… Read More →
