I received this response from one of our listeners to our most recent podcast on MP3s. Thank you Harold from Austria for your insightful email.

As a loyal listener as well as professional audio engineer I feel the need to respond to your podcast about MP3 in general and the idea of “hearing the difference” between uncompressed and MP3 audio.

Short story: Although I have no doubt that the fellow studio guy did a great job of producing theses files, it does prove NOTHING but instead your conclusion of this is what mp3 is missing is highly misleading! Read more…

As many of you are aware, the recent podcast and Audioholics article uncovered that the $3,500 Lexicon BD-30 essentially is a $500 Oppo BDP-83 with a pretty case. What also occurred is that another publication – Home Theater Review.com – published a review of the Lexicon before we got a chance to test our review sample. What was most unfortunate (for them) is that the reviewer not only did not use any objective tests of the Lexicon, but also claimed to have compared it to the upgraded BDP-83SE. The reaction of the public to this review after the Audioholics exposé was… well… energetic to say the least. Read more…

In light of the recent podcast and the Audioholics article on the Lexicon/Oppo debacle, I can’t help but think back on some of things I expected to find in this business when I got into it. Let’s be honest, it’s easy to demonize a lot of the people you read (or watch, or hear about). They become caricatures of real people. They are malicious or stupid or conniving or nefarious… the list goes on. But when you meet them, they tend to be just like you – humans trying to do their best with what they have. There are always extenuating circumstances, always reasons, always a bunch of behind the scene stuff you don’t know. That if you only knew, you’d understand.

I’m wondering what those are at Lexicon and THX. Read more…

So Clint forwards me the picture to the right. Apparently Yamaha is trying to scare people into downloading their free app. Sure, it’s free (unlike ours which would be a great way for people to support the show) but tell me that chick doesn’t look like she’d rather be gnawing the nose off your face? Maybe I’ve just been playing too much Left 4 Dead 2, but if I met her in a dark alley (and had a cricket bat on hand), it’d be on.

So during a random Google search I came across a news article which is actually a scan from a newspaper. This got me thinking… how old of a loudspeaker review could I find? Well, I didn’t really find one but I found references to loudspeakers way back into the 20’s. Most of the articles forced me to pay to read them (yeah right, this is the Internet) so I may have missed one or two. What I wanted to do was to compare an old article to a new one and see how similar they were. After a while I gave up on that idea but not before I came across this.

Report from the First International Sight and Sound Expo The Milwaukee Journal, Sept 3, 1953

So taking the article apart, the first bit is about how may people where there and how hardcore they were. That pretty much sounds like any CES writeup nowadays. Next, they are talking about binaural sound (we’d call that Stereo). What I found interesting was how similar that description resembles every other new tech that has come out. Read more…