Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

I will let you in on a little secret. I'm a girl. As in a female of the species. I am also part Vulcan, a geek, and a lover of music. Waaaaay back in college, I went through 3 engineering degrees before settling on "General Science," or the degree you select when you were an engineer for 3.5 semesters and realize that you don't quite "get" Calc 4, yet don't want to stay at college an extra year. I really do understand that I may not be your normal chick, but I do love makeup, animal print, and sparkly, glittery things. As a "Computer Professional" I was used to being an oddity - a woman in a man's world - but when I gave up programming to become a mom, I really forgot that strange combination of flattery and oddity that comes with being the only woman in a room full of dorky guys. I got a refresher when I would go to a comic store that had Sailor Moon doodads and dolls for my kids, or to the store with the paint-able miniatures for b...

Nightmare or sanity saver?  You decide. It's 2:37 am, and you wake up. The baby is asleep. The older kids are asleep. Your spouse is asleep. Nature, however, makes a call, and you tiptoe to take care of it. Unfortunately, you find you have a sound track. A really   annoying soundtrack. An earworm , that threatens your sanity and your ability to fall back to sleep after the deed is done. And there is a singular purple dinosaur (or a wiggly band of musicians, perhaps) that is to blame. You can escape! I was one of those  stay at home moms. I chose the path of least resistance in the car. I was more than willing to let the kids choose the CDs we listened to on trips, as long as the melt-downs were kept to a minimum. I learned the words to so many Barney and Sesame Street songs. I even learned several verses of the Poke-Rap song that named all 150 original Pokemon. I even survived the Pokemon movies IN THE THEATERS that had the psychedelic shorts at the beginning t...

I asked my sister to write a review of The Might Be Giants kid's albums ( Here Come the A B C's and Here Come the 1, 2, 3s ) about numbers and letters in an attempt on getting a mom who is actively momming a 3 year old (she has her own blog about raising her wonderful daughter here ).  Well, I sent her the CD's and then called her, slightly inebriated and said she had to write an article.  I was shocked when she said "yes" and this is what she sent: To: Brent From:  Betsy DISCLAIMER FOR YOUR READERS:  I have no business writing anything in a blog for audiophiles.  When I am listening to music, it's mostly in my car.  My car that has the same CD player in it as when I bought it back in 2001.  I haven't even learned how to properly use the equalizer on the damn thing.  And I really don't have any business writing a music review.  I have no musical training whatsoever.  I don't even play an instrument.  Also, I've...

Yes ... the two of us took the plunge and bought season tickets to our local Philharmonic.  Sure it was impulsive, but I have to say ... we're looking forward to it like you can't imagine! We got into this crazy thing over music - and aside from a Jazz festival we blew off this last year (so crowded you could hardly move - and we don't like massive crowds) - we've been suffering a live-in-the-flesh music deficit this ought to correct.  And despite the hives I got as a kid going to St. Louis Symphony concerts as part of school functions, I managed to get over it, and it is one of the few memories I have intact from being 5 or 6. Last season we saw a performance of Beethoven's 3rd ("Eroica" one of my favorites of all time) in a intimate hall and it was transformational.  We're hoping to have a similar levels of enjoyment this coming season.  I bet most of you have access to live music of some kind - see if you can drag yourselves and your family to...

Martin Logan Summit X - Perhaps the best Hybrid Electrostat on the planet?  Certainly one of the better 'stats My first real "Hi Fi" experience was about 1998 or so.  I had just moved into a house in San Jose, CA - a little shoebox of a place, but even then being able to afford and move into a house was a bit of an achievement due to the astronomical cost of housing in that area (and in subsequent years, it has even got more out of bed with incomes as waves of startup IPO money continued pushing up prices).  The point of this was that I wasn't exactly rolling in cash at the time having put my life savings into the downpayment, so I was only seeking a Tivoli Radio for the kitchen given the great FM reception and reasonable sound. I wandered into a Magnolia Hi Fi whose newspaper ad indicated they had them.  And had them they did, but as I walked passed an open listening room I was promptly blown away - I had never heard sound reproduction sound so clean and goo...

At some point when you are building and upgrading your stereo system, you will be faced with the basic question when is enough, enough? did the last upgrade to the sound really do all that much to improve the sound (or sounds worse!) despite all the reviews and measurements you have seen for it?  Or when you changed a pair of interconnect cables (or a power cable!) and you could swear you heard an improvement of such a magnitude, and that just does not make sense to you. Subjectivist vs Objectivist ... or is it the other way around? How you answer these questions really puts you in two camps:  Objectivists (Not the Ayn Rand types, thankfully) and Subjectivists .  In a nutshell, an Objectivist is of the mind that unless there is some scientific basis verified by a measurement technique that can quantify an effect, you are experiencing the placebo effect, your ears are fooling you, Emperor's New Clothes , etc.  The most extreme members of that group take gre...

I was in the process of trying - struggling, really - to come up with a post for today that made fun of audiophile idiosynchracies based around "You know you are an audiophile if ..." and only came up with "You can argue about the effectiveness of cable and interconnect upgrades for hours and never get bored" But that was it.  So when I found the below, aptly titled "Audiophile Hotline" I decided to pass this along instead and save the list for another day ... Audiophile Hotline

We added a new piece of reference music to our regular lineup - we mentioned it previously, but it has proven to be enlightening. Genesis Selling England by the Pound's second song "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" The track is full of stereo tricks - including a lawmower moving across the stage, but the most spectacular part of it is the lyrics are Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel singing in close harmony.  A system that isn't resolving will sound like Peter Gabriel with a little bit or reverb.  The more revealing the system, the more you will notice that it is the two people singing quite distincly form one another. The Quads sailed through this, where there was no way you could not tell it.  Martin Logan Spires was clear if you knew it already, the Thiel CS2.4s if you listened carefully, and the Bose 901's we own (that's audiophile sin #349, for those keeping track) it was reverb city but a stadium concert wide soundstage to make up for it.  W...

Note:  This is an entry we're going to do, and publish updates as we "live" with a product.  We have no affiliation with B&O other than as a customer - and in fact own the piece of gear we're going to be reviewing and doing the long term impressions.  And given the skin in the game, hopefully the observations will be in-line with what other purchasers would be going through (hopefully mostly good, we shall see!) As you may have guessed, both of us are big fans of whole house audio - and it doesn't even need to be fussy perfectionist audiophile stuff, either, hence our plunge into the world of Sonos (detailed here and here ) From an audio perspective, Sonos is far from perfect - the most glaring omission is their inability to play high bitrate music files at all - and their much vaunted "Plays all the music on Earth" ad campaign earns a "pants on fire" rating from us because of this!  We're happy to overlook their whoppers because ...