What is the Great American Pastime? Baseball? Football? Soccer? Actually, it’s none of those. Our great pastime is sitting passively and yelling as other people actively run around. And while shouting from the bleachers is fun, it’s even more fun to sit and shout at the TV.
When we first alerted readers to Harman’s Aha, we expected to hear a lot more about this streaming platform. As expected, Aha added fuel to its fires at CES.
Turntables are alive and well, thank you very much. A-T has a well-deserved reputation for making solid turntables, and keeps hope alive with the introduction of a new model. The AT-LP1240-USB is aimed at both the DJ and home markets.
If you’ve ever ridden the Tokyo subway during rush hour, stood in line to buy Nike Air Jordans, or been pepper-sprayed at a Walmart on Black Friday, you may have a sense of what CES is like. The only difference is that CES is a lot more crowded, dangerous, and painful.
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. . . . But at any rate, they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to.”
8-track tape, cassette, MiniDisc, DAT. They all have two things in common. You don’t find them in new cars anymore. And, like lots of other technologies that have come and gone, car radios have easily outlasted them. Actually, add CD to that list. Within a few years, that’ll be gone. But is AM/FM radio on the endangered species list too?
Michael Jackson is back in the news, and as usual, not in a good way. This time, at least, it’s no fault of his own. Rather, it’s his employer, Sony, who assumes the blame. It was imprudently careless with the keys to Jackson’s bank vault.
You’ve got to hand it to Walmart. First, they make a zillion dollars selling DVD and Blu-ray discs to everyone. Now, they’re set to make another zillion dollars so you don’t have to actually use the discs. Brilliant, simply brilliant.
Everything runs in cycles, and audio has passed its nadir and is now trending back up. And high-fidelity audio — for heaven’s sake! — is moving back onto the radar screen. Consider these 10 points: