Rants posts on CNET


Do you have a problem with clutter?

Are people more obsessed with reducing clutter now than they were in times past? A mastering and recording engineer friend recently told me he was selling off all of his CDs and LPs, and from now on Spotify would be his only music source. I was taken aback by that remark; this man has spent his entire working life making the best-sounding music he could, but from now on he'll be streaming tunes. So I asked if he heard something new on Spotify he really liked, would he buy it? He just smiled and said, "Why?" So … Read more

Can Sony make a world-class headphone?

2014 isn't shaping up as a stellar year for Sony, the company is forecasting losses of $1.1 billion, but I think a serious effort to reestablish its stature as a leading headphone manufacturer might be a wise move. Sony currently offers a vast range of headphone models, but they don't have any truly great ones. With the ongoing boom in headphone sales, you have to wonder why Sony is sitting on the sidelines.

Back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, Sony made some of the world's best headphones: the very affordable MDR-V6 and MDR-7506 are examples … Read more

An inconvenient truth: Why music sounds bad


Do all amplifiers sound exactly the same?




The "Spinal Tap" reference to the volume control that goes to "11" notwithstanding, there's a lot of confusion surrounding volume controls. There shouldn't be; the volume control setting has nothing to do with how loud an amp can play. Some folks mistakenly think that if you don't have to turn the knob up very far from the minimum setting to achieve high volume, that "proves" it's a powerful amp. No, not at all; the maximum volume level of any amp is determined not by how far you turn the knob, … Read more

Poll: Are restaurants and bars too loud?


Lego, you are dead to me


On the one hand, … Read more

Rate your AV receiver's autosetup program



Twitter needs to deal with the Twitter Accuracy Problem

Twitter's had a bad couple of weeks.




