How To Spot A Psychopath

Apropos of this, I was just looking through the review-site article announcements that constantly pitter-pat into my Dan’s Data mailbox (I only do announcements via RSS these days, but plenty of sites still have a mailing list as well).

And lo, I found an announcement for a piece called “Do Expensive Home Audio/Video Cables Matter?“, from Digital Trends.

Apparently - imagine my surprise - some guy who sells hi-fi gear says that customers should buy the more expensive cables!

Oh, and you should keep all of your cables “at least four inches off the floor” - there’s a picture of a shiny little cable stand - for some reason.

The reason is not explained. Neither is anything else. Usually articles like this can summon up some BS about the skin effect or jitter or something - for cable stands, I think it’s usually something about the dielectric constant of your carpet. Sometimes you get something quite impressively deranged.

But this article doesn’t bother.

(Cable stands are, by the way, one of the things mentioned on that I Like Jam audiophile page I linked to the other day. Apparently it’s now common knowledge among a certain class of audiophile that badness can leak from the floor into any cable, including optical cables and power cables. I’m not sure whether this is still a problem if you don’t live on the ground floor of a building.)

Digital and analogue? What’s the difference? Spend big bucks - and whatever you do, keep those wires off the carpet!

Even if you don’t have a single analogue interconnect except for your speaker cables, Digital Trends are here to tell you, on behalf of that guy who sells hi-fi gear, that if you’re not spending “20 percent of the entire worth of your system on cable and wire”, you’re doing it wrong.

(Fortunately, it was quite easy for me to unsubscribe from the Digital Trends mailing list.)

(Via BB.)

Audiophile nonsense is one of those hard-to-parody things, like religious fundamentalism: Poe’s Law states that no straight-faced parody of fundamentalism can reliably be distinguished from the stuff real fundamentalists actually say.

But one Nathan P. Marciniak has, nonetheless, given this difficult task a go.

(For comparison, consider ILikeJam’s page of real audiophile products.)

Audiophile nonsense, about which I have of course written on numerous previous occasions, is sort of the Fisher-Price, bonsai version of the real, serious scams, like medical quackery.

(Audiophile weirdness and medical quackery sometimes appear on the same page on dansdata.com. My audience seems to rather like the letters columns that’re all about scams.)

Nobody’s dying young because of audiophile flim-flam (well, not unless they leave their amplifier plugged in while they replace the tubes…), nobody’s spending money they can ill afford to lose (well, OK, maybe some of the crazier ones), nobody’s being led into criminal activity. Audiophile nuttitude is just people getting together to fool each other and themselves. Sometimes a lot of money changes hands, but it’s all entirely voluntary and essentially harmless.

I’m sure some vendors of crazy hi-fi products are well aware that they’re running a scam, But most seem to be sincere - if pompous, wilfully ignorant and sometimes a bit rude.

(Note that Mr Marciniak is not actually the maker of Blinker Fluid and Cross-Drilled Brake Lines. That’s KaleCoAuto.)

These guys remind me of someone.

And also remind me that I must get around to building that Thingamakit I bought the other day.

(Via.)

Regular readers will know that Unique Hardware are the makers of the hilariously-named but great-looking and, more importantly, surprisingly-good-sounding “HUMP” series of USB computer speakers.

A while ago, I reviewed their NF01 and NF02 speakers, which differ only in the USB amplifier module. The NF02s…

…have an amp with buttons and an auxiliary input.

In brief, these tiny (but surprisingly heavy) speakers sound quite remarkably good for their size. Which really is astonishingly small.

When I reviewed them, though, they cost about 75 US dollars delivered, and you could only buy them on eBay.

You still can buy Unique Hardware speakers on eBay; the US ebay.com store is here, and the Australian-dollar version is here. The price is now down to about $65 delivered, which would be too much to pay for ordinary crappy plastic USB speakers, but is quite a good deal for the Unique Hardware products. They’re unquestionably the finest “pocket sized” speakers in existence. If you ask me, their only weakness is that if you treat them roughly and fracture the cables - which you could easily do in less than a year, if you’re chucking them into your laptop bag twice a day - you’re going to have a dickens of a time repairing them.

I’ve recently updated the review to mention that ThinkGeek have started selling “Crystal USB Desktop Speakers” that’re obviously actually NF01s, for only $US39.99 plus delivery. That’s a great price, if you’re in the USA and don’t have to pay much for delivery.

Oddly, however, Unique Hardware tell me that they aren’t actually wholesaling any speakers to ThinkGeek. In truth, they’ve been having some trouble making money on the product.

It’s not likely that the ThinkGeek speakers are inferior copies, though. The rock-solid machined-acrylic cabinets that make the Unique Hardware speakers special also make them rather difficult to clone. Unique Hardware believe that ThinkGeek have actually bought a crate or three of NF01s from some other outfit that earlier bought them from Unique, then found the speakers hard to sell.

(If you’re a ThinkGeek insider with more info, do feel free to fill me in.)

It’s not surprising that people - including the manufacturers - have had trouble shifting these speakers. As I point out at the beginning of the review, little tiny computer speakers, as a general rule, suck. Sucky speakers that cost ten bucks are one thing; sucky speakers that cost more than $50 are quite another. When Engadget mentioned the “new” ThinkGeek product, they therefore quite reasonably assumed the Crystal USB Desktop Speakers sounded lousy.

But they really, really don’t.

No, these little speakers don’t have much bass, and no, they don’t go up to party volume. But they really are a very great deal better than you’d think.

I invite US readers to buy up ThinkGeek’s entire stock, which Unique Hardware figure isn’t more than about 500 units. Then they may have to start buying direct from Unique, who deserve more business.

Yep, it’s a cat playing a theremin (via).

[UPDATE: It’s become a fad!]

…but it’s a theremin nonetheless.

Musical cats do not, of course, usually show any awareness that there’s a connection between what they’re doing and the noises that’re being made. The cat walks down the piano because that’s how you get to the windowsill; the cat plays the theremin because it enjoys bopping the interesting springy wire.

(Oo! Bill-Bailey-narrated theremin documentary {via}! See also the film documentary Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey.)

I’m probably the last person in the world to discover this, but the TSA Gangstaz music video is, I’m given to understand the kids today are saying, da bomb.

NOTE: Naughty NSFW dirty offensive words!

And now, Why I Wrote This Song, by the rather Jewish perpetrator, Zach Selwyn:

There haven’t actually been all that many responses so far, but this one right here is perfectly awesome.

(Via.)

A few people have e-mailed me to mention this Consumerist post, which links to an Audioholics forum post which I could have sworn I myself linked to a while ago, though I may be mistaken. All of the “audiophile” bulldust kind of merges together in my mind after a while.

Anyway, the gist of the post is that fancy Monster-brand speaker cables “sound” the same as wire coat hangers, as any electrophysicist would tell you they would, but as the entire fancy-audio-cable industry insists they would not.

(Wire hangers are not, of course, actually very practical for most speaker-cabling tasks. Numerous less dramatic tests have demonstrated that so-called audiophiles can’t tell the difference between fancy cables and lamp cord.)

But wait, there’s more.

Here is a test of wire hangers versus fancy cables for home theatre digital interconnect applications, which turned up similar results. Again, this is entirely unsurprising from a physics point of view, but is completely contrary to the heated claims from many magic-cable vendors.

I invite you to link to any other, similar tests in the comments.

(Actually, despite this post’s headline, I’m pretty sure that someone actually has tested rusty old barbed wire against “audiophile” cables of one kind or another. I do know for a fact that sending hundred-megabit Ethernet over barbed wire was a pretty well-known demo back in the days when 100BaseT was super-technology.)

DVD Jon’s new application DoubleTwist looks completely awesome. I don’t think it really does anything that you couldn’t do before with umpteen tweaky utilities, but it aims to do it all in one simple program.

So I was all ready to download the beta and start freeing all of my DRM-ed media files from their corporate shackles… when I suddenly remembered that I don’t have any DRM-ed media files.

I’ve got some DVDs, but they seem pretty happy where they are.

If you’ve got audio, video or even photos (on a stupid locked-down cameraphone, for instance) that you’d like to move somewhere else but can’t, though, check DoubleTwist out.

I just watched From Beyond, which Stuart Gordon made a year after the more famous, and similarly Lovecraft… ish… Re-Animator.

(There’s an animated 2006 version of From Beyond, as well, but an IMDB rating of 1.7 doesn’t tempt me.)

The movie didn’t get off to a good start. Every automatic door in a hospital - including the glass swinging doors on the exit - made the Star Trek door noise.

(This movie also turned out to be the source of the “giving them drugs, taking their lives away” sample from Empirion’s acid-house classic Narcotic Influence. Which is neither here nor there, but which I found surprising enough that I just had to mention it.)

The acting is also not a good reason to watch this movie. And the script has only the tiniest skerrick of a connection with the original Lovecraft story.

The special effects have their ups and downs, too.

(Actually, this beastie looks pretty good in motion.)

Oh, and then there’s the bondage gear. And the supernaturally-induced horniness. I don’t remember that from the original story either.

But, for all that, I quite liked it.

Like all good horror movies, From Beyond gives you the impression that there’s some method to the madness even if you can’t really figure it out. It also held my interest; there were no long predictable scenes with characters walking backwards into the grasp of a monster or failing to be believed by scornful, obviously-doomed townsfolk.

The movie’s also got classic-horror stalwart Ken Foree, amiably tolerating a bit of light blaxploitation. And the silly bits of the ending are also the funny bits of the ending, so that’s OK. I’ve watched far worse movies with far better production values.

As Neil Gaiman points out…

…visual media are not a good place to put Cthulhu Mythos stuff, because the whole idea is that the ghastly Things are as far beyond human comprehension as Jupiter is beyond the comprehension of an ant. But since this isn’t really a Lovecraft-y story, that doesn’t matter.

The version I watched is the unrated Director’s Cut released only last year, which includes a couple of bits of footage that didn’t make it past the censors when the movie was in theatres. Pay attention and you can spot the places, in a couple of particularly nutritious shots, where the recovered-from-the-cutting-room-floor footage was spliced back in.

Oh, and I made a panorama of the laboratory.

You’re welcome.

Newspaper “formulae” for one thing or another have a terrible, and richly deserved, reputation.

But the formula for the Moby Quotient, whereby one may calculate “the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies”, would be highly amusing even if the article about it hadn’t been written by Bill Wyman.

(Regrettably, the Bill Wyman in question is this guy, not the famous metal detector fellow who once dabbled in music.)