2025-03-08 04:00:00
I bought new speakers. This story combines beautiful music with advanced analogue technology and nerdy obsession. Despite which, many of you are not fascinated by high-end audio; you can leave now. Hey, this is a blog, I get to write about what excites me. The seventeen of you who remain will probably enjoy the deep dive.
Totem Tribe Tower loudspeakers, standing on a subwoofer.
This picture makes them look
bigger than they really are. They come in black or white, satin or gloss finish.
Prettier with the grille on, I think.
My main speakers were 22 years old, bore scars from toddlers (now grown) and cats (now deceased). While they still sounded beautiful, there was loss of precision. They’d had a good run.
Just in the last year, I’ve become convinced, and argued here, that both DACs and amplifiers are pretty well solved problems, that there’s no good reason to spend big money on them, and that you should focus your audio investments on speakers and maybe room treatment. So this purchase is a big deal for me.
The number of boutique speaker makers, from all over the world, is mind-boggling; check out the Stereophile list of recommendations. Here’s the thing: Pretty well all of them sound wonderful. (The speakers I bought haven’t been reviewed by Stereophile.)
So there are too many options. Nobody could listen to even a small proportion of them, at any price point. Fortunately, I had three powerful filters to narrow down the options. The speakers had to (1) look nice, and (2) be Canadian products, probably (3) from Totem Acoustic.
I do not have, nor do I want, a man-cave. I’ve never understood the concept.
And you have to be careful. There are high-end speakers, some very well-reviewed, with design sensibilities right out of Mad Max or Brazil. And then a whole bunch that are featureless rectangles with drivers on the front.
Ours have to live in a big media alcove just off the kitchen; they are shared by the pure-audio system and the huge TV. The setup has to please the eyes of the whole family.
At this point in time, a position of “from anywhere but the US, the malignant force threatening our sovereignty” would be unsurprising in a Canadian. But there are unsentimental reasons, too. It turns out Canadian speaker makers have had an advantage stretching back many decades.
This is mostly due to the work of Floyd Toole, electrical engineer and acoustician, once an employee of Canada’s National Research Council, who built an anechoic chamber at the NRC facility, demonstrated that humans can reliably detect differences in speaker accuracy, and made his facility available to commercial speaker builders. So there have been quite a few good speakers built up here over the years.
What happened was, in 1990 or so I went to an audio show down East somewhere and met Vince Bruzzese, founder of Totem Acoustic, who was showing off his then-brand-new “Model One” speakers. They were small, basic-black, and entirely melted my heart playing a Purcell string suite. They still sell them, I see. Also, the Totem exhibit was having a quiet spell so there was time to talk, and it turned out that Bruzzese and I liked a lot of the same music.
So I snapped up the Model Ones and that same set is still sounding beautiful over at our cabin. And every speaker I’ve bought in the intervening decades has come from Totem or from PSB, another excellent Toole-influenced Canadian shop. I’ve also met and conversed with Paul Barton, PSB’s founder and main brain. Basically, there’s a good chance that I’ll like anything Vince or Paul ship.
My plan was to give a listen to those two companies’ products. A cousin I’d visited last year had big recent PSB speakers and I liked them a whole lot, so they were on my menu. But PSB seems to have given up on audio dealers, want to sell online. Huh?! Maybe it’ll work for them, but it doesn’t work for me.
So I found a local Totem dealer; audiofi in Mount Pleasant.
For this, you should use some of your most-listened-to tracks from your own collection. I took my computer along for that purpose, but it turned out that Qobuz had ’em all. (Hmm, maybe I should look closer at Qobuz.)
Here’s what was on my list. I should emphasize that, while I like all these tracks, they’re not terribly representative of what I listen to. They’re selected to stress out a specific aspect of audio reproduction. The Americana and Baroque and Roots Rock that I’m currently fixated on is pretty easy to reproduce.
200 More Miles from the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session. Almost any track from this record would do; they recorded with a single ambiphonic microphone and any competent setup should make it feel like you’re in the room with them. And Margo’s singing should make you want to cry.
The Longships, from Enya’s Watermark album. This is a single-purpose test for low bass. It has these huge carefully-tuned bass-drum whacks that just vanish on most speakers without extreme bass extension, and the music makes much less sense without them. You don’t have to listen to the whole track; but it’s fine music, Enya was really on her game back then.
The opening of Dvořák’s Symphony #9, “From the New World”. There are plenty of good recordings, but I like Solti and the Chicago Symphony. Dvořák gleefully deploys jump-scare explosions of massed strings and other cheap orchestration tricks in the first couple of minutes to pull you into the symphony. What I’m looking for is the raw physical shock of the first big full-orchestra entrance.
Death Don’t Have No Mercy from Hot Tuna’s Live At Sweetwater Two. Some of the prettiest slide guitar you’ll hear anywhere from Kaukonen, and magic muscle from Casady. And then Jorma’s voice, as comfortable as old shoes and full of grace. About three minutes in there’s an instrumental break and you want to hear the musical lines dancing around each other with no mixups at all.
First movement of Beethoven’s Sonata #23, “Appassionata”, Ashkenazy on London. Pianos are very difficult; two little speakers have a tiny fraction of the mass and vibrating surface of a big concert grand. It’s really easy for the sound to be on the one hand too small, or on the other all jumbled up. Ashkenazy and the London engineers do a fine job here; it really should sound like he’s sitting across the room from you.
Cannonball, the Breeders’ big hit. It’s a pure rocker and a real triumph of arrangement and production, with lots of different guitar/keys/drum tones. You need to feel it in your gut, and the rock & roll edge should be frightening.
Identikit from Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. This is mostly drums and voice, although there are eventually guitar interjections. It’s a totally artificial construct, no attempt to sound like live musicians in a real space. But the singing and drumming are fabulous and they need to be 100% separated in space, dancing without touching. And Thom Yorke in good voice had better make you shiver a bit.
Miles Runs The Voodoo Down from Bitches Brew. This is complex stuff, and Teo Macro’s production wizardry embraces the complexity without losing any of that fabulous band’s playing. Also Miles plays two of the greatest instrumental solos ever recorded, any instrument, any genre, and one or two of the ascending lines should feel like he’s pulling your whole body up out of your chair.
Emmylou Harris. This would better be phrased as “Some singer you have strong emotional reactions to.” I listened to the title track and Deeper Well from the Wrecking Ball album. If a song that can make you feel that way doesn’t make you feel that way, try different speakers.
I made an appointment with Phil at Audiofi, and we spent much of an afternoon listening. I thought Audiofi was fine, would go back. Phil was erudite and patient and not pushy and clearly loves the technology and music and culture.
I was particularly interested in the Element Fire V2, which has been creating buzz in online audiophile conversation. They’re “bookshelf” (i.e. stand-mounted) rather than floorstanders, but people keep saying they sound like huge tower speakers that are taller than you are. So I was predisposed to find them interesting, and I listened to maybe half of the list above.
But I was unhappy, it just wasn’t making me smile. Sure, there was a stereo image, but at no point did I get a convincing musicians-are-right-over-there illusion. It was particularly painful on the Cowboy Junkies. It leapt satisfactorily out of the speakers on the Dvořák and was brilliant on Cannonball, but there were too many misses.
Also, the longer I looked at it the less it pleased my eyes.
“Not working, sorry. Let’s listen to something else” I said. I’d already noticed the Tribe Towers, which even though they were floorstanders, looked skinny and pointy compared to the Elements. I’d never read anything about them but they share the Element’s interesting driver technology, and are cheaper.
So we set them up and they absolutely aced everything the Elements had missed. Just vanished, I mean, and there was a three-dimensional posse of musicians across the room, filling the space with three-dimensional music. They flunked the Enya drum-thwack test but that’s OK because I have a subwoofer (from PSB) at home. In particular, they handled Ashkenazy pounding out the Beethoven just absolutely without effort. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard better piano reproduction.
And the longer I looked at them the more my thinking switched from “skinny and pointy” to “slender and elegant”.
A few minutes in and, I told Phil, I was two-thirds sold. He suggested I look at some Magico speakers but they were huge and like $30K; as an audiophile I’m only mildly deranged. And American, so no thanks.
I went home to think about it. I was worried that I’d somehow been unfair to the Elements. Then I read the Stereophile review, and while the guy who did the subjective listening test loved ’em, the lab measurements seemed to show real problems.
I dunno. Maybe that was the wrong room for them. Or the wrong amplifier. Or the wrong positioning. Or maybe they’re just a rare miss from Totem.
My research didn’t turn up a quantitative take on the Tribes, just a lot of people writing that they sound much bigger than they really are, and that they were happy they’d bought them.
And I’d been happy listening to them. So I pulled the trigger. My listening space is acoustically friendlier than the one at Audiofi and if they made me happy there, they’d make me happy at home.
And they do. Didn’t worry too much about positioning, just made sure it was symmetric. The first notes they played were brilliant.
I’ve been a little short on sleep, staying up late to listen to music.
2025-03-07 04:00:00
Today I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription.
As I wrote in Not an Amazon Problem (and please go read that if you haven’t) I don’t see myself as an enemy of Amazon, particularly. I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to shreds then replace the CEO with someone who will maximize shareholder return at all costs, without any of that amateurish “ethics” stuff.
To the extent that Amazon is objectionable, it’s a symptom of those circumstances.
I’m bailing out of Prime not to hurt Amazon, but because it doesn’t make commercial or emotional sense for me just now.
Yes, free next-day delivery is pretty great. In fact, in connection with our recent move, I’ve been ordering small cheap stuff furiously: (USB cables, light switches, closet organizers, a mailbox, a TV mount, WiFi hubs, banana plugs, you name it).
But the moving operations are mostly done, and there are few (any?) things we really need the next day, and we’re fortunate, living in the center of a 15-minute city. So getting my elderly ass out of my chair and going to a store is a good option, for more than one reason.
Second, for a lot of things you want to order, the manufacturer has its own online store these days and a lot of them are actually well-built, perfectly pleasant to use.
Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Amazon is an US corporation and the US is now hostile to Canada, repeatedly threatening to annex us. So I’m routing my shopping dollars away from there generally and to Canadian suppliers specifically. Dumping Prime is an easy way to help that along.
Second, shopping on Amazon for the kinds of small cheap things listed above is more than a little unpleasant. The search-results page is a battle of tooth and claw among low-rent importers. Also it’s just really freaking ugly, hurts my eyes to look at it.
Really? I have no idea what they were.
Finally, one of Prime’s big benefits used to be Prime Video, but no longer. There was just no excuse for greenlighting that execrable Rings of Power show, and I’m not aware of anything else I want to watch.
Amazon is good at lots of things, but has never been known for good taste. I mean, look at that search-results page.
Yep.
Yep, no complaints. There were only two please-don’t-go begs and neither was offensive.
No hard feelings.
2025-03-01 04:00:00
It is traditional in this season in this space to tickle your eyes with pictures of our early spring crocuses, while gently dunking a bit on our fellow Canadians who, away from the bottom left corner of the country, are still snowbound. So, here you go. Only not really.
Yes, those are this spring’s crocuses. But they’re not our crocuses, they’re someone else’s. We don’t have any. Because we moved.
It’s a blog isn’t it? I’ve written up childbirths and pet news and vacations and all that stuff. So why not this?
What happened was, we bought a house in 1996 and then, after 27 years and raising two kids and more cats, it was, well, not actually dingy, but definitely tired. The floors. The paint. The carpet. The cupboards. So we started down two paths at once, planning for a major renovation on one side, and shopping for a new place on the other. Eighteen months later we hadn’t found anything to buy, and the reno was all planned and permitted and we were looking for rentals to camp out in.
Then, 72 hours from when we were scheduled to sign the reno contract, this place came on the market across our back alley and three houses over. The price was OK and it didn’t need much work and, well, now we live there.
I’m sweeping a lot of drama under the rug. Banking drama and real-estate drama and insurance drama and floor-finishing drama and Internet-setup drama and A/V drama and storage drama. And of course moving drama. Month after month now, Lauren and I have ended more days than not exhausted.
But here we are. And we’re not entirely without our plants.
This is Jason of Cycle Driven Gardening,who lent his expertise to moving our favorite rosebushes, whose history goes back decades. Of course, there could be no guarantee that those old friends would survive the process.
Today was unseasonably warm and our new back patio is south-facing, so we soaked up the sun and cleared it of leftover moving rubble. Then ventured into the back yard, much-ignored over winter.
Each and every rosebush has buds peeking out. So it looks, Dear Reader, like I’ll be able to inflict still more blossom pictures on you, come spring.
And we’ll be putting in crocuses, but those photos will have to wait twelve months or so.
See, even in 2025, there are stories with happy endings.
2025-02-27 04:00:00
Like most Web-heads I spent years living in Chrome, but now feel less comfy there, because Google. I use many browsers but now my daily driver is Safari. I’m pretty happy with it but there’s ugly stuff hiding in its corners that needs to be cleaned up. This fragment’s mostly about those corners, but I include notes on the bigger browser picture and a couple of ProTips.
If your life is complicated at all you need to use more than one. By way of illustration not recommendation, here’s what I do:
Safari is where I spend most of my time. As I write this I have 36 tabs, eight of them pinned. That the pinned number is eight is no accident, it’s because of the Tab Trick, which if you don’t know about, you really need to learn.
More on Safari later.
I use Chrome for business. It’s where I do banking and time-tracking and invoicing. (Much of this relies on Paymo, which is great. It takes seconds to track my time, and like ten minutes to do a super-professional monthly invoice.)
I use Firefox when I need to be @[email protected] or go anywhere while certain that no Google accounts are logged in.
I use Chrome Canary for an organization I work with that has Chrome-dependent stuff that I don’t want to mix up with any of my personal business.
We inhabit the epoch of Late Capitalism. Which means there’s no reason for me to expect any company to exhibit ethical behavior. Because ethics is for amateurs.
So when I go looking for infrastructure that offers privacy protection, I look for a provider whose business model depends at least in part on it. That leaves Safari.
Yeah, I know about Cook kissing Trump’s ring, and detest companies who route billions of nominal profits internationally to dodge taxes, and am revolted at the App Store’s merciless rent-extraction from app developers who make Apple products better.
But still, I think their privacy story is pretty good, and it makes me happy when their marketing emphasizes it. Because if privacy is on their path to profit, I don’t have to mis-place my faith in any large 21st-century corporation’s “ethical values”.
Also, Safari is technically competent. It’s fast enough, and (unlike even a very few years ago) compatible with wherever I go. The number of Chome-only sites, thank goodness, seems to be declining rapidly.
So, a tip o’ the hat to the Safari team, they’re mostly giving me what I need. But there are irritants.
This is my biggest gripe. Every so often, Safari just loses all my tabs when… well, I can’t spot a pattern. Sometimes it’s when I accidentally ⌘-Q it, sometimes it’s when I have two windows open for some reason and ⌘-W something. I think. Maybe. Sometimes they’re just gone.
Yes, I know about the “Reopen all windows from last session” operation. If it solved the problem I wouldn’t be writing this.
This is insanely annoying, and a few years back, more than once it seriously damaged my progress in multiple projects. Fortunately, I discovered that the Bookmarks menu has a one-click thing to create bookmarks for all my open tabs. So I hit that now and again and it’s saved me from tab-loss damage a couple of times now.
Someone out there might be thinking of suggesting that I not use browser tabs to store my current professional status. Please don’t, that would be rude.
Even weirder, sometimes when I notice I’ve lost my main window and use the History menu to try to bring it back, I get a new window with all my tabs except for the pinned ones. Please, Safari.
Safari won’t let me ⌘-W a pinned tab. This is good, correct where Chrome is wrong.
But when I try, does it quietly ignore me, or emit a gentle beep? No, it abruptly shifts to the first un-pinned tab. Which makes me think that I indeed killed the tab I was on, then I realize that no I didn’t, then I panic because obviously I killed something, and go looking for it. I try Shift-⌘-T to bring back most recently closed tab, realize I killed that an hour ago, and sit there blank-faced and worried.
When I’m in Discord or my Mail client or somewhere and I click on a link, sometimes it puts up a new Safari window. Huh? But usually not, I can’t spot the pattern. When I kill the new window, sometimes I lose all my tabs. Sigh.
When I have some tab that’s been around and unvisited for a while, sometimes there’s this tasteful decoration across the top.
I think that this used to say “significant memory” rather than “significant energy”? But really, Safari, try to imagine how little I care about your memory/energy problems, just do what you need to and keep it to yourself. And if you can’t, at least spruce up the typography and copy-editing.
[This is partly a MacOS rather than Safari issue.] On my Android, I can click on something in Discord that takes me to the GitHub app, another click and I’m in the browser, then click on something there and be in the YouTube app, and so on and so on. And then I can use “Back” to retrace my steps from app to app. This is just incredibly convenient.
Safari’s memory of “how did I get here” apparently lives in the same evanescent place my tab configuration does, and usually vanishes the instant I step outside the browser. Why shouldn’t the Back operation always at least try to do something useful?
Hey Apple, it’s your operating system and your browser, why not catch up with Android in an area where you’re clearly behind?
… that Safari do these things:
Save my current-tabs setup every few seconds on something more robust than the current fabric of spider webs and thistledown. Offer a “Restore Tabs” entry in the History menu that always works.
Don’t just exit on ⌘-Q. Chrome gets this right, offering an option where I have to hold that key combo down for a second or two.
When I try to kill a pinned tab, just ignore me or beep or put up a little message or something.
Never create a new Safari window unless I ask for it.
Kill the dumb “this webpage was refreshed…”
Offer a “back” affordance that always works, even across applications.
I already use Firefox every day and I know about Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, etc., and I’ve tried them, and none ever stuck. Or the experience was feeling good when something emerged about the provider that was scammy or scary or just dumb. (And the recent rumblings out of Mozilla are not reassuring.)
While it’d sure be nice for there to be a world-class unencumbered open-source browser from an organization I respect, I’m not holding my breath. So it’s Safari for me for now.
And it seems to me that the things that bother me should be easy to fix. Please do.
2025-02-09 04:00:00
Recently, Janus Rose’s You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism crossed my radar on a hundred channels. It’s a smart piece that says smart things. But I ended up mostly disagreeing. I’m not saying you can post your way out of Fascism, but I do think it’s gonna be hard to build the opposition without a lot of posting. The what and especially the where matter. But the “posting is useless” stance is dangerously reductive.
Before I get into my gripes with Ms Rose’s piece, let me highlight the good part: Use your browser’s search-in-page to scroll forward to “defend migrants”. Here begins a really smart and inspirational narrative of things people are doing to deflect and defeat the enemy.
But it ends with the observation that all the useful progressive action “arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers”. Here’s where I part ways. Sure, local action is the most accessible and in most cases the only action, but right now Fascism is a global problem and these fighters here need to network with those there, for values of “here” and “there” that are not local.
Which is gonna involve a certain amount of posting: Analyses, critiques, calls to action, date-setting, message-sharpening; it’s just not sensible to rely on networks of neighbors to accomplish this.
Message sharpening feels like the top of the list. Last month I posted In The Minority, making the (obvious I think) point that current progressive messaging isn’t working very well; we keep losing elections! What needs to be changed? I don’t know and I don’t believe anybody who says they do.
It’s not as simple as “be more progressive” or conversely “be more centrist”. I personally think the way to arrive at the right messaging strategies and wording is going to involve a lot of trial balloons and yes, local efforts. Since I unironically think that progressive policies will produce results that a majority of people will like, I also believe that there absolutely must be a way of explaining why and how that will move the needle and lead to victories.
Short answer: Everywhere, almost.
Granted that TV, whatever that means these days, is useless. Anyone doing mass broadcasting is terrified of controversy and can’t afford to be seen as a progressive nexus.
And Ms Rose is 100% right that Tiktok, Xitter, Facebook, Insta, or really any other centralized profit-driven corporate “social network” products are just not useful for progressives. These are all ad-supported, and (at this historical moment) under heavy pressure from governments controlled by our enemies, and in some cases, themselves owned and operated by Fascists.
That leaves decentralized social media (the Fediverse and (for the moment) Bluesky), Net-native operations like 404/Vice/Axios/Verge (even though most of them are struggling), and mainstream “quality publications”: The Atlantic, the Guardian, and your local progressive press (nearest to me here in Canada, The Tyee).
Don’t forget blogs. They can still move the needle.
And, I guess, as Ms Rose says, highly focused local conversations on Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal. (Are there other tech options for this kind of thing?)
I am. And here I part paths with Ms Rose, who is vehement that we should see online anger as an anti-pattern. Me, I’m kinda with Joe Strummer, anger can be power. Rose writes “researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action”. I followed that link and found the evidence unconvincing.
Also, if there’s one thing I believe it’s that in the social-media context, being yourself, exposing the person behind the words, is central to getting anywhere. And if the enemy’s actions are filling me with anger, it would be disingenuous and ineffective to edit that out of my public conversation.
Not gonna say more about principles or theory, just offer samples.
50501 has done it all with hashtags and micro-posts. Let’s see how it works.
Here’s Semafor arguing that the Democrats’ litigation-centric resistance is working pretty well.
Heidi Li Feldman, in Fear and loathing plus what blue states should be doing now argues on her blog for resistance at the state-government level, disengaging from and pushing back against toxic Musk/Trump projects.
Here’s Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo calling for pure oppositionism and then arguing that Democrats should go to the mattresses on keeping the government open and raising the debt limit.
Here’s the let’s-both-sides-Fascism New York Times absolutely savaging the GOP campaign to keep Mayor Adams in place as a MAGA puppet.
Here’s yours truly posting about who progressives should talk to.
Here’s Mark Cuban on Bluesky saying hardass political podcasts are the only way to reach young men.
Here’s Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker making very specific suggestions as to the tone and content of progressive messaging.
Here’s Cory Doctorow on many channels as usual, on how Canada should push back against the Trump tariffs.
There’s lots more strong stuff out there. Who’s right?
I don’t know. Not convinced anyone does.
Let’s keep posting about it till we get it right.
2025-02-05 04:00:00
What happened was, I went to Saskatchewan to keep my mother company, and got a little obsessed about photo composition and complexity. Which in these troubled times is a relief.
This got started just after take-off from Vancouver. As the plane climbed over the city I thought “That’s a nice angle” and pointed the Pixel through the plexiglass.
You might want to enlarge this one.
A couple of days into my Prairie visit I got around to processing the photos and thought that Vancouver aerial had come out well. No credit to the photographer here, got lucky on the opportunity, but holy crap modern mobile-device camera tech is getting good these days. I’ll take a little credit for the Lightrooming; this has had heavy dehazing and other prettifications applied.
A couple of days later I woke up and the thermometer said -36°C (in Fahrenheit that’s “too freaking cold”). The air was still and the hazy sunlight was weird. “There has to be a good photo in this somewhere, maybe to contrast that Vancouver shot” I thought. So I tucked the Fujifilm inside my parka (it claims to be only rated to -10°) and went for a walk. Mom politely declined my invitation to come along without, to her credit, getting that “Is he crazy?” expression on her face.
Her neighborhood isn’t that photogenic but there’s a Pitch-n-putt golf course a block away so I trudged through that. The snow made freaky squeaking sounds underfoot. At that temperature, it feels like you have to push the air aside with each step. Also, you realize that your lungs did not evolve to process that particular atmospheric condition.
Twenty minutes in I had seen nothing that made me want to pull out the camera, and was thinking it was about time to head home. So I stopped in a place where there was a bit of shape and shadow, and decided that if I had to force a photo opportunity to occur by pure force of will, so be it.
It ain’t a great city framed by coastal mountains. But it ain’t nothing either. I had to take my gloves off to shoot, and after just a couple of minutes of twisting around looking for angles, my fingers were screaming at me.
The two pictures are at the opposite end of the density-vs-minimalism spectrum but they share, um, snow, so that’s something.
Anyhow, here’s the real reason I was there.
Jean Bray, who’ll be turning 95 this year.
I find photography to be a very useful distraction from what’s happening to the world.