Quiet Commute
After a few years of using the iaudio U2, I decided it was time to move to something that supported FLAC files. I didn’t have to look that far. The iaudio7 fits all the requirements on my list. The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but overall, it’s a very nice player. Not having to generate two sets of files (mp3/flac) is worth the cost of the upgrade alone.
Not much use playing back FLAC files if all you can hear is the bus and other traffic noise, so I picked up a pair of Shure Se210s. They are reasonably flat sounding, which i like, and have decent sound isolation, meaning I can keep the volume down and still hear the nuances in Stockhausen’s Stimmung without taking the volume past 10.
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SOTL cover Fratres
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From Pluto to the Top of the world
It was a while ago that I mentioned being excited about the new My Brightest Diamond album, but it turned out that I only picked it up this week. Since then I've listened to it more than a few times and have been incredibly moved every time.
The songs have their roots in the writing for her first album, but were reworked and rerecorded after the initial demos. I'm very happy that was the way things went. I love Bring me the workhorse, but A Thousand Shark's Teeth has a voice all of it's own, and it's a beautiful one.
Strings and other instruments, (notably the harp played by Maeve Gilchrist) are clean and crisp, which allows them to co-exist with Shara's voice and the other instruments differently than on BMTW. The results are stunning.
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South, West, North
While at a conference in San Francisco, earlier this year, I had lunch with a few of the other participants. One of them was from SF, and we got talking about his recent move from one neighborhood to another. He said he was going through a bit of an identity crisis, after leaving the neighborhood where he had spent over a decade of his life. At the time I thought it was not an unreasonable reaction, since (as my logic went) it was such a large city, you might as well be moving to another small town. Something, I thought, one wouldn't have to worry about in a city the size of Halifax.
After moving to the hydrostone area a only few weeks ago, I'm getting a bit closer to understanding that feeling. Spent some time wandering around the blocks of hydrostone buildings and areas around it, like Union, Russel (close to Barrington) and Devonshire, discovering a part of Halifax that I never knew existed, that have a different feel than the south and west, where we have lived in the past. Adding to the sense of otherness is the apparent drop in frequency and reliability of Metro Transit service, the further north you go. The 7 seems almost as unreliable as the 52. Heading downtown at least.
But, so far, the good far outweighs the bad, by a considerable margin :)
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