Poetry professor Garret Hongo's new book The Perfect Sound [amazon] is aptly named. It's the perfect book for any fan of all things audio. It combines a personal family memoir with midcentury Hawaiian and Southern Californian culture, pop music personalities, audio recording, technology, jazz, vacuum tubes vs. transistors, surf music, steel guitars, and so much more. You'll smell the smoke and hear the sizzling solder as Hongo recalls wiring up early hi-fi amps with his dad, just the first step in his life-long quest for the perfect sound.
"The Perfect Sound" is a perfect book for audio fans
Image: Public Domain via PxHere
Listen to starquakes, the weird vibrations on the surface of stars
The European Space Agency's Gaia mission is using a one billion pixel orbiting camera to generate a 3D map of more than a thousand million stars in our Milky Way. The researchers have just released a trove of new data and were surprised by the instrument's ability to detect starquakes—"tiny motions on the surface of… READ THE REST
Ta-da! Hear the fascinating history of the Microsoft Windows start-up sounds
The new episode of the excellent Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast is the first in a two-part series on the fascinating history of Microsoft Windows start-up sounds. Over the years, Microsoft has made at least ten iconic startup sounds for Windows—from the triumphant "Ta-da!" of Windows 3.1, to the ambient chime that Brian Eno crafted for… READ THE REST
Why it's so hard to find a good tape deck these days
My colleague Brent Butterworth has a fantastic new piece on Wirecutter about the recent revival of music on tape cassettes — and why it's so hard to make them sound good, on a very technical level. CDs can flawlessly reproduce the entire range of audio from 20 hertz (half an octave below the lowest note… READ THE REST
Got a home repair project? This HD endoscope camera can give you a closer look
As much as you hate it, sometimes we have to search for things in places we never want to go, like the kitchen sink's drain, the dusty attic, or the spider-web-laden area underneath the house. Your shrieks might just bring music to their ears! But as much as we don't want to see what's in these… READ THE REST
With Buildix Pro, you don't have to be a pro developer to make a killer website
Whether you have your own cookie business or run a celebrity gossip blog, having an unimpressive landing page can really slow things down. Sure, hiring a professional developer to create a website would be awesome, but their rates can be pretty steep, and that's not something you want to budget for these days. Just because… READ THE REST
Send untouched files and useless apps to the dump with this app for Macs
How much of your Mac's storage space is actually stuff you use? Odds are good a significant portion of your hard drive is filled with untouched downloads, duplicate files, and apps you forgot existed. You may not have noticed it, but the gradual slowing of your computer could be due to all those files just sitting… READ THE REST
