Ears On

Daniel Barenboim is using his baton as a stiletto. The outgoing musical director of the Chicago Symphony has lashed out against Muzak in a BBC lecture series. Starting in the 1920s, Muzak pioneered the piped-in music that follows you around like a talkative acquaintance with bad breath. Barenboim called it "absolutely offensive" and declared, "active listening is essential." In response, the Muzak people compared their product to the works of Erik Satie, describing it as an "aural background" and a "mood enhancer." But the conflict here isn't between foreground and background listening. It's between music voluntarily perceived as music and music involuntarily endured as noise.

Are you a fan of Norah Jones? If so, you may be looking to download "Thinking About You," her new single. Best place to go is Yahoo, where you can buy it in the latest, coolest codec ever: MP3! Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can buy the track from iTunes. But if you do, it will be wrapped in FairPlay, Apple's brand of digital rights management (yuck, tooey). Wouldn't you rather pay the same to Yahoo, and enjoy the following advantages of DRM-free downloads, so helpfully enumerated by Yahoo? Oooh, talk DRM-less to me:

Dolby Atmos is hitting surround audiophiles like a succession of giant waves crashing on the beach. The first wave is Dolby Atmos in movie theaters. The second wave is Atmos in Atmos-enabled speakers and surround receivers. But what about that third wave, the one nobody's discussing? That's the quiet incorporation of another totally new technology into the Atmos technology bundle. I'm talking about Dolby Surround.

Readers may already have noticed that my speaker and receiver reviews have begun name-checking a new reference signal source. It is a Micro Seiki BL-51 turntable. And it's a jewel. There isn't a single component in my rack that I don't respect and depend on. But the Micro Seiki I love-love-love. Let me tell you how and why I acquired it.

A Tokyo racetrack has become home to the world's largest large-screen video display. The screen is 218 feet wide (by 66 by 37). Judging from the picture, its ratio of width to height is way more than the standard 16:9 of DTV in general. Behind the display is Mitsubishi's Aurora Vision LED technology. Here LEDs are being used to produce the picture directly, though they're also creeping into consumer DLP displays as a substitute for the color wheel. The screen was installed in 35 pieces and cost $28 million. Apologies for the headline. Couldn't resist. A larger edit of the picture, and three others, are in the Galleries.

After extensive testing, I have finally found the ultimate power cable. It's from Mothra Research Unlimited. Their motto: "At Mothra, you won't get snake oil; you'll get the entire snake." While the Mothra Power Cord may be a bit pricey at $8899.95 per meter (one meter shown), doesn't this description excite the two-channel purist in you?: "Designed and engineered for proper frequency handling from the wall tap to your equipment, the Mothra Power Cord uses 0.0001 mm palladium wire in a helium atmosphere to carry high frequencies, 0.001 mm platinum wire in a xenon atmosphere to carry the upper midranges, 0.01 mm gold wire in an argon atmosphere to carry the lower mids, and 0.1 mm silver wire in highly reactive sulphur hexafluoride to carry the low frequencies. This is then shielded with over 700 Kg of 99.9999% copper, packed into a special neodymium-bismuth damping material, encapsulated in our specially bioengineered case, and irradiated with high intensity gamma rays from Three Mile Island reactor #2." No system would be complete without Ghidorah or Rhodan interconnects, not to mention Mothra's speaker cable. Here's the price list. Mothra's corporate philosophy is simple: "Our goal is to wrap the listener in an intense, passionate and lifelike embrace of sound at a price comparable to the US Navy's Trident Missile Program. The enormous soundstage and precise, realistic imaging of our products will bring out the beast in you and secure our comfortable retirement."