An Audio Spectacular

31st January 2022

This week’s newsletter is all about those sweet, sweet sounds. There’s a story about Spotify, starring Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Joe Rogan. And one about expensive audiophile-level computer hardware. On top of this, some of you might be interested to hear that we’re going to try something new with the newsletter soon, something audio related…

Craig and I are hoping to get together online and audio record some of the things we write about in the newsletter as a fortnightly podcast. For those of you who might be interested in listening to this newsletter on the way to work instead of reading it when you get there, we’ll let you know what it’s called and where to find it once we’ve sorted everything out. We’ll talk about our stories, and probably chat a little about what we think of them. We may also at times be joined by some of our fellow committee members, including Daniel Ryan (who’s a keen activist and may want to tell us what he’s been up to) and Bronwyn Rideout (who’s written a few articles for us already, and we’re hoping will write for us more regularly)..

Speaking of Bronwyn, she’s written us a piece about why she’s a skeptic, so I’ll start with that before diving into my audio news.

Mark Honeychurch

Moving away from Spotify

Mark Honeychurch - 31 January 2022

Moving away from Spotify

I'm not normally one for jumping on bandwagons, but when I saw friends posting on Facebook over the last few days that they were cancelling their Spotify subscriptions, I figured this was one cause I could get behind.

A computer hard drive that makes your music sound better?

Mark Honeychurch - 31 January 2022

A computer hard drive that makes your music sound better?

I'm sitting here writing this week's newsletter with music playing in the background - I've just listened to tracks by (and I'm name-dropping here) Malcolm Middleton, the Flashbulb, Madvillain, PJ Harvey, Mogwai and 65daysofstatic. I'm enjoying this music being played from Plex on my Chromecast, through my TV, via a Sony home theatre amp, to my in-wall 7.1 surround sound speakers. The entire setup might have cost me $1,200, if we exclude the cost of the TV (another $1,500). But could I be enjoying my music more if I'd spent more money buying reference equipment from high-end specialist companies?