Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions High end for iPod

Anyone interested in getting high quality output from their iPod, to use as a digital source will probably be interested in this

Ummmm, no. That's a ridiculous waste of money. You can get a dedicated line output jack by just popping your iPod into this Apple dock. That'll improve your sound probably just as much as this product claims to.

iPod Nano dock $29 + home-made interconnect (3.5mm stereo miniplug to L/R RCA) ~$20 = good enough for me.

I'm w/ Peter. OMG, what a complete waste of money. Your best bet is the dock. C'mon, it's compressed audio...

I listen to my iTunes on my Mac Mini connected via USB to my Pio 45TX. That sounds great and I didn't have to buy anything esoteric. Sounds even better when I use my tube amp.

It simplifies and improves the analog output stage. It isn't meant for those playing compressed files, rather lossless. I heard it at Rocky Mountain Audiofest, have any of you? It's output stage sounded much better than stock and as good as a nice cd player.

Did you hear itcompared to a standard iPod playing uncompressed music connected via a dock or other cable that takes advantage of the line-out?

Via rca mini to rca.

Or even this http://www.i-deck.com/

MA too? Does that mean they've jumped the shark?

There's plenty of shark hopping going on where the iPod is concerned... :P

Or, you buy an iRiver MP3 Hard Drive Player with an Optical Line out.

I just bought my boy an Ipod Nano for christmas. Where do you guys download the songs? Looks like the Itunes are about a buck a piece. That sounds like a rip off to me..........

iTunes is actually pretty cheap, IMHO. You can find most music there and it's easy to buy/manage w/ iTunes.

Granted, you have to drink the Apple kool-aid (DRM and all).

Of course, if you want to put regular old MP3s acquired in ...other ways on your iPod, it can be done. Or rip from your CDs, etc.

Apple has the largest, most successful online music store. They are fighting hard to keep the price of songs at $0.99. Steve Jobs responded to RIAA whining that the prices are to low by calling the music industry "greedy." Which of course they are. Think of it this way: The label's have 0 overhead in this model. They simply provide the tunes in digital format. Apple of course has a datacenter for storage and the web store, probably co-located with their main website. I don't know what their take is but I would imagine it to be much less per-song than traditional distribution channels. So 99-cents per song and about a 12-15 song-per-album average and you're talking the same amount per album but lower overhead. And the RIAA folks want to charge more. @#$@ bastards. Anyhoo if you and/or your son have a bunch of CD's you can use iTunes to rip them to the computer and load them on the iPod. I don't think anyone else charges less per song. There is of course, ahem, "other" places to get the songs. Hypothetically speaking I would run such a program through a blind proxy in say Russia to avoid prying eyes. Hypothetically.

LightningJoe - it seems I'm picking on you, first with the monkey movie, now with Apple... I'm not, really.

Ahh, remember when Apple made computers? With RISC processors that were faster than the IBM-compatible Intel CISC processors? Starting in 2006 - Apple's using Intel processors.

Remember MacOS? No, not rebranded Linux, but when they wrote their own OS?

Now they make hipster-targeted portable personal players (with a track record about as good Luftschiffbau Zeppelin's) and they resell the heavy-managed use of music under a DRM system that reminds us all that music belongs to Sony/BMG, they just let us live in their world.

"iPod problems" returns 22,000,000 hits on Google. The Register reports Apple has sold 30,000,000 of the units by three-quarters of the way into November... they expect to sell 37,000,000 by year's end.

Bren R.

Forget it, I'm not getting into computer flamewars here...

I'm not saying they are perfect in any way. DRM is what it is. I'm a bit torn by the issue really. The RIAA is basically crap. But they do have a point TO A CERTAIN EXTENT. And sure songs BOUGHT from ITMS have DRM but you aren't restricted to using only songs from ITMS.

Ah yes, I remember when RISC was relevant. And the classic Mac. No SMP. No PMT. Horrible memory management. Still a nice OS though. I love OSX personally. Real OS (BSD, NOT Linux) underneath, cool MAC GUI on top. Can't get enough of running a shell term on Mac. As far as the switch, well they could contiue to wait while IBM moves at their own pace on product development meanwhile paying a premium for relatively small-production-run chips or start buying commodity chips. The computer industry runs at incredibly thin margins as it is, and this will give Apple some breathing room and probably allow them to get more competitive in system pricing. Plus the new mobile processors from Intel are very nice indeed, thank you very much. More power and less power consumption than any G4 in Powerbook. And where is the mobile G5? Oh yeah, IBM twiddled it's thumbs and never really tried to "mobilize" the G5. Oh well.

As far a iPod problems well I don't think one has exploded on landing killing 68 people. Oh the humanity. Haven't met the perfect MP3 player yet. As far as hipster-targeted, well Apple made the market. Remeber that Steve Jobs considers himself a connoisseur of industrial design. From the Apple II through to the Mac, Powerbook, iMac, Mini, iPod, etc they have always had cutting-edge engineering and elegant design. I don't think the pod is really any different. Just that as General Sherman said they got there "fustest with the mostest."

Finally don't worry about picking on me. I can take it and am as stubborn and opinionated as anyone here. What was that SNL skit? "Who's More Grizzled?"

"I can take it and am as stubborn and opinionated as anyone here."


You dont know Bren very well.






Oooh boooyyyy!!!!







I'm a "Hipster".

Hehe. Yeah, but I'm a grizzled veteran of the UO Football forums. I suffered a year of "51-20" crap from OSU Barkrodents and lived to tell about it. I saw compatriots fall on their swords to protect our honor before the Michigan game in '03 and had my vengeance. I have led charge after futile charge against the "AFLAC" defenses stubbornly put up by forum foes and still I have not been reduced to a quivering, spineless net casualty. This forum at its most uncivilized is as comparatively sophisticated as a character from "The Thin Man." On the football forums half of the people mis-spell their own handles.

Although BrenR sounds disturbingly close to a contraction of bren gunner.

Ken - not intended to be a flamewar... just my pet peeve (well, one of many) when one company steps up to make their trade name a household word for an entire industry.

iPod, iTunes, iCar... whatever it is, Apple has a history of jumping on a lot of bandwagons, putting out a highly marketable, product-placement ready piece of equipment that is (IMHO) usually overpriced or underfeatured, but it's sleek, cool, etc and it sells (PowerBooks, iBooks, iPods) and glutting the market and hailing themselves as a pioneer. Best Buy/Future Shop this season here both had huge iPod displays... an entire rack for everything Steve Jobs thought of in the shower one day... knit iPod cozys, holders to fit on your dog's collar, docks for your boat, car, plane, bicycle.

So other manufacturers who put out a good solid product without dancing silhouette commercials get buried under the hype.

Lisa's got a Creative MuVo I think it is. Excellent little thing... it's easy to use, it's about the size of a pack of gum... thick enough not to crack in half, and if you want a USB drive, you disconnect the drive from the player and can use it separately. Good product... (surprising coming from Creative!) but they won't get news reports hailing them as the Jesus Christ of the portable music set.

Just that mindset that Jobs can say one day "Intel sucks" and 300 Mac owners all agree... then the next day "Intel is the future" and all 300 Mac owners agree again - is infuriating.

Bren R.

But since you wish you had that same power yourself, isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

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On the football forums half of the people mis-spell their own handles.

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lmfao

I'm not diputing the overpriced part. And not disputing that there are other perhaps superior players out there. But really Apple pretty much created the bandwagon. Sure Rio was there first, and Creative and others not far behind. IRiver makes some cool players. But all of these companies are benefitting from the iPod phenomenon. The market was stagnant until the 1G 'pods came on the scene. Heck one of the real problems is that none of the pretenders can do all of the 3 parts well: 1)Must-have design 2)Cool features and 3)MARKETING! Ever see an add for an iRiver or a MuVo? How much of the general populace has ever heard of these companies much less their products? Sure there is a bit of the Evil Genius to Jobs but ya know that's the way it is. I've had 5 or 6 players and the only one I really liked had a fatal design flaw. So I finally buy an iPod and it works fine for me. And please don't tell me you buy into the "it's success makes it suck" crap. I personally couldn't give a rat's tuckus how many other people in the world own something. If it fits my needs I'll buy it. I'm a professional computer geek which means by definition I have no sense of style and further could care less what the world thinks of me. If I was an add-on manufacturer I would turn 100% of my capacity to iPod merch and completely ignore the rest. I would nod sympathetically when competitors tell me about their warehouses full of add-ons for the now-defunct Rio products and iRiver parts never sold to an unknowing, uncaring public. It's freaking business and they are out there to make money. I'll tell you what: If my 'pod breaks I will give serious consideration to whichever player you think is superior.

As far as computers go some people make the mistake of assuming I am a militant towards or against one platform of another. Nope. Like 'em all, as far as what they can do for me. Maybe you have had bad luck with Apple. But hell I can point out flaws inherent in countless computers from Dell, IBM, HP and others. Think the iBooks are the only ones with power supply problems? Dell probably replaced more PS's for its Inspiron 8XXX series laptops in the last quarter than Apple has in the entire life of the iBook line. Their Latitude D600's had nearly 35% hard drive failure rates for while on machines less than a year old. And believe you me there is no such thing as a perfect OS. Any of them. OS X could be. Stability of Unix, Mac GUI and ease of use. All it needs are the ba-jillions of periphs you can get on the PC plus all the high-end games and power apps. Maybe OS-X86 will be the one true OS that brings balance to the galaxy.

I love how you talk about glutting the market and 300 Mac users in the same post. 5% of the total market ain't half bad for one company...

And ya know what? They do innovate. They got critiqued for "Not-Invented -here" syndrome for the longest time, then they start using tech that wasn't invented there, and they get critiqued. They get critiqued for being so small, and so big! And you do both in one post! Incredible!

Sorry, I have a problem when someone critiques something simply because they are popular. Or high quality.

Here's an article on part of the reason for the iPod's dominance. Hint: it's not just because of good marketing.

Indeed. Remember the "beige box" Apple of the late 80's through to the late 90's? The Gil Amelio years? Ugh. Descending into junk bond status, getting a $150 million investment from Microsoft of all things. Bad juju. Jobs turned things around in very short order. The eMac was just the beginning. If the Mac just had all the app support I need I would never look back.

'Tis impossible to forget. Yet, it was the iMac. The eMac is a hideous, gigantic piece of white plastic, wrapped around the world's largest 17" CRT.

Now I'm gonna go play games on my Athlon64...

My bad. Got Battlefield Desert Combat or Battlefield 2?

Oh, I've got both types of machines. My primary job is as a tech/sysadmin for Macs.

But no, I don't have either of those. I've been replaying Far Cry recently... I'm a little behind.

I've got FarCry for the Xbox, and it is quite good. Haven't had much time as of late to really get into it, but I have a few vacation days to use before the year is up (only working one day next week!).

The plot is terrible. The most generic first person shooter I've ever seen, complete with African-American scientist, buxomy girl who is not what she seems, and giants with rocket launchers grafted to their arms. Seriously, I think we've all seen enough giants with rocket launchers grafted to their arms. Next!

However, the gameplay and graphics are amazingly good; especially the gameplay. It's so refreshing after Doom3 to be able to sneak up on enemies and kill them, instead of enemies sneaking up on you. And killing you. Messily.

On the other hand, Half Life 2 is still my favorite game of all time.

Half Life 2 rocks. I still haven't finished it (near the end of the Nova Prospekt level), but it's definitely in my top 5 favorite games of all time. As amazing as the graphics are, the gameplay is even better.

Yeah, some plots really need to be worked on in games. At least the gameplay makes up for it. Half Life 2 is amazing (again, Xbox), but, unfortunately first person shooters make me queasy. I can only play for a little at a time.

One game I recently picked up that I was thrilled with was "Shadow of the Colossus." There are many faults to it, but it is a spectacle of a game and it is a must to have a subwoofer for.

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But really Apple pretty much created the bandwagon.

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Exactly my point. Apple jumped on a bandwagon, repainted it tangerine (or in the case of the iPod, gloss white) and said they invented it... and everyone believes it. They created the hype. The hype that everyone needed "an iPod" (as a general term for portable players)

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The market was stagnant until the 1G 'pods came on the scene. Heck one of the real problems is that none of the pretenders can do all of the 3 parts well: 1)Must-have design 2)Cool features and 3)MARKETING!

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Apple got lucky in timing... that tech reached the point where it was a good time to toss away audio CD players, and MP3 on disc players in favour of audio on RAM players. As for the 3 parts? Must have design? It looks like my digital thermostat. Cool features? What ARE the cool features of an iPod? And marketing? Well, that's what makes dudes get a Dell, and everyone to pay a 200% premium to have their laptop look like a V-Tech kids learning centre.

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And please don't tell me you buy into the "it's success makes it suck" crap.

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No, its design makes it crap, it's success in spite of repeated design flaws says more about the Apple marketing strategy - the entire first run of Nanos had screens that scratched - with no protective coating on them. That should have made the iPod synonymous with Ford's Pinto. Apple was slow in even admitting a problem to users that were looking at frosted and cracked screens, that should have brought out the torch-light mobs. But no.

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As far as computers go some people make the mistake of assuming I am a militant towards or against one platform of another. Nope. Like 'em all, as far as what they can do for me.

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That's the difference, I'll be the first to point out problems with any platform and I've been through a lot - everything from CBM Basic V2 to BeOS to Solaris to Windows - they all sh*t the bed somewhere... but most don't get a second chance - BeOS was going to be awesome, but it died. The Mac supporters just seem to cheer for the retarded kid no matter how badly he does. You seem something similar in processor camps (Intel vs AMD) but it's just not the same as the all-encompassing Apple can do no wrong chant.

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And believe you me there is no such thing as a perfect OS. Any of them. OS X could be. Stability of Unix, Mac GUI and ease of use. All it needs are the ba-jillions of periphs you can get on the PC plus all the high-end games and power apps. Maybe OS-X86 will be the one true OS that brings balance to the galaxy.

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Or brings about Revelations... the draw of *nix is its adaptability. The hardcore nerds love to recompile kernals to make them 0.01% smaller and 0.02% faster and then brag about it in IRC channels. Anyone with a day job or even a good quality hobby isn't really all that interested in that. So the kernal's hidden away under the mask of OSX, leaving only the well-documented *nix drawback of "not playing well with peripherals", which, granted, is a small problem with Apple, since they control most of what add-ons go into their machines, you don't pick from a who's-who of nobodys when it comes to network card, sound cards and the like. No "happy green mainboard for sokket 7 proscesser" motherboards floating over on rafts from the east.

For a good example of why I'm not sold on OSX - I launched a brand new sports facility with a "world-class" closed circuit feed last year. Apple put together the non-linear edit suite to certain specs. Out of the box, the system would not L&C (log and capture) footage over 5 minutes in length without a complete OS crash... ie: pull the plug out of the wall. Took them 2.5 months for their techs to fix the problem. Spectacular, guys.

Bren R.

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I love how you talk about glutting the market and 300 Mac users in the same post. 5% of the total market ain't half bad for one company...

(...)

They get critiqued for being so small, and so big! And you do both in one post! Incredible!

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The glut I refer to is in the personal players market... the 300 Mac users is in the computer market.

Remember - they've got a few irons in the pot... hardware, OS, software, standalone electronics, music reseller. They can be big in one area, and small in another. And good in one area and bad in another.

Take HP for instance - great graphing calculators, incredible desktop printing solutions, mediocre scanners, and pretty much everything else they brand/sell is complete crap. I've got a point-and-shoot digital cam of theirs for quick product shots for emailing - has a driver that completely craps out the Windows volume tracker - makes fixed discs disappear. Bra-vo. You screw up your DRIVER that badly? Tsk! And HP laptops - one of my guys had one... accidentally hit the key-combination to park the drive heads... they're still parked... in a landfill here somewhere.

Bren R.

Come on Bren, join the revolution and admit it. The iPod is cooler than tits on glass.

I don't have much use for portable players. When I do need a few tunes when out working in the yard or on a plane, I usually put my Sony discman in my pocket - plays the same MP3 discs I've prepared for my car deck (I'm up to about 40% of my CD collection on 15 or so discs at 256Kbps), has an insane amount of read-ahead (only spins up a second time on songs over about 3 minutes) and does the trick for me.

Other than that, either I'm at work, at home, in the car (all places I've got either good or great audio systems) or on my bike, in which case I like being able to hear road noise.

Bren R.

I never heard the Apple folks say they invented the market or discovered nuclear fission or the cure for polio. That's just perception. They come out with a cooler product that what's out there, people (including the press, who of course have been plied with free merch) love it and away we go. Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.

As far as "lucky," well I'm not so sure it was luck. You don't think they had the 'pod in the works for a while? You don't think they did studies and such to decide when to launch? I can't believe they spent huge amounts of time and money designing the 1G iPod then crossed their fingers and wished hard. Sure no one expected the nuclear explosion that happened but they have to had sensed a market upturn coming. You seem to completely forget the Napster Factor. The 'pod was launched at the height of The Golden Age OF Napster (RIP) and touted as the perfect device for the age of digital music. Genius. And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.


As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well. Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car. My Rio Carbon was my all-time fave until a true design flaw killed it: The volume wheel was poorly reinforced and would break and could not be fixed. THAT is bad engineering my friend.

Sure *ix has many superior elements but are you gonna set granny in Hoboken up with NetBSD? Didn't think so. I mean quit beating around the bush and name the perfect OS. Does it exist? Nope. I mean as far as servers go you have a point but as an all-around all-purpose OS FOR THE MASSES any *ix or Linux (remember GNU's Not Unix!) doesn't stand up. Granny needs 100% point-and-click usability and plug-n-play compatibility. Certainly no "read the man pages" and "edit the config file" stuff. That's fine for us but not for Granny.

So anyway I'm going to go monitor our Linux servers from my Powerbook and later I'll play Doom3 on my Wintel machine at home. Ahh, so glad I can enjoy the best of all worlds without reservation.

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Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.

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Insulting and dismissive in the same sentence.

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And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.

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One man's clunky is another man's streamlined. Is flat "cool"? According to Apple, Motorola (Moto Razr phones) and vinyl LPs it is, I'd personally rather carry a cassette than an LP, but that's just me.

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As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well.

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Nope, and oh well? People bought these products for hundreds of dollars, they were severely damaged within days and Apple refused to admit a problem, and you're confident in your opinion that this wasn't an issue.

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Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car.

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Now that sounded a wee bit fishy to me... you're talking about this, correct? The article where dropping a Nano out of a car window did not appreciable damage the unit, save for scratches. Honestly, it doesn't weigh much, so the physics of it are it's got a pretty good drag coefficient, coupled with not much mass behind it that means it's not hitting the ground hard. I don't believe this is the kind of force that would be most likely to damage the iPod. Kind of like saying a feather is indestructable because you can drop it out of a plane and it'll survive unscathed.

Dropping it from a park bench destroyed the screen. They (and you) consider this a pass, I'd consider it a fail. The music still plays - but the functionality is gone. I've dropped a "G-shock" watch ($0.50 plastic watch I grabbed out of stock when I worked shipping and receiving) off an 8th story balcony, and it's continued to work, with only a chip in the LCD screen, so I'd already consider the screen becoming non-functional as a fail. There are no mentions of hitting it with a hammer or kicking it. Running it over with a car is kind of smoke and mirrors... as long as there are standoffs between the front and back of the case, a car's weight would be evenly distributed over these and shouldn't damage the internals. I've had my foot run over by a 1/2 ton truck and if the tiny bones in my foot weren't snapped like twigs (my calcium consumption is probably 3% of RDA), I wouldn't expect electronics to suffer much either.

As for all the OS talk - I'm not suggesting any OS doesn't stink. But I'm also not willing to put any on a pedestal. I haven't gone on on how XP roolz - all else droolz, or how they'll get my OS/2 Warp when they pry it from my cold dead hands or anything. Computers are a tool for me. I want my tool to work. I don't need it to be tangerine, or glowing, or stylin' I just want it to work.

My personal experience has been some frustration with Windows 3.x (mostly networking issues until 3.11WFWG), a good deal of frustration with 95, none to speak of with Win98/SE or NT3.5/4.0, I skipped over 2000 and ME (which both stunk on ice) and I've been remarkably impressed with WinXP (though that impression requires that you patch the OS security defects on an hourly basis, but since none of them have actually burned me, it's been a non-issue for me)... in the Mac camp, I've never myself been the primary user of a Mac system - they've been and are in my workplace, and from a purely managerial standpoint, OS9.x has created very few headaches and slipped timelines on my projects, OSX came out of the box like a screaming baby. If someone's still shiny-faced about this wonderful tech, maybe it's still got some cool factor for them... I've become pretty grizzled with the personal computer since 1983, I just want it to work, if it doesn't, I either lose money or face.

Bren R.

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Insulting and dismissive in the same sentence.

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You gotta give the man points for efficiency.

But seriously, you do make a great point. At the end of the day, you just want something that works.

To nobody in particular,

I bought a 2nd generation iPod in the Summer of 2002. I paid $299 for the ten gig model and since then have added about 700 of my favorite songs. Make that all my favorite songs. I didn't add my entire library since if I skipped past it on a CD, why add it to my iPod.

I used to take a few CD's to the gym with me for working out. I began taking my iPod which had all my favorite music available at my fingertips. I soon bought a new receiver for my truck with a 1/8" plug on the front. Now I had all my music available in my truck all the time. Once you get used to not having to switch out CD's you won't go back.

Well my beloved 10 gig iPod finally developed a problem I couldn't resolve. The headphone jack no longer transmitted sound properly. I cleaned it like I had many times before, all to no avail.

Well my new AVR240 receiver happens to support the dock feature on newer iPods. It isn't just about playing my iPod over my awesome axioms as I could do that with a 1/8" to RCA adapter. It is the way it works. The dock bypasses any amplification from the iPod and also allows the remote for the AVR240 to control all iPod functions with the iPods menus displayed on the receiver.

So with my old iPod not functioning properly, last night I bought a new 4 GB iPod Nano. With my current iPod only using 2.5 gigs, I figure I should be good for at least a couple more years.

With regard to sound quality, if I playback a good AAC compressed song over my AVR 240 receiver, it sounds as good on my Axioms as the original 44.1 CD did.

Basically the iPod is functional and cool for many people.

Greg

To be quite frank it was meant to be insulting and dismissive. I have reached a point where I have no patience for the "mine is better" geek crowd. I have no patience for the "that song/gadget/widget/OS/whatever sucks because other people like it" crowd. The typical "but F=MA plus the aerodynamic efficiency of the design means it should do that anyway" defense is exactly what I have come to expect. Unsubstantiated of course. All sound and fury signifying nothing. Look, I know I'm being a dick here but I have heard the same argument overandoverandover. I'm just fine with you liking what you like. You want dismissive? Look at your original answers to my posts lately. You not only state that iPods/King Kong/etc suck but intimate that yours is the superior opinion and further that anyone who disagrees is lesser for it. I am an IT professional which means I don't have the luxury of being a jihadist for or against any platform. I have to make everything work at very high efficiencies regardless. My career has been well served by keeping an open mind for such things and I have little tolerance for people who try to convince me of the correctness of their idea of the "only real OS/platform/etc."

Looks like we're pretty much done here, before it continues in the "I'm in IT, man... pro IT... my Technology is so Informational, its Professional..." and me poking you with a pointy stick manner it's headed. Oops, crap, I just baited you again... ignore that one, wouldja?

You (and 2x6spds and I think it was BigWill?) and I have the worst two types of personalities for discussion. I make broad and harsh generalities - mostly because I'm the poster boy for cynicism and the "don't pee on my head and tell me it's raining" camp. You hold some truths dear to you and will fight to make them universally accepted.

You have to be right, I have to get the other person to admit the failings of what they believe.

Didn't I see this on Showtime? "Cocksure and the Master Baiter"

Bren R.

Hehe. Beats the hell out of everyone agreeing all the time, no? As far as TRUTHS go, what works is what works. Veritas is . or / or In Vino.

I really do love this place.

Bren, I'm closing in on three years on this board and I find your posts consistently entertaining and informative -- and not necessarily in that order. I can't count the number of times I'd probably have risen to take the bait simply because you seem to thrive on being...well...Bren. If there wasn't some element of substance there you'd just be a confrontational jerk. As it stands, your arguments are consistently well reasoned.

Joe, nicely handled.

If we were on AVS this would have gone on for another 20 pages. And that's not a challenge, fellas.

If you aren't on your toes with Bren around, you'll soon be on your ass. There's some force behind that pointy stick.

Glad to have you posting again, Bren. It's not the same without you.

Hey man where's my props? I believe we battled to a draw!

You're pretty cool, too. At least you like iPods.

*Phbbbbttt*!

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At least you like iPods.

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I was pimping my 'pod to a buddy at work today. He has a pretty cool iRiver 20GB video gizmo. He wants an iPod 5G now too. I should refer him to Bren first, so Bren can tell him all the things he liked about it really don't exist... (now come ON Bren, you gotta smile at that!).

Smile? Does baring my teeth count as a smile? What if thecorners of my mouth turn up?

Bren R.

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I find your posts consistently entertaining and informative (...) simply because you seem to thrive on being...well...Bren.

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Glad to have you posting again, Bren. It's not the same without you.

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Alright, enough of the love-in, everyone loves Bren. And for no good reason, he's far overhyped by his PR people. The truth is, he's just not worth the money. His audio theory is solid, but he's got very little time in listening to a wide range of current models of receivers and speakers. For bang for the buck and concise, non-rambling posts, you should really pay more attention to the likes of Alan Lofft and JohnK.

Bren R.

It's all about the info-tainment, Bren.

But the humour is so dry....
If one is looking for a colourful diatribe, clearly they have to look to the goateed man in black from the west.

At some point, we should really get together. The new place is amazing. You would love this new HT room. The wine cellar should be finished by Friday.

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At some point, we should really get together. The new place is amazing. You would love this new HT room. The wine cellar should be finished by Friday.

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So invite me over... there's a standing invitation here, long as I'm home, the door's open.

If you want it to be a guys' night, Lisa's in Hawaii from Boxing Day til Jan 7, or after that if you want to meet her too.

Bren R.

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Smile? Does baring my teeth count as a smile? What if thecorners of my mouth turn up?

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You're giving me the Boss smile, aren't you? The "sure Boss, there's nothing I would rather do than come in to work on Christmas day and fix your son's computer" smile.

Nah... I can appreciate the "boss smile"... I support insubordination, I hate being called the "B" word... usually makes me bring out a "what, you work, I work... bosses delegate, you and I work... I'm not your 'boss'"

I also love when one of the guys uses the word "sir"... dripping with so much sarcasm, you KNOW they're spelling it with a "C" (cur!)

Bren R.

Your friend Darren was one of the first people in the nation to own an iPod, proudly walking around with one as early as 2001. Of course when people found out he'd paid $300 for what appeared to be an effete paperweight they chalked him up as an iDiot, and the gewgaw's rounded corners had them wondering if perhaps Darren had been one of those a second-graders required to use the blunt scissors. WELL WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, NAY-SAYER? Hint: not Darren. Now that everyone and their Manx owns an iPod, Darren has been desperately trying to stay cutting-edge by buying smaller iPods and video iPods and iPods with more gigabytes than Steve Jobs has had laughs over hipster America's willingness to snap up anything emblazoned with the Apple logo. Fortunately, you can make Darren stand out from the crowd yet again with the gift of an iPod cowboy costume. With "fringed-suede chaps, checkerboard kerchief, full-length lasso, and brown suede hat," this item from iAttire edges out Brokeback Mountain for the title of Gayest Cowboy-Themed Holiday Release.

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Thanks to Matthew Baldwin's 2005 Holiday Survival Guide For Slackers. Matthew is better known as blogger Defective Yeti.

Bren R.

I'm afraid I havent reached that level of hipsterness yet.