Cocktails and Records

I was just out on a lunchtime visit to Rough Trade to buy myself some more Christmas presents when amongst the skinny-trousered boys clutching their Kitsune vinyl I spied this in-store goody.

This is an ipod boombox and it offers an ipod dock, a radio, an alarm with ‘wake up and sleep’ function, an ‘accurately real’ time clock display, separate bass and treble controls, ‘powerful’ speaker sound system, EQ monitor and (wow!) a volume level indicator.

You’ve got to admire it for delightfully defying every single design principle that ipod designer Jonathan Ive and indeed Apple have ever stood for. Sleek and compact it is not.

The ipod boombox will set you back a trifling £195. You could buy one from Rough Trade, but it seems that they’ve sold out…

Recession? What recession?

A copy of Hi-Fi News has somehow found its way into our house. I am not responsible for this I’d like to stress – I may love reading about music, but I don’t necessarily love reading about moving-magnet cartridges.

However amongst its pages of Hi-Fi porn, the magazine does have some pretty amusing album reviews. Each record gets two star ratings based on its performance and on its recording. This means that the 180g vinyl reissue of Linda Ronstadt’s Don’t Cry Now gets a 4/5 for recording, but 3/5 for the actual performance (there’s a lack of energy and excitement which doesn’t compare well to the great recording).

Thank God I’m not an audiophile. I’d have a break-down each time I attempted to buy an album with all these additional things to worry about (and I’d have 50 ever so slightly different copies of Kind of Blue).

The recent vinyl reissue of Steely Dan classic Aja gets 5/5 for both performance and recording, but sadly I have an inferior 70s pressing so I will forever be missing out on something or other.