Audio News for September 27, 2016

by | Sep 27, 2016 | Audio News

Snapchat Introduces Sunglasses with a Video Camera to Record 10-second Videos – This rather bizarre unit will retails for $130 and makes use of a 115-degree lens making all recorded video circular. The idea is that the recorded video will more closely approximate the human eye’s range of vision. It also will come in three colors. Snapchat became an online phenomenon, so perhaps the glasses will too.

David Beckham Does Pushups to Live Classical While Drinking Atop a Piano – You can see him on Instagram this week sharing his journey for the 22 Pushup Challenge. It is to bring awareness for service men and women who take their lives post-conflict. In the video, he says “…I’m 79 floors up, I’m lying on top of a piano, and I thought I’d bring a pianist with me…I thought you’d find it romantic.”

Black Violin and Other Classical Music Events –  On the 23rd the two classical-trained Florida musicians fused hip-hop with pop and classical. The next day was the premiere at Oberlin of What Noises Remain, a one-hour-long work for percussion, electroacoustic sound, text and video. Its basis it eh Shakespeare play The Tempest. The Oberlin Orchestra also gave its first concert of the season at Finney Chapel – an all-Russian program with Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Also on Sept. 14, The Cleveland Classical Guitar Society began their season with a free Showcase Concert. On the 25th a musical originally written by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman (which as censored by the government for being too radical) was performed at King State University: The Cradle Will Rock. It is an outstanding opportunity for bit of theater history and to marvel at how the sentiments and passions of the play resonate today. It called on everyone to join a union. It included a brief multimedia presentation prior to the show itself. Brooks Atkinson said in the NY Times of the original: “…It blows (a theatergoer) out of the theater on the thunder of the grand finale.”

The iPhone 7 Missed an Audio Opportunity – Apple could have singehandedly and dramatically improved the state of digital audio quality around the world if it had not removed the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone 7 (although it does provide a free adapter; $9 elsewhere). Wireless audio connections are generally lower-quality than wired because of the need to compress the file over the available wireless bandwidth. Most people are starting with highly-compressed audio files to begin with, and this essentially means that you’re degrading an already degraded signal. The ability to deliver the highest possible raw media audio quality – regardless of the device upon which it is played back – should be the goal of any media playback device, but particularly one that is so incredibly influential. The process of sacrificing audio quality for convenience goes on…

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