Audio

Revisiting My Favorite Hearing Protection in 2026

ETY + etymotic logo vertical blueIt is my stated intention to see more live music. Most especially those artists who, like me, are getting older, and may not be touring for much longer. I came to this decision when Rush announced their Fifty Something tour. It was solidified when Triumph announced the 2026 Rock & Roll Machine Reloaded tour.

The Triumph show in Houston was on May 22nd. I knew from past experience that it was likely to be very loud. While I enjoy the music, these days I’m sensitive to very loud situations. In high ambient noise situations I can start to feel claustrophobic. The world starts to close in on me in a very uncomfortable way.

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Is there a MiniDisc Revival?

I loved the Sony MiniDisc! In the mid-90s I had some MiniDisc gear. So when I recently heard rumor of a MiniDisc revival, I was interested.

MiniDisc Article on Lenovo P14S

To get started in MiniDisc, I bought a starter set known as MD Bundle 4. I bought this in the summer of 1996, at the The Sony Store at Premium Outlet Mall in Grove City, PA just north of Pittsburgh. At the time, I was working a large project at KDKA-TV2 in Pittsburgh. That project saw me driving between Toronto and Pittsburgh repeatedly over a period of several months.

sony_mds-je320_minidisc_deck

The bundle included a Sony MDS-JE510 recorder and an MZ-E40 portable player. I also bought the brand new Sony MDR-NC10 noise cancelling earbuds.

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Holiday Project: Lyrion Media Server & Spotify

This week saw me spending some time to get Lyrion Media Server working with Spotify again. I started using Logitech’s Squeezebox series streaming music players since the Squeezebox 3 was introduced in 2005. Lyrion Media Server is community supported version of what was once known as Logitech Media Server.

Of course, the Logitech hardware eventually died. Electrolytic capacitors eventually age. Our fleet of SB3 were eventually replaced with a handful of Raspberry Pi running PiCorePlayer. Both Lyrion Media Server and PiCorePlayer are open source.

Originally, LMS was all about playing stream from a local library of music. That didn’t last very long. As streaming music sources appeared online the software was extended to include these services. While I’ve used Pandora and Radio Paradise in the past, more recently I access a paid Spotify account by way of Michael Herger’s excellent Spotty plug-in for LMS.

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Revisiting the Alto Professional Presenter

Late last year I detailed my quest to find a small public address system for use by our local civic association. I settled upon the Alto Professional Presenter, which is a portable, battery operated PA in the form of a podium. What follows are some notes about how I’ve used it over the past nine months, and some recent tweaks to the setup that have made me irrationally happy.

While I was initially quite enthusiastic about the product, that proved to be substantially unwarranted. Out-of-the-box it’s actually quite terrible. It’s a nice idea, poorly executed.

The major problem is the included gooseneck microphone. You can’t turn the device up loud enough to be useful without generating feedback. As a practical matter, the position of the microphone is fixed relative to the front-facing speakers. Also, I suspect the microphone suffered from being physically connected to the podium. The physical connection increases the likelihood of feedback, as vibration was passed directly to the gooseneck.

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