Category Archives: Music

SFist: Touched by an Angela: La Rondine at SF Opera.

SFist: Touched by an Angela: La Rondine at SF Opera.:

Angela Gheorghiu, the diva, made her SF Opera debut on Wednesday evening, in Puccini’s La Rondine.

Now, Angela has some redeeming qualities: one could excuse her for her behavior; being diva in the truest operatic sense of the word, that’s her job after all. Plus, she brings excitement to a performance well before a single note is sung, which is good in the accounting department. It does not hurt that she can display major cleavage very convincingly. And: she can sing.

Angela’s musical performance as Magda was a bright point in the La Rondine production. She’s as stunning on stage as she appears on the promo material, wearing in the first Act an ankle-long evening dress slit all the way up to her thigh. Her voice is warm, silky, it evoked a caramel swirl to us, or a heavy velvet drape: a voice with texture and depth. Her acting, on the other hand, was built on a single premise: look at me. If she walks, she comes off as Naomi Campbell ona catwalk. If she takes off her shoes, she plays a coy little girl. Maybe her attention grabbing behavior off-stage predisposes us to see her forced acting as a ploy for attention, so go check for yourself. Fortunately, it does not deter from the enjoyment of her singing.

LOL at cleavage display convincingly. Gonna try to catch this when I get back to SF.

NY Phil Tchaikovsky Experience

Check out the video of Janine Jansen talking about the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, I think I have 5 different recordings of it, and I’ve been to countless performances of this piece. The best was some Korean violinist in HK with a loaned Stradivarius, I think it was from the Royal School of Music. (I’ve also heard Stradivarius’ in person with Anne-Sophie Mutter with the NY Phil and Itzhak Perlman in Austin). Janine Jansen uses a 1727 Strad, I tempted to go to nyc for this and to pickup a leather jacket.

One thing I don’t like about SF is that the symphony here really sucks.

new ipods? total crap!

I was pretty excited following the live blogging this morning, somehow I thought there was a 160GB iPod Touch! Turned out the regular iPods just got bigger hard drives, the iPhones got stripped down to the iTouch, and the only thing truly unique is the new Nano. If the Nike+ kit works on the new Nano I would probably pickup a 8GB one, if anything it will be more portable music for running, also should give me interesting pocket fades on my jeans. 😉

What I really need is a 160GB iPod Touch.

upgrade 60/80gb 5g ipod to 100gb for $275?

I’ve always wanted a 100GB iPod for my lossless library, hmm… these guys are from Cedar Park, which is north of Austin like about 15 minutes from my house there… interesting… If I care enough for more capacity I can probably get the Toshiba MK1011GAH HDD somewhere else and do this myself, but the price difference isn’t really worth it. Cheapest price for the MK1011GAH is around $208 at Froogle right now. Though if I DIY this I wouldn’t have to re-sync all 80GB of my music, as it takes a long time over USB. Imaging the disks with dd probably takes just as long though… They sell the 60GB hdd I currently have (MK6008GAH) for $200, completed listings on eBay went for about $100, so around $110 for 40 more gigs, not bad…


Well, I think I’ll just wait for the next gen iPods, I don’t need the extra space that bad. Only reason for more space is to have the complete Wagner ring cycle on my iPod.


March 26, 2007, Austin (Cedar Park), TX — PDASmart http://www.pdasmart.com, the leading developer of iPod® performance upgrades and accessories, announced today the immediate availability of a 100 gigabyte hard drive upgrade for the iPod® Video. The PDASmart 100gb iPod upgrade installs in an existing 60gb or 80gb iPod® Video without any modifications to the case. A new rear casing is available for the 30gb model to allow for the slightly larger hard drive size.

http://www.pdasmart.com/ipod100gbupgrade.htm

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Etymotic ety8 Bluetooth cans

I am very curious on the SQ on these cans, I think A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) uses GAVDP (General Audio/Video Distribution Profile), which could use several lossy codecs like SBC (subband codec), MPEG-1,2 Audio, MPEG-2, 4 AAC, and ATRAC (the evil Sony MiniDisc codec). So my lossless tracks will get compressed when streamed over A2DP, but these IEMs are probably not good enough for me to notice the difference… I will have to try these babies out, and if they work well enough I’ll use them as my running cans… 🙂

I’m sure there are already a bunch of threads on HeadFi about these but I am too lazy to go look…

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