Haven’t been to YesAsia for a long long time, just went there to look up some ??? CDs, they now have a news / editorial / reviews section, pretty cool. They really need feeds for it though, otherwise I will almost never check it.

YesAsia.com: YumCha! – ?????????

Technorati Tags: yesasia

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.
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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.
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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.

Found this on Noah’s Cool Stuff list, very cool…

Went to the AT&T Park for the free livecast of Samson and Delilah, pics didn’t turn out well, but I youtubed my favorite aria, “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” (“My heart opens to your voice”):

Some info on the opera and the simulcast:

Technorati Tags: samson and delilah

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.

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…

technorati tags:ipod, etymotic, IEMs, cans, earphones, headphones, heafi, apple, nano

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