DOuG pRATt – Page 240 – Prattling Before the Pratfall

Be Very Afraid

Remember when the GOP said the president should be someone you could imagine having a beer with? Twenty years later, we are now confronting nothing less than the possible end of both democracy and the rule of law.

A Slight Oversight

Once again, Vint Cerf didn’t mention the ARPANET, the packet-switched (as distinct from circuit-switched) technical foundation upon which the Internet was based. In grad school Cerf had early exposure to the ARPANET, but he was not one of the visionaries behind it.

Vint’s significance in the development of TCP/IP can’t be overstated. He is a legendary development programmer, and as he says he approached the Internet as an engineering challenge. Cerf should give credit for the vision where it’s due, and that should certainly include the late Bob Taylor, one of the originators of the ARPANET project.

Cerf and Kahn started working at DARPA in 1973, after Taylor got the ARPANET going and had left for Xerox PARC. Taylor headed up the Alto project, which was the thing that blew Steve Job’s mind by having a GUI with a mouse, an early version of Ethernet, laser printers, and e-mail. After Xerox, Taylor moved on to Digital Equipment Corporation.

At DEC, Bob leveraged Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Worldwide Web by coming up with AltaVista, the powerful search engine that was influential on a startup called Google. Since 99.999% of everybody thinks the Web is the Internet, rather than the biggest part of it, an occasional mention of Tim by Vint would also be appropriate.

The Woman Most Admired by Other Woman

You were expecting Taylor Swift?

Debbie was the unanimous winner of an informal survey I once made of same-age women I knew.

Don’t Call Them Earbuds

I’m abusing the headphone jack on my laptop PC by playing two different pairs of In-Ear-Monitors, or IEMs, at the same time. I’m abusing my ears by going back and forth between them.

Positive reviews on AudioScienceReview for inexpensive “Chi-Fi” IEMs made me curious, resulting in this post from a month ago.

In One Ear, In the Other

A guy in Singapore who goes by the handle Crinacle is a leading reviewer of these products. His influence extends to him collaborating with manufacturers to evaluate and fine-tune the sound of their IEMs.

After listening to the BLUE set with his name on it, I was curious about the RED set. The models are identical in design and construction except for the sound, with the RED tuned to Crinacle’s preference. As expected from the reviews, it’s more balanced sounding than the BLUE.

That would typically be my preference, but I feel that something of the baby was thrown out with the bath water, and I actually prefer the brighter BLUE with its excellent deep bass. The extension piece on one of the cables is a bass boost for the RED that I think muddies the sound like the loudness buttons that used to be standard on amps and receivers.

Unlike some other hobbies and pastimes, where the next generation of fans failed to show up (stamps, coins, bowling, et. al.), many young guys are actively involved in appreciating audio and music. Being young, there are some snarky reviews of IEMs on YouTube, but the overall tone is positive and fun. As is seen here, where the youngsters are questioning an elder audio expert, while remaining respectful.

Follow-up: Both of these IEM’s are keepers. The extra $5 for the RED edition seems to be for the booster adapter. Curiously, on the Lenovo laptop it makes the sound a little muddy, but with my phone it seems to have no effect. Maybe it’s an impedance thing.