Posts by One Igloo

Lossless music goes High Street

Not hard at all

Try the same experiment with even half-decent headphones rather than speakers (any speakers). Or with classical or acoustic jazz music as the source. Or both together. What I hear is a halo of compression artefacts surrounding thin congested music. A bit like an audio equivalent of the visual artefacts you get if you overdo the processing of JPG images.

I've done this with several popular computer-based rip-compression programs (iTunes, WMP, VLC, etc) and with dedicated hardware (Brennan JB7). And at a range of bitrates. Uniformly horrible to my ears.

If you listen mainly to rock or pop over speakers you might get away with it. Those recordings usually start out compressed (in dynamic terms) anyway, though typically done with much more sophisticated kit/algorithms which produce fewer artefacts (or produce "desirable" side-effects such as punch).

Cell site data sinks into black hole of local bureaucracy

Credit where credit is due

My thanks to Igloodude for his/her temperate and reasoned re-rendering of my post. I do tend to have little truck with the trappings of civilised discourse. But one key element of my rant has been lost in translation: why did the author of the original article cast his argument in the form of a criticism of Local Authorities?

Er...

Why exactly are the Local Authorities the evil ones here? If the mobile operators want to release THEIR data why can't they simply post it on THEIR websites?

Disclosure: I work for a Local Authority. I and my colleagues have better things to do than be the fall guys for lazy, devious, greedy commercial companies.