Katy Perry - "E.T." (featuring Kanye West)

If you havent heard this song yet, stop what you are doing, plug in the headphones (yes go get them right now) and take a listen. The official video for this song was just released yesterday, but the lyrics video they did for it might be even better.

Battlefield 3: Fault Line Trailer

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This was featured on IGN as footage which shows that BF3 can give the Call of Duty franchise a "run for its money," but Im not really sure I agree with that assessment. Call of Duty, to me, means an intense single player experience with multiplayer as an add on, while Battlefield I think of as primarily a multiplayer game - as it has always had dedicated servers. But the Battlefield games we get on consoles dont live up to their PC counterparts, whereas Call of Duty is essentially the same on all platforms. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a very good game on the 360 - but its a great game on the PC, provided you have the proper hardware to run it. Will Battlefield 3 break the mold?

I dont think so, and I think its specifically for this reason I will be buying it on the PC. The current generation of consoles is lagging badly behind current gen PCs, because we have essentially skipped a generation. Due to the Great Recession, we wont even have a console to fit in between the 360 and whatever uber-monstrosity Microsoft is currently cooking up. Developers are shoehorning next gen concepts into consoles with 512MB of RAM. This isnt advisable or sustainable, but its where we are right now. Im sure BF3 will be great, but part of me thinks if it was made from the ground up for a 4 core processor rig with 4+gbRAM, a current gen video card, and a mandatory 10gb install, it could be a totally different game, not just a great one.

The Xbox's greatest strength isnt and never has been its technical prowess, which is finally being overshadowed by the PS3 with its built in HDD and Blu Ray, but rather Xbox Live. Its the defining feature of the console, and if developers are able to leverage digital downloads combined with a huge social network of gamers, the Xbox brand has unlimited potential in the future. As it stands, most of that potential remains untapped and companies like Zynga are primed to capitalize on if Microsoft falls asleep at the wheel. Call of Duty and Battlefield are brands that are both primed to make a big leap in the real next generation, the question is when will we get there and who will be first.

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The Loudness War And The Death of HiFi

Hifi is dead. MP3s killed it, and the Loudness War has raped its corpse. For those of you who are really interested, I suggest reading the entire Wikipedia link on the history of compression and loudness in music. Suffice to say, the difference between a pop recording made in the 1980s or 1990s and today is so stark, that you can hear it with youtube audio quality on computer speakers. In the clip above, the levels of the tracks have been adjusted so that they have the same volume. Suffice to say without this adjustment, the 2004 version would sound much, much louder. But as you can hear, a hotter track doesnt sound better. Retaining the dynamics of the recording, and turning up the volume control on your stereo is better.

The irony is that this race towards increased perceived loudness was all in the name of allowing people to hear the music better: if they just added a bit more compression, you could hear the song better on your clock radio or while driving 70mph on the highway. Eventually a bit more compression became a shitload, to the point that now an entire generation of albums is being ruined by overcompression and distortion. If you listen to a recording made from the 1940s-1990s on a hifi system, it sounds incredible with a huge dynamic range. If you listen to a modern pop single on the same system, its sounds very flat and distorted in comparison, and you will be reaching for the volume control to turn it down.

The music industry is in dire straights. The last thing they need at this point in time is a radical drop in audio quality - but thats what we have gotten for roughly the last 10 years. People arent critical about what they listen to, as long as they can download it for free who cares if its distorted to shit and encoded at a low bit rate. People need to start buying music again, even if its only one song per week or one album per month, and consistently buy albums from artists and producers who have decided not to overcompress their album and leave the dynamics intact. This might mean forgoing the latest pop album for some jazz or an indie rock album, but your dollars talk much more loudly than words, so make sure they are heard.

Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit

White Rabbit is a psychedelic rock/acid rock song from Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. It was released as a single and became the band's second top ten success, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was ranked #483 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. One of Grace Slick's earliest songs, written during either late 1965 or early 1966, it includes comparisons of the hallucinatory effects of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, with the imagery found in the fantasy works of Lewis Carroll: 1865's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

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