The less interesting part of the story is that my big home stereo has new amplification: Tiny Class-D Monoblocks! (Terminology explained below.) More interesting, another audiophile tenet has been holed below the waterline by Moore’s Law. This is a good thing, both for people who just want good sound to be cheaper, and for deranged audiophiles like me.

Tl;dr

This was going to be a short piece, but it got out of control. So, here’s the deal: Audiophiles who love good sound and are willing to throw money at the problem should now throw almost all of it at the pure-analog pieces:

1. Speakers.

2. Listening room setup.

3. Phono cartridge (and maybe turntable) (if you do LPs).

What’s new and different is that amplification technology has joined D-to-A conversion as a domain where small, cheap, semiconductors offer performance that’s close enough to perfect to not matter. The rest of this piece is an overly-long discussion of what amplification is and of the new technology.

What’s an “amp”?

A stereo system can have lots of pieces: Record players, cartridges, DACs, volume and tone controls, input selectors, and speakers. But in every system the last step before the speakers is the “power amplifier”; let’s just say “amp”. Upstream, music is routed round the system, not with electrical currents, but by a voltage signal, we say “line level”. That is to say, the voltage vibrates back and forth, usually between +/-1V, the vibration pattern being that of the music, i.e. that of the sound-wave vibrations you want the speakers to produce in the air between them and your ears.

Now, it takes a lot more than +/-1V to make sound come out of speakers. You need actual electrical current and multiple watts of energy to vibrate the electromagnets in your speakers and generate sound by pushing air around, which will push your eardrums around, which sends data to your brain that results in the experience of pleasure. If you have a big room and not-terribly-efficient speakers and are trying to play a Mahler symphony really loud, it can get into hundreds of watts.

So what an amp does take the line-level voltage signal and turn it into a corresponding electric-current signal with enough oomph behind it to emulate the hundred or so musicians required for that Mahler.

Some speakers (subwoofers, sound bars) come with amps built in, so you just have to send them the line-level signal and they take care of the rest. But in a serious audiophile system, your speakers are typically passive unpowered devices driven through speaker wires by an amp.

Historically, high-end amps have often been large, heavy, expensive, impressive-looking devices. The power can come either from vacuum tubes or “solid-state” circuits (basically, transistors and capacitors). Vacuum tubes are old technology and prone to distortion when driven too hard; electric-guitar amps do this deliberately to produce cool snarly sounds. But there are audiophiles who love tube amps and plenty are sold.

Amps come in pairs, one for each speaker, usually together in a box called a “stereo amplifier”. Sometimes the box also has volume and tone controls and so on, in which case it’s called an “integrated amplifier”.

So, what’s new?

TPA3255

This thing, made by Texas Instruments, is described as a “315-W stereo, 600-W mono, 18 to 53.5V supply, analog input Class-D audio amplifier”. It’s tiny: 14x6.1mm! It sort of blows my mind that this little sliver of semiconductor can serve as the engine for the class of amps that used to weigh 20kg and be the size of a small suitcase. Also that it can deliver hundreds of watts of power without vanishing in a puff of smoke.

Also, it costs less than $20, quantity one.

It’s not that new, was released in 2016. It would be wrong to have expected products built around it to arrive right away. I said above that the chip is the engine of an amplifier, and just like a car, once you have an engine there’s still lots to be built. You have to route the signal and power to the chip — and this particular chip needs a lot of power. You have to route the chip output to the speaker connection, and you have to deal with the fact that speakers’ impedences (impedance is resistance, except for alternating rather than direct current) vary with audio frequency in complicated ways.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, in the last couple of years there have started to be TPA3255-based amps that are aimed at audiophiles, claiming a combination of high power, high accuracy, small size, and low price. And technically-sophisticated reviewers have started to do serious measurements on them and… wow. The results seem to show that the power is as advertised, and that any distortion or nonlinearity is way down below the sensitivity of human hearing. Which is to say, more or less perfect.

For example, check out the work of Archimago, an extremely technical high-end audio blogger, who’s been digging in deep on TPA3255-based amps. If you want to look at a lot of graphs most of which will be incomprehensible unless you’ve got a university education in the subject, check out his reviews of the AIYIMA A08 Pro, Fosi Audio TB10D, and Aoshida A7.

Or, actually, don’t. Below I’ll link to the measurements of the one I bought, and discuss why it’s especially interesting. (Well, maybe do have a quick look, because some of these little beasties come with a charming steampunk aesthetic.)

PWM

That stands for pulse-width modulation, the technique that makes Class-D amps work. It’s remarkably clever. You have the line-level audio input, and you also bring in a triangle-wave signal (straight lines up then back down) at a higher frequency, and you take samples at another higher frequency and if the audio voltage is higher than the sawtooth voltage, you turn the power on, and if lower, you turn it off. So the effect is that the louder the music, the higher the proportion of time the power is on. So you get current output that is shaped like the voltage input, only with lots of little square corners that look like high-frequency noise; an appropriate circuit filters out the high frequencies and reproduces the shape of the input wave with high accuracy.

If that didn’t make sense, here’s a decent YouTube explainer.

The explanation, which my understanding of practical electronics doesn’t go deep enough to validate, is that because the power is only ever on or off, no intermediate states are necessary and the circuit is super efficient therefore cheap.

Monoblocks

Most amps are “stereo amplifiers”, i.e. two amps in a box. They have to solve the problem of keeping the two stereo signals from affecting each other. It turns out the TPA3255 does this right on the chip. So the people who measure and evaluate these devices pay a lot of attention to “channel separation” and “crosstalk”. This has led to high-end audiophiles liking “monoblock” amps, where you have two separate boxes, one for each speaker. Poof! crosstalk is no longer an issue.

Enter Fosi

You may have noticed that you didn’t recognize any of the brand names in that list of reviews above. I didn’t either. This is because mainstream brands from North America, Europe, and Japan are not exactly eager to start replacing their big impressive high-end amps costing thousands of dollars with small, cheap TPA3255-based products at a tenth the price.

Shenzen ain’t got time for that. Near as I can tell, all these outfits shipping little cheap amps are down some back street off a back street in the Shenzen-Guanghzhou megalopolis. One of them is Fosi Audio.

They have a decent web site but are definitely a back-street Shenzen operation. What caught my attention was Archimago’s 2-part review (1, 2) of Fosi’s V3 Mono.

This is a monoblock power amp with some ludicrously high power rating that you can buy as a pair with a shared power supply for a super-reasonable price. They launched with a Kickstarter.

I recommend reading either or both of Archimago’s reviews to feel the flavor of the quantitative-audio approach and also for the general coolness of these products.

I’m stealing one of Archimago’s pictures here, to reveal how insanely small the chip is; it’s the little black/grey rectangle at the middle of the board.

And here is my own pair of V3 Monos to the right of the record player.

My own experience

My previous amp (an Ayre Acoustics V-5xe) was just fine albeit kinda ugly, but we’re moving to a new place and it’s just not gonna fit into the setup there. I was wrestling with this problem when Archimago published those Fosi write-ups and I was sold, so there they are.

They’re actually a little bit difficult to set up because they’re so small and the power supply is heavier than both amps put together. So I had a little trouble getting all the wires plugged in and arranged. As Archimago suggests, I used the balanced rather than RCA connectors.

Having said all that, once they were set up, they vanished, as in, if it weren’t for the space between the speakers where the old amp used to be, I wouldn’t know the difference. They didn’t cost much. They fit in. They sound good.

One concern: These little suckers get hot when I pump music through them for an extended time. I think I’m going to want to arrange them side-by-side rather than stacked, just to reduce the chances of them cooking themselves.

Also, a mild disappoinment: They have an AUX setting where they turn themselves on when music starts and off again after a few minutes of silence. Works great. But, per Archimago’s measurements, they’re drawing 10 watts in that mode, which seems like way too much to me, and they remain warm to the touch. So, nice feature, but I guess I’ll have to flick their switches from OFF to ON like a savage when I want to listen to music.

The lesson

Maybe you love really good sound. Most of you don’t know because you’ve probably never heard it. I’m totally OK with Sonos or car-audio levels of quality when it’s background music for cooking or cleaning or driving. But sitting down facing a quality high-end system is really a different sort of thing. Not for everyone, but for some people, strongly habit-forming.

If it turns out that if you’re one of those people, it’s now smart to invest all your money in your speakers, and in fiddling with the room where they are to get the best sound out of them. For amplification and the digital parts of the chain, buy cheap close-enough-to-perfect semiconductor products.

And of course, listen to good music. Which, to be fair, is not always that well-produced or well-recorded. But at least the limiting factor won’t be what’s in the room with you.

I’m not here to go into detail about last night’s presidential debate, since the results of that are already well known: A massive humiliation for Trump, who was easily batted about by Kamala Harris, who kept him angry and defensive the entire night. Only the most delusional of observers believes it was anything other than that, and I will not be humoring them, nor should you.

What I am here to say is that last night, Donald Trump was at the best any of us will ever see him again. This was the one place and time where he was meant to be prepared, coherent and presidential, where he was not surrounded by handlers, coddlers and sycophants. This was meant to be the one place and time where he was meant to keep his id and his ego in check, put voters and Americans first, and make a case for a second shot at the presidency. This was the one place and time where his worst and most self-indulgent impulses were supposed to be reined in. This was Trump on his best and most decent behavior, or at the very least, the best and most behavior he is capable of. We see how that went.

It’s unlikely Trump will do another debate, because Trump doesn’t like being a loser, and he lost this debate even more comprehensively than he lost the 2020 election. From here he’ll retreat into the safe little world of right-wing media, where even his most unhinged pronouncements are met with respectful nodding and agreement. He’ll double down on his hate and his ranting and his inability to censor even the most embarrassing of thoughts. And if, after all of that, he’s still rewarded with a second term, then all his resentment and seething inadequacy will find a focus on anyone and everyone who ever made him feel a fool, and this time, he won’t bother having anyone around him who will tell him no.

Last night is the best Trump will ever be from here on out. At his very best, then, he is a loser, a fraud, a racist, a criminal and an embarrassment. He has no plan other than to avoid prison. He has nothing to him but anger and cowardliness and revenge. It’s impossible at this point that anyone doesn’t know this. No one who is voting for him at this point can pretend they are voting for anything other than that. No one who is somehow still “undecided” at this point can be under the delusion that he will somehow improve.

This is as good as it gets with Trump. Beyond this point is the abyss, again. Maybe don’t vote for that.

— JS

That’s the title of a book coming out October 29th that has my name on the cover. The subtitle is “Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain”. It’s an anthology; I’m both an author and co-editor. The other authors are people who, like me, were arrested resisting the awful “TMX” Trans Mountain pipeline project.

Pulling together a book with 25 contributing authors is a lot of work! One of the contributions started out as a 45-minute phone conversation, transcribed by me. The others manifested in a remarkable melange of styles, structures, and formats.

Which is what makes it fun. Five of our authors are Indigenous people. Another is Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green party. There is a sprinkling of university professors and faith leaders. There are two young Tyrannosauri Rex (no, really). And then there’s me, the Internet geek.

As I wrote then, my brush with the law was very soft; arrested on the very first day of a protest sequence, I got off with a fine. Since fines weren’t stopping the protest, eventually the arrestees started getting jail time. Some of the best writing in the book is the prison narratives, all from people previously unacquainted with the pointy end of our justice system.

Quoting from my own contribution:

Let me break the fourth wall here and speak as a co-editor of the book you are now reading. As I work on the jail-time narratives from other arrestees, alternately graceful, funny, and terrifying, I am consumed with rage at the judicial system. It is apparently content to allow itself to be used as a hammer to beat down resistance to stupid and toxic rent-seeking behaviour, oblivious to issues of the greater good. At no point has anyone in the judiciary looked in the mirror as they jailed yet another group of self-sacrificing people trying to throw themselves between TMX’s engine of destruction and the earth that sustains us, and asked themselves, Are we on the right side here?

Of necessity, the law is constructed of formalisms. But life is constructed on a basis of the oceans and the atmosphere and the mesh of interdependent ecosystems they sustain. At some point, the formalisms need to find the flexibility to favour life, not death. It seems little to ask.

We asked each contributor for a brief bio, a narrative of their experience, and the statement they made to the judge at the time of their sentencing. Our contributors being what they are, sometimes we instead got poems and music-theory disquisitions and discourse on Allodial title. Cartoons too!

Which, once again, is what makes it fun. Well, when it’s not rage-inducing. After all, we lost; they built the pipeline and it’s now doing its bit to worsen the onrushing climate catastrophe, meanwhile endangering Vancouver’s civic waters and shipping economy.

The effort was worthwhile, though. There is reason to hope that our work helped raise the political and public-image cost of this kind of bone-stupid anti-survival project to the point that few or no more will ever be built.

Along with transcribing and editing, my contribution to the book included a couple of photos and three maps. Making the maps was massively fun, so I’m going to share them here just because I can. (Warning: These are large images.);

The first appears as a two-page spread, occupying all of the left page and the top third or so of the right.

Then there’s a map of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, highlighting the locations where much of the book’s action took place.

Finally, here’s a close-up of Burnaby Mountain, where TMX meets the sea, and where most of the arrests happened.

I suspect that if you’re the kind of person who finds yourself reading this blog from time to time, you’d probably enjoy reading Standing on High Ground. The buy-this-book link is here. If you end up buying a copy — please do — the money will go in part to our publisher Between The Lines, who seem a decent lot and were extremely supportive and competent in getting this job done. The rest gets distributed equally among all the contributors. Each contributor is given the option of declining their share, which makes sense, since some of us are highly privileged and the money wouldn’t make any difference; others can really use the dough.

What’s next?

We’re going to have a launch event sometime this autumn. I’ll announce it here and everywhere else I have a presence. There will be music and food and drink; please come!

What’s really next is the next big harebrained scheme to pad oil companies’ shareholders’ pockets by building destructive infrastructure through irreplaceable wilderness, unceded Indigenous land, and along fragile waterways. Then we’ll have to go out and get arrested again and make it more trouble than it’s worth. It wouldn’t take that many people, and it’d be nice if you were one of them.

I put in years of effort to stop the pipeline. Based on existing laws, I concluded that the pipeline was illegal and presented those arguments to the National Energy Board review panel. When we got to the moment on Burnaby Mountain when the RCMP advanced to read out the injunction to us, I was still acting in the public interest. The true lawbreakers were elsewhere.

[From Elizabeth May’s contribution.]

Thanks!

Chiefly, to our contributors, generous with their words and time, tolerant of our nit-picky editing. From me personally, to my co-editors Rosemary Cornell and Adrienne Drobnies; we didn’t always agree on everything but the considerable work of getting this thing done left nobody with hard feelings. And, as the book’s dedication says, to all those who went out and got arrested to try to convince the powers that be to do the right thing.

I’m going to close with a picture which appears in the book. It shows Kwekwecnewtxw (“Kwe-kwek-new-tukh”), the Watch House built by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation to oversee the enemy’s work, that work also visible in the background. If you want to know what a Watch House is, you’ll need to read the very first contribution in the book, which begins “Jim Leyden is my adopted name—my spirit name is Stehm Mekoch Kanim, which means Blackbear Warrior.”

Rytmos is a game that sounds as good as it looks.

With its global rhythms, sci-fi visuals, and clever puzzles, the 2024 Apple Design Award winner for Interaction is both a challenge and an artistic achievement. To solve each level, players must create linear pathways on increasingly complex boards, dodging obstacles and triggering buttons along the way. It’s all set to a world-music backdrop; different levels feature genres as diverse as Ethiopian jazz, Hawaiian slack key guitar, and Gamelan from Indonesia, just to name a few.

And here’s the hook: Every time you clear a level, you add an instrument to an ever-growing song.

“The idea is that instead of reacting to the music, you’re creating it,” says Asger Strandby, cofounder of Floppy Club, the Denmark-based studio behind Rytmos. “We do a lot to make sure it doesn’t sound too wild. But the music in Rytmos is entirely generated by the way you solve the puzzles.”

ADA FACT SHEET

Rytmos

• Winner: Interaction
• Team: Floppy Club
• Available on: iPhone, iPad
• Team size: 5

Learn more about Rytmos

Download Rytmos from the App Store

The artful game is the result of a partnership that dates back decades. In addition to being developers, Strandby and Floppy Club cofounder Niels Böttcher are both musicians who hail from the town of Aarhus in Denmark. “It’s a small enough place that if you work in music, you probably know everyone in the community,” laughs Böttcher.

The music in Rytmos comes mostly from traveling and being curious.

Niels Böttcher, Floppy Club cofounder

The pair connected back in the early 2000s, bonding over music more than games. “For me, games were this magical thing that you could never really make yourself,” says Strandby. “I was a geeky kid, so I made music and eventually web pages on computers, but I never really thought I could make games until I was in my twenties.” Instead, Strandby formed bands like Analogik, which married a wild variety of crate-digging samples — swing music, Eastern European folk, Eurovision-worthy pop — with hip-hop beats. Strandby was the frontman, while Böttcher handled the behind-the-scenes work. “I was the manager in everything but name,” he says.

The band was a success: Analogik went on to release five studio albums and perform at Glastonbury, Roskilde, and other big European festivals. But when their music adventure ended, the pair moved back into separate tech jobs for several years — until the time came to join forces again. “We found ourselves brainstorming one day, thinking about, ‘Could we combine music and games in some way?’” says Böttcher. “There are fun similarities between the two in terms of structures and patterns. We thought, ‘Well, let’s give it a shot.’”

The duo launched work on a rhythm game that was powered by their histories and travels. “I’ve collected CDs and tapes from all over the world, so the genres in Rytmos are very carefully chosen,” says Böttcher. “We really love Ethiopian jazz music, so we included that. Gamelan music (traditional Indonesian ensemble music that’s heavy on percussion) is pretty wild, but incredible. And sometimes, you just hear an instrument and say, ‘Oh, that tabla has a really nice sound.’ So the music in Rytmos comes mostly from traveling and being curious.”

The game took shape early, but the mazes in its initial versions were much more intricate. To help bring them down to a more approachable level, the Floppy Club team brought on art director Niels Fyrst. “He was all about making things cleaner and clearer,” says Böttcher. “Once we saw what he was proposing — and how it made the game stronger — we realized, ‘OK, maybe we’re onto something.’”

Success in Rytmos isn't just that you're beating a level. It's that you're creating something.

Asger Strandby, Floppy Club cofounder

Still, even with a more manageable set of puzzles, a great deal of design complexity remained. Building Rytmos levels was like stacking a puzzle on a puzzle; the team not only had to build out the levels, but also create the music to match. To do so, Strandby and his brother, Bo, would sketch out a level and then send it over to Böttcher, who would sync it to music — a process that proved even more difficult than it seems.

“The sound is very dependent on the location of the obstacles in the puzzles,” says Strandby. “That’s what shapes the music that comes out of the game. So we’d test and test again to make sure the sound didn’t break the idea of the puzzle.”

The process, he says, was “quite difficult” to get right. “Usually with something like this, you create a loop, and then maybe add another loop, and then add layers on top of it,” says Böttcher. “In Rytmos, hitting an emitter triggers a tone, percussion sound, or chord. One tone hits another tone, and then another, and then another. In essence, you’re creating a pattern while playing the game.”

We’ve actually gone back to make some of the songs more imprecise, because we want them to sound human.

Niels Böttcher, Floppy Club cofounder

The unorthodox approach leaves room for creativity. “Two different people’s solutions can sound different,” says Strandby. And when players win a level, they unlock a “jam mode” where they can play and practice freely. "It’s just something to do with no rules after all the puzzling,” laughs Strandby.

Yet despite all the technical magic happening behind the scenes, the actual musical results had to have a human feel. “We’re dealing with genres that are analog and organic, so they couldn’t sound electronic at all,” says Böttcher. “We’ve actually gone back to make some of the songs more imprecise, because we want them to sound human.”

Best of all, the game is shot through with creativity and cleverness — even offscreen. Each letter in the Rytmos logo represents the solution to a puzzle. The company’s logo is a 3.5-inch floppy disk, a little nod to their first software love. (“That’s all I wished for every birthday,” laughs Böttcher.) And both Böttcher and Strandby hope that the game serves as an introduction to both sounds and people they might not be familiar with. "Learning about music is a great way to learn about a culture,” says Strandby.

But mostly, Rytmos is an inspirational experience that meets its lofty goal. “Success in Rytmos isn’t just that you’re beating a level,” says Strandby. “It’s that you’re creating something.”

Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

I’ve been thinking about all the generative AI slop that’s appearing, especially with tools like “Reimagine”, and I think it’s going to be a great thing for the open web.

Why?

Because Google is unwittingly shooting itself in the foot in a way that will change the character of the web.

How?

The web has always been built on trust.

The very core of the Internet is built on trust: I try to connect and someone else accepts because I’m using a trusted protocol.

Trust is also an important part in the way people work together: a recommendation from a friend is a hell of a lot more important than any other media (including TV, print, and the web). We also negotiate once a level of trust has been established: just like our protocols.

That trust in people extended to companies that built their business on the Internet. We trusted Amazon to deliver our books. We trusted Google to deliver answers to our queries. We trusted The Onion to deliver us the lols. We trusted Twitter to connect with friends.

And all was good because it was built on top of trusted protocols.

Twitter was the first to break the human trust. It’s popularity attracted a lot of bad actors: scammers, bots, and billionaires. And when things started falling apart, many lost trust in the service.

And just like a Nazi bar, when you can’t trust a place, you stop visiting. You find new places like Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky that are welcoming with people you know and trust.

Now we have Google shitting in their own pool.

They are generating things that don’t exist. Pizza with glue. Pigs falling from the sky. Even Nazi SpongeBob.

As these generative technologies get better, you will be less likely to trust what appears in your search results. This change will happen at an exponential rate thanks to slop being generated from other slop.

Search engines you can’t trust because they are cesspools of slop is hard to imagine. But that end feels inevitable at this point. We will need a new web.

What?

The human component of the web won’t change. People will need answers that they can trust. Folks on the web are also resourceful; they always have been.

Something new will fill the gap and give people what they need and want. And my guess is that the open web, personal reputation, and word of mouth will be key components of that thing.

A better thing, thanks to slop.