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(Credit:
Burmester)

Burmester B25 speakers

The 032 amplifier in all its German splendor

My complete review is on the “Home Entertainment” Web site.

High-end audio isn’t so different, but it’s more private. High-end buyers’ families and friends are the only ones who’ll ever get to be bowled over by the sound and looks of their spectacular audio systems. So while you’ve probably heard of Jaguar, chances are you’re less familiar with high-end audio brands. I’m here to help raise awareness of quality audio.

(Credit:
"Home Entertainment" magazine)

I write about the world’s best audio gear for “Home Entertainment” magazine, and I recently had the pleasure of testing the Burmester 032 integrated stereo amplifier ($22,495) and B25 speakers ($11,995/pair). Burmester is based in Berlin, Germany. The company builds the sort of hi-fis a Jaguar owner would buy.

The B25 tower speaker’s 42-inch-tall cabinet is fabricated from high-density fiberboard and birch plywood. Standard finishes include Aluminum Laminate, Makassar, or Elsberry veneers. Burmester can custom finish speakers to your exact specification. Burmesters decked out in gloss white with chrome baffles are among the most beautiful speakers I’ve ever seen.

Right from the get-go the Burmester duo’s wide-open imaging and sonic purity were hard to miss. Feed the Burmester system high-quality recordings and it will reward your ears with dazzling resolution of fine detail.

The 032 amplifier’s sculptured metalwork is drop-dead gorgeous. The amplifier’s front and sides are covered by machined heat sinks. They provide optimal cooling for the stereo 240-watt-per-channel amplifier’s output transistors, eliminating the need for noisy fans. Burmester components, fully decked out in chrome, are a startling sight to behold.

I like hearing about stuff I can’t afford, like the recent road test of the $80,000 Jaguar XFR. The big sedan can hit 162 mph, can stop from 150 in 6 seconds, and it’s a ball to drive fast. Funny, the road tester never mentioned fuel economy. There you go, people don’t buy $80,000
cars for their practicality, they buy them to be seen in and for how well they perform.

The 032’s mirrored surfaces will reflect your room’s color and lighting, so the electronics disappear more than your average high-end component would. Each assembled 032 is run through a 300-point computer test regime, the amplifier is then played for a solid week, and then put through the complete 300-point testing process again. The first and second test results must be identical before the amp moves onto final testing. Each and every Burmester undergoes a thorough listening test before it leaves the factory.

Here at CNET we write about all sorts of gadgets and toys, but I’ve noticed that when I write about high-end gear I get the biggest reaction.

They’re involved in something, striving to make it better, to get ever closer to some ever-elusive goal of perfection. If audiophiles take some satisfaction in that, what’s the problem?

Back in 1957, Time magazine reported on “audiophilia,” a disease that afflicted the “middle-aged, male and intelligent” and found them to be compulsive and fascinated with bizarre sounds. Hey, that describes me!

My wife happened to find the article, “Audiophilia,” online with no author listed. The article reported that a new neurosis was discovered, audiophilia, an excessive passion for hi-fi sound and equipment. The Audiophiliac was amused.

Do you have the disease? More important, is there a cure? Maybe we need a telethon.

I’m not sure what to make of the Time piece, whether it was tongue-in-cheek or what. The discoverer of the disease, Dr. Henry Angus Bowes, clinical director in psychiatry at Ste. Anne’s Hospital for veterans at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, noted that some audiophiles turn up the volume up until it reaches the physical level of pain. Ouch! There is an extraordinary fascination with recreating the actual sounds of instruments. Yeah, so?

(Credit:
Robert Wright)

I admit it, we audiophiles are an obsessive bunch who endlessly fuss over our hi-fis, but no more than
car freaks fiddle with their fuel injectors, or computer geeks agonize over bits and apps. Each group has its nut jobs, but they’re at least passionate about what they do.

Posts to CitizenQuasar Twitter page.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)

An Oklahoma City man who allegedly threatened on Twitter to turn a tax protest into a massacre has been arrested on suspicion of making interstate threats in what is believed to be the first federal prosecution based on posts made to the micro-blogging site.

The FBI arrested Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, after agents identified him as Twitter user CitizenQuasar. Using the micro-blogging site, Hayden allegedly threatened to start a “war” against the government at the Oklahoma City Capitol where a “Tea Party” tax protest was planned.

“START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!,” read a message posted at 8:01 p.m. on April 11, which was followed by, “After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!” Another post said: “I really don’ give a (expletive) anymore. Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the(m) on the State Capitol steps.”

Hayden directed many of his tweets toward another Oklahoma City man he erroneously thought was an organizer of the protest. Wired tracked down Earl Shaffer, a 68-year-old retiree who Hayden allegedly tweeted about, including posts with his phone number.

“He seemed to know stuff about me, but I don’t know how or why,” Shaffer told Wired. “He called me a few days before that tea party and let me know somehow he got my name as one of the organizers. I don’t have the energy.”

Shaffer told CNET News that he has never met Hayden and is unnerved by the situation.

“I have no idea who this guy is,” Shaffer said. “It is very much a concern that he mentions my being killed.”

One of the last messages posted to the site on April 15 says CitizenQuasar is “Locked AND loaded for the Oklahoma State Capitol. Let’s see what happens.”

Hayden was arraigned on April 16 and released to an Oklahoma City halfway house, according to various media reports.

The U.S. intelligence community has expressed concern that terrorists might use Twitter to coordinate attacks. A draft Army intelligence report prepared by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and posted to the Federation of American Scientists Web site examined the possible ways terrorists could use mobile and Web technologies such as the Global Positioning System, digital maps, and Twitter mashups to plan and execute terrorist attacks.

A vintage picture of yours truly from back in the moustache era and given the Warholizer treatment.

(Credit:
Warholizer)

Chances are you’re not going to match the influence over the art world that Andy Warhol did with his pop-art pictures of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, but at least you can have some of the fun.

BigHugeLabs has added a “Warholizer” tool that lets you upload a photo or modify one hosted at Flickr or Photobucket so it becomes a tribute to Warhol’s bright, posterized art.

BigHugeLabs already offers a large collection of entertaining photo-effect tools. Along with the Warholizer, my favorites include the mock motivational poster maker, the ID badge maker, the palette generator (is there a way to feed this into Adobe Systems’ Kuler?), and the picture cube creator.

Bret Taylor, formerly of Google and now of FriendFeed, has a greater appreciation for the business development function. In a post today he wrote about the challenges of getting legal access to factual data–such as mapping, stock quotes, white pages, TV schedules, movie show times, and sports scores–for use in applications.

If you want to experiment with a new driving directions algorithm, it is infinitely more difficult than coming up with an algorithm; you have to hire a lawyer and a sign a contract with a company that collects that data in the country you are developing for.

Bret Taylor: Free the data

He adds that some of the data has quality problems or is incomplete. In sum, Taylor believes that innovation is stymied and the barrier to entry is raised in the current environment. It’s not just the need for lawyers and contracts but also the issue of companies that sell data restricting use.

What the solution to freeing up the data? Taylor advocates open-sourcing factual data, and competing on use of the data, not access to it. He wrote:

To this end, I think we should create a Wikipedia for data: a global database for all of these important data sources to which we all contribute and that anyone can use. When a user reports an inaccurate phone number in your products, save it back to the DataWiki so everyone can benefit, and in return, you get everyone else’s improvements as well. If your local movie theater doesn’t have listings data in DataWiki, you can type it in yourself, and everyone in your town can benefit, and all the products you use that access movie listings will automatically update. Need better mapping data for a city? Pay to collect it, and upload it to the DataWiki. In return you get all the other cities other companies paid for (sort of like a company contributing device drivers to the Linux kernel).

For centuries, companies have made money in exchange for doing the busy work of collecting, massaging, and publishing factual data. The same was true for encyclopedia data until recently. Taylor is definitely onto something, but it presents some real data collection challenges. The open-source community is sure to take up the challenge.

The question is, will the companies that already have the data be of assistance? It’s not exactly in their best financial interest to give away their content, but the example of Wikipedia should give them the incentive to press the pause button.

See also: Sarah Perez discusses where to find open data on the Web, such as CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), OpenStreetMap and Freebase.

At the beginning of April, I met with VoiceCloud CEO Gerald Marolda to take a tour of the company’s voice mail-to-SMS service. VoiceCloud, which relies on human translators instead of software to transcribe calls, competes with Spinvox, SimulScribe, and CallWave.

A month ago at CTIA Wireless, the hatchling service was just being introduced. Now everyone is invited to try. From the Web site, enter the invite code, “cloud,” and your phone details to get started. Users will be able to test the application free of charge for about a month, Marolda says, before a pricing structure is imposed.

Related: Voice-to-text services seek a human touch.

The recently passed energy act is a boon for ethanol. But other biofuels, including plant-derived fossil fuel look-alikes, are also poised to get a boost.

A handful of companies are using different approaches to designing synthetic versions of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. They include including LS9, Amyris Biotechnologies, Codexis, and J. Craig Venter-founded Synthetic Genomics.

These biofuels, which some refer to as “renewable petroleum,” will be designed with the same properties of hydrocarbons that now fuel our vehicles, but be made from biomass, rather than petroleum.

Custom-designed synthetic fuels are very appealing to established fossil fuel providers because, unlike ethanol, they should not require significant changes to the existing fuel infrastructure, said Nathanael Greene, a biofuels policy analyst at the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC).

“I think (fuel providers) are going to dramatically step up efforts to find different molecules because…the stuff they have to do at their own facilities (to handle ethanol) is really a nontrivial cost,” Greene said. “I think they are eager to find a more fungible fuel within their system.”

The recently passed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that there be 36 billion gallons of domestic biofuel production per year by 2022, with 20 billion coming from non-corn based, or “advanced,” biofuels.

Established fuel companies have varying levels of commitment to biofuels. Even General Motors is stepping up its commitment to biofuels with an investment, announced Sunday, in ethanol company Coskata.

Shell, for example, has a partnership with cellulosic ethanol maker Iogen, and it has also invested in Codexis, a company that is designing a specialty enzyme to make synthetic biofuels.

But ethanol requires separate tanks and blending facilities while properly designed sythetic hydrocarbons should be able to function within the existing infrastructure.

Neil Renninger, senior vice president of development and co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies, said his company’s technology allows it to optimize fuels with certain characteristics, such as the ability to operate at low temperatures and emissions.

He spoke at the EmTech Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last September, where he said that processes to make these advanced biofuels will be ready within three or four years.

“All we’re doing is changing the metabolic pathways so that it no longer makes ethanol, it makes a hydrocarbon,” Renninger said. “You define a fuel molecule that looks more like gasoline.”

(For more on synthetic biology and its adherents, click here.)

Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to open a search technology center in Europe as it seeks to bolster its Live Search efforts.

The center is slated to open sometime during Microsoft’s next fiscal year, which begins on July 1, and a review of potential sites is under way. The site will be modeled after Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Beijing, China, which opened in 2005.

With these international search centers, Microsoft is looking to dive deep into understanding the consumer search habits, methods, preferences of local residents.

“Searchers have different expectations and experiences in every geography in the world, so we believe it is critical to make deep investments in physical locations in multiple markets to ensure that we’re applying the best local expertise to our research and development efforts,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president of the Search, Portal and Advertising Group, said in a statement.

Microsoft plans to build on its previous projects in Europe, where it has been working on enterprise search via its $1.2 billion acquisition this year of Fast Search & Transfer SA.

The software giant currently reaches 68 percent of Internet users in Europe via its online assets and display advertising, said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft’s Platforms and Services Division president.

Your brain lies to you, says the NY Times in an Op-ed piece about the upcoming elections. For me, the article illuminates some of the implications of the social-media world where information flies at you from every direction. You don’t know what’s true or false and odds are you can’t handle the volume of information in a manner that lets you process it effectively.

Basically you hear or learn something, the brain processes it multiple times and by the time its fully part of your brain you’ve forgotten where it came from.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.

I find myself following my Twitter list and posting my own inanities having little to no idea if there are implications or if what anyone posts is actually true. This requires a level of diligence that the brain isn’t necessarily prepared to deal with as well as a level of attention that goes beyond being a communications utility and into a part-time job.

Personally, this Twitter thing was fun for a while but it has become a burden.

ScrnShots is a community for hosting screenshots. It’s a companion to a desktop application that will grab and automatically upload in a similar fashion to Plasq’s Skitch. Both sites have a social element, with commenting and tracking popular shots. The big difference is that ScrnShots is cross platform and will work on both Macs and PCs. You can also simply use it as an image host if you’re using another screenshot utility like TechSmith’s SnagIt, or OS X’s Grab.

The service launched in private beta back in April, and has since opened up to everyone. I’ve been exploring it this morning and have come across quite a few gems just from its discovery pages, which like Flickr will highlight some of the more interesting shots based on community involvement either in page views or comments. If you find something you like, or would like to share one you’ve taken, there’s a simple embed option to stick it on a blog or social-networking page. One thing to note is that these embeds are for specific sizes only, either close to full-size or a small thumbnail, like I’ve embedded below.

For power users, the integrated desktop applications offer the convenience of uploading without having to visit the site. You can also do things like add URLs and related tags–the latter of which is made far easier on the
Mac version, as it will pull up tags you’ve used in the past and auto-complete them for you as you begin to type. Both sit in your system bar and can be called upon no matter what application you’re using.

While regular users will bask in this simplicity, ScrnShots isn’t the perfect solution for bloggers, what I consider to be ScrnShots’ target audience. It’s missing a way to annotate and edit your shots. Skitch and SnagIt offer this, and I find it a hugely helpful feature–especially for some of the shots I take and use for my posts on here. Also missing is a way to set up captions and credit on shots that are embedded elsewhere, meaning site owners will have to set up custom CSS and coding into the embedded item if they want to do either of those two things. Until it gets these features I wouldn’t ditch SnagIt or Skitch just yet.

Related: Iterasi goes live with personal Web-archiving tool