I love you too, APK. But my heart is promised to another.

Newegg got really cheap on packaging too. I'm OK with Amazon for the stuff I'd buy from Newegg if they can avoid that mistake.

All I'm talking about here is what sounds better to me, for my personal purchase. I've heard DACs bad enough to matter, just as I've used patch cables bad enough to matter. Avoiding that without audiophile pricing is my goal.

It does make a lot of sense. Windows phone outsells iPhone in the more price-sensitive areas of Europe, but hasn't seen the same traction in Asia. Getting app parity is a different story, of course, but MS did finally get the big commercial shops onboard. Now it just needs to be easy for the hobbyist to write apps, as it is for Android.

I really wish MS would step up and officially support C# on Android, and cross-platform dev in VS (third parties actually sell this today, c'mon MS). Anything I wrote at home I'd like to be as cross-platform as possible so my friends (the only audience for my hobby coding) could all use it! Much as I like C# in VS, I need at least Android side-loading as a target platform, and ideally iPhone too.

No, just worded it badly. Everyone tries to match pricing with each other - the pricing is the same at every commercial cloud storage vendor, and S3 is the easiest to check.

The two real players for "consumer cloud drive" with consumer friendly APIs are Google Drive and OneDrive (I guess it's called now). If the price for drives-in-bulk had come down or something, you'd see it reflected in S3 and Azure, so this is something different.

Either this is a loss leader now for Google, or they're monetizing the heck out of the content.

I can tell the difference between the DACs built into my (similarly-priced) amps. Too many variables to control for, of course, but something was certainly better, and I doubt is was the amp section since that's so easy to get right these days.

That being said, chips get better, and I can believe the price just came down (the ones I have are high power because they're "class A" (constant power) in the way they build the analog out, but I suspect that was just the easiest approach at the time).

I find it quite suspicious in this exact way, because the price cut is for Google Drive specifically, and not for S3 , which is still priced at 0.068/GB-Month, more than 3x this price. Commercial cloud storage has always cost more than the consumer "cloud drives", but clearly they expect to see some other forms of profit from this.

If they had dropped S3 pricing, I would have been looking for some tech breakthrough instead.

(By comparison, S3 and Azure storage pricing are effectively the same, but Skydrive is about 0.04/GB-Month past the free 7 GB).

You can't really make that work for solar. You won't be shipping power 20,000 km from dayside to nightside, regardless of how much you generate.

I think that there's a lot to be said for solar thermal + thermal power storage (at industrial scale), but it's more expensive than current sources so I wouldn't advocate rushing into it.

Second recommendation for that -thanks. But I don't understand USB audio - am I going to be blocked by driver issues on say a old android tablet, or a Windows phone, or some other obscure platform?

Wow, you have such admiration for the Emperor's clothes - very perceptive and loyal of you! How wise to ignore the fools who can't see his wonderful new clothes.

The variation in hearing, much like in the frequencies our eyes can see, is minimal before our ears get damaged by city living, because it naturally pushes the limits of the physics involved.

CD is good enough for someone with good hearing, which realistically is far about what anyone over 20, or anyone who has lived in a city, will ever need. (There's some arguments for 48 kHz vs 44, but almost everyone who thinks they can hear that difference is fooling themselves - the overlap between e.g., teenaged Bushmen who have never seen a city and audiophile buyers is probably 0).

Read the link. Seriously.

A good ADC will sample at a much higher frequency, do a very steep digital band pass filter, not limited by coils and capacitors, then compress.

Sure, you can't just naively sample at 44 kHz, which is why it's not done that way. But 16 x 44 kHz at the end of the process, after ADC and mastering and mixing, really is perfect.

Undertones doesn't mean what you want it to mean.

The bottom octave (20-40 Hz) is mostly felt, not heard, but high power subwoofers are cheap as high-end audio gear goes. It's really easy to be accurate within human discrimination for that octave, you just need a whacking great amp built into most of em) and neighbors who don't live close.

You really, really don't want subsonics reproduced. While the "brown note" may not be real, subsonics can do similarly messed-up stuff to you.

Seriously, read that link. This is engineering; you can learn it.

I'm not familiar with USB audio - I assume that means it won't work with my gear because there won't be a driver for the OS (because that's what I assume about everything). Is that a stupid assumption?