- I was recently listening to a local radio station here in the San Francisco Bay Area, KPFA, and I heard something that got me thinking. The host was mentioning how much attention KPFA pays to sound quality- something you’d expect from a medium that deals entirely in sound. Moreover, the show receives phone calls all the time from guests and the sound quality tends to be anywhere on the poor to lousy side (guests call on their cell phones with frequent poor reception).
So one day the the host received a personal call from his wife and was shocked at how clear and vivid the sound of her voice seemed. Outside of talking to his wife in person- he hadn’t ever experienced her voice (or anybody elses) so clearly over the phone before. He asked what she was calling on. It turned out she had bought an old rotary phone from a thrift store and was calling him on that. The analogue sound quality over that rotary phone was far better than any modern touch phone or cell phone in existence…
- I love the raw and warm sound from cigar box guitars.. I’ve been inspired by Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing.com to make my own guitar one of these days. With the guidance from Bill Jehle’s excellent DVD: How to Build a Guitar: the String Stick Box Method and the social network of cigar box guitar makers at Cigar Box Nation, I’m hoping to take on building one of my own soon.
-If you haven’t heard of them- please check out SolarEar. They are an amazing company that manufactures and designs the first solar powered hearing aid. They education, train, and hire young deaf people to make the devices. I’m the voice of their twitter account: http://twitter.com/SolarEar.









