Title typo, yo! It's spelled "space." Cheers.

Looks like a guitar/recording effect features on Bowie's space oddity or any radiohead from OK computer onward. Tape delay units are pricey and much in demand on ebay. I can see why homebrew would be an attractive option. Popular commercially produced examples include the Roland Space Echo and the echoplex. Bonus points if it has vacuum tubes in it. http://www.loopersdelight.com/history/Loophist.html

I think that how we value fine art can be largely set by context--the act of a curator setting a painting or sculpture up in an large room signals to us to dig deeper and try and process the image. We are bombarded by sounds and images on the street, and unless we have gone to the trouble to cultivate an appreciation for something, we will likely dismiss anything we find in the street as marketing or amateur work that could not find a real venue. Some people don't look at graffiti (I do) as something worthy of attention.

A curator is telling us it is ok to stop and look because the image might not immediately grab us, but might reward viewing. Allegedly we are in for a sublime experience, should we be sufficiently cultured to appreciate it. Woe to she who notices that the emperor might not be wearing clothes. It is mediated experience. Art galleries are selling a high end product of limited utility, but a product nonetheless.

"Graphic design," as opposed to fine art, is typically seen on the street and goes for high impact visuals that readily and immediately convey their message. This experiment is kind of like comparing a 3 minute 14 second pop song to Stravinski. What the artist has done is hide high art in the guise of low art. It is a fun experiment that hopefully will make some people think about how they take in the world around them and why and how they let people dictate what they are supposed to enjoy. You know, stop and smell the flowers, and all that.

As opposed to the Federal 9th Circuit which just stated that the Federales can search ones laptop at the border sans warrant just as if it is your luggage.
http://volokh.com/posts/1208829306.shtml

107th! ...sorry.

The gallery was just reopened after many years of restoration. Other highlights include the enclosed courtyard with the wavy glass roof (picture here: http://americanart.si.edu/index3.cfm )
as well as the Colbert portait, a freaky portait of john Brown, and the allegedly possesed statue known as "Black Aggie."

Scroll down for a picture in one of Aggie's former outside locations. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/agnes.asp

For listening to other people's music, treat the corner with some of the DIY ideas mentioned here, or just don't put them in a corner if you can avoid it. If you go too far with tuning your apartment with bass traps, hanging acoustic panels and mass damp vinyl, then it can look really ugly.

You can also either buy some sort of real time analyzer (RTA) on ebay or hire some dude to come in and tune your room/make adjustments to the EQ on each amp channel to compensate for this too. (or just listen to a record you know well and bugger with the eq on each channel yourself.

This route has fallen out of favor though, because it gets you very localized results. If you move a few inches one way or the other, the results begin to vary wildly. So it doesn't work well if you don't do your listening in exactly the same spot every time, but it might help a little in combination with a homemade bass traps in that corner.

For your recording purposes, it doesn't sound like you are recording a bosendorfer with a stereo Neumann into a Neve or API desk, so just get the rig sounding OK on a record that you already know well. Then get a pair of crappy speakers and a pair of crappy earbuds so that you can simulate how it will sound on people's computer speakers or ipod headphones--the most prevalent listening environment for city-dwellers. Always use several different monitors when mixing. You stuff might sound great on some nice speakers, but then might not translate well to the white ipod buds. In the "industry" Mastering engineers work to avoid this, but I assume you are doing it all yourself on your laptop, so...

Well, I do allow some adjustment for inflation since I came up with this rule in the mid-90s, but I've found that when I seriously break this rule, I always end up buying much more guitar/bass than I need and I'm afraid to really play it or keep it out of it's case. I always end up selling the nice one's in favor of made in china/korea cheapo guitars. If you want an investment, you are generally better off putting your money-somewhere--anywhere-other than in musical instruments. Does Berkshire Hathaway stock up on Gibsons every year when they come out? Hell no.

I'm no luthier, but the guitars of 40 years ago were made when you could get better (rarer/more endangered) woods than are available today. They were far less mass-produced. The guitars from 20 years ago are often cheap, with the companies having been sullied by the era's merger & acquisition frenzy--that's why everyone looks for "pre-CBS" Fender guitars. Even if you followed Leo Fender from fender to music man to G & L, those are great guitars but the values haven't increased all that much for anything besides fender.

Nevre pay more than $400 for a guitar unless you play it for a living.

I had the galaxy explorer and have passed it along to my nephews. I need to get around to having some kids so that I can play with these again. I had some of those ugly apce lego sets that you posted too.

DC meter maids are notorious for ticketing you twice for the same offense, but not putting anything on your car so that you don't know you have an offense and are in default. Then one gets booted the next time they get you. "Street cleaning" is the usual offense--never mind that they don't clean the streets and that half of the signs mentioning the forbidden times have been knocked down or are faded to illegibility. DC also uses the newfangled scanners so that a car can drive around at 4 am and scan the plates of everyone on a street and auto generate tickets.

I used to live in Boston and the meter maids would patrol back and forth on a two block stretch and issue rounds of $100 tickets, mostly to delivery vans that double parked, but also to the people parking in meter spots that are for impracticably short periods of time.

magic missle!

If you really want an expensive gear habit, try starting a recording studio. The extinction of audiophilia is coming from many angles, though there will always be a place for it. As aluded to in the articles, digital consumer formats are lacking--songs are overly compressed in the mastering stage to compete with other artists' songs, and then songs are subjected to some rather lossy file compression that kills the highs and lows, and the are played back on an ipod on crappy earbuds. It's good enough for me when I am on the subway, but it is kind of sad to see the bar being lowered industry wide.

The other factor affecting things is the slow death of the professional recording studio. Basically this means a somewhat fixed number of "classic" records for audiophiles to listen to. The studio business is a very hard business to be in these days, absent a trust fund. Anyone with a laptop and garageband can cut a demo, but since the means of production have been delivered to the people, there isn't enough money to support very many decent recording studios which have tuned control rooms and tracking rooms to reduce standing waves, floating floors, german tube microphones, optical compressors, tea boys, tape delays, vintage instruments in decent repair, etc.

So the number of places that can produce a decent recording worth listening to on your expensive stuff is dwindling. I would argue that there is a class divide between audiophiles and the more populist projects that get into the expensive studios. The industry motive is to produce more of whatever just sold a bunch of records, i.e. cookie cutter. The labels can afford to use the good studios, but how many audiophiles listen to the stuff that sells? Anyone waiting for Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park on 180 gram vinyl?

What do audiophiles listen too? Somebody said prog, which makes sense. I'd have to guess there are some classical and opera snobs out there with some sweet gear. I've heard that there's a glut of classical recordings out there, so there's little market for more of it. Mozart isn't writing anything new and we already have numerous "definitive" recordigns of his major works.

A lot of the good indie stuff was recorded on inexpensive equipment--take Elliot Smith's earlier albums for example-I think that was all done on a serviceable Otari MX 5050 1/2 inch 8 track. A lot of artists do their best work on their way up, when they are still recording on budget-minded equipment.

Hip/hop and raggeatron afficienados often spend a lot of money on audio gear for their cars, as I can attest from having my third floor apartment consumed by what's playing in the car waiting at the nearby stoplight. That isn't about finesse--it's more about power and bass response. They are equally as driven to achieve sonic excellence as the prog rock listening dude with $350,000 speakers, but their goals are much different. The songs themselves are composed of scratchy samples and digital source material (midi synths), so it's not like you need to have crisp frequency response. Usually there aren't any acoustical instruments on the tracks. This segment of audiophiles is going to be present for a while-maybe even growing. But they aren't the dicks who own the $350,000 speakers in the picture above.

Therev said "The mastering engineer is the one twisting the knobs to create the loudness, but I wouldn't say they are responsible."

-You are correct--I should have worded it a bit differently. Many mastering engineers make their reputation by not indulging the clients-- producers, A & R, and artists-- in the proliferation of loundess. By loudness, I mean the lack of dynamic range rather than the actual decible levels. Though I think some mastering guys do make their reputation on producing the "loudest" records.

Jeff Lipton in Boston (peerless mastering) is one guy I know of who foams at the mouth about the evils of removing all of the dynamic range from the performances. Squashing the levels to the max undoes a lot of the work of the artists and recording engineers and eliminates a lot of the details. It also makes music a lot harder to listen to for an extended period. I haven't seen any hard studies, but a lot of engineers believe that ear fatigue results from either excess volume or a lack of dynamics (at any volume). The theory is that when your brain is processing audio, it needs a break from the steady loud stuff or it'll get burned out and get sick of listening to music very quickly.

There are a few more distinctions one could make. There are many forms of compression and it occurs at a number of stages. Here's some distinctions between dynamic range compression and digital audio encoding/compression: The former is used in recording and mastering stages of a project. Imagine a karaoke singer who gets too close and then too far away from the microphone while singing-it varies between distorted cookie monster vocals and distant warbling. A dynamic compressor in this situation is like having someone with very fast hand on a volume knob to turn down the level of the microphone when there are sudden spikes of input and turn up the level to prolong sustained notes and make the quieter passages louder.

Digital audio compression is used at the very end of the recording process to reduce the file size of a finished mix more than ten fold by getting rid of unnecessary data or replacing it with a sort of digital shorthand of what was there. Dynamic range compression is primarily concerned with regulating decibel levels and the digital compression with regulating file size. Volume adjustment in the MP3 encoding context would be better described as normalization, which adjusts tracks to have the same average volume upon playback. Audio compression (in recording and mastering) is more concerned with adjusting peaks and valleys.

Stages at which dynamic range compression is used:
1). Musician, 2). Recording engineer (noted for their sallow pale skin), 3). Mastering engineer (often a different guy in a separate studio; the ones responsible for the loudness wars), 4). whoever converts the file to an MP3 or other digital format. Producers can jump in and strong-arm any of the above into enhancing or compromising the overall sound by overcompressing. Finally, if audio is played on the radio, it is pumped through some really expensive compressor to make all the songs the same level and to get it to fit in their radio bandwidth.

Compression is used at every stage of the recording process. Bass players sometimes plug into one before their line signal makes it to their amp to make things sound consistent. Recording engineers route microphone signals into compressors to prevent their levels from overloading the recording medium, since there isn't usually a volume knob on a drum set. Signals are also compressed to alter the sound or to trigger other microphones once a certain dynamic level is reached via a "sidechain." (examples would be vocals on either David Bowie's Hero's or Nirvana's In Utero)

Compressing room microphones can alter the listener's perception of how large the room is. Compressing a kick drum or bass guitar can affect the attack and sustain of the instrument, greatly enhancing the sound. All this is done by the recording engineer, generally with a light hand, in the "tracking" phase of recording--just focusing on getting good performances to tape or hard drive without worrying about adding a lot of effects. Recording to analog tape at "hot" levels produces tape compression, which some listeners find more appealing than digital recording. Digital clipping is all you get if you put protools into the red.

Then there is the mixing phase where reverb, delay, other effects, and compression are added. Maybe some digital pitch correction comes into play to fix up people's vocals if the singer sucks at staying in tune. At this phase, engineers and producers often monitor on several speaker systems. A nice expensive pair (maybe some Genelecs), a low-level pair (the discontinued Yamaha NS-10s were common), and a nasty sounding pair, often from radio shack. Tom Waits listens to mixes on his car stereo. When all of the individual tracks are mixed into a stereo 2 channel or 5.1 mix, compression is also used at this stage.

This mix then goes off to a mastering engineer, who applies equalization and really expensive compression which can both be adjusted by frequency. So you can compress the high end a little and the low end a lot, or whatever you want. These guys are the ones whose work fuels the "loudness war"--who wants their track to be quieter than the next one in an ipod? The mastering guys are kind of sick of squashing all of the dynamic range out of recordings, but that is a whole other story. They make your loud rock track the same volume as the emo acoustic track.