I have just set up a brand new pair of HomePods, 2nd Generation. I made sure I got all the updates and everything done, and this evening I am sitting on the sofa listening to some music.
It went through my mind how my late grandfather was taken aback by CDs when they first appeared in the second half of the 1980s. I got my first CD player in 1987, and my grandparents had come to visit. I wonder what he would make of this technology now when I don’t have to move off the sofa all evening; where I don’t even have to lift a finger, but just tell Siri what I want to hear next.
OK, it’s not perfect. Apple Music might state that they have 100 million tracks on offer these days, but there are still a few old favourites that the streaming services have passed by. Nevertheless, it’s a fun evening, and, for me, mostly preferable to the TV!
Some of you may wonder what the heck scrobbling is. It’s a method of keeping track what music you listen to, using a service provided by Last.fm You can share your played list with others; you can get suggestions of what else you might like based on your listening choices and it’s a fun way to generate some statistics to look back on as the years go by.
Now I used to scrobble most of what I play when I used Spotify. When I switched to Apple Music the process became unreliable, as Apple Music will only add tuns that you have in your library and not a regular stream.
Now, though, having got some excellent IEMs for Christmas, I have decided to switch streaming again. This time I am going to a Tidal HiFi account. I couldn’t hear the difference on my iPhone before but with these new buds I certainly can. I already could hear the difference between Apple’s AAC stream and Tidal’s CD quality on my desktop but I tend to do most of my listening when on my phone.
For those of you that would like to follow my eclectic musical tastes you can find my scrobbles here
Oh, in case you’re wondering, the IEMs I got for Christmas are the excellent RHA T20i. They are certainly an improvement on my old Bose QC15 cans. There’s no noise canceling but as the noise isolation is so good it’s not really needed. Noise leakage is superb too. I hate sitting next to people with cheap buds and you can hear that tinny sound that’s leaking out and I don’t want to be guilty of that myself. I tend to drive my buds quite hard too.
Here’s to a musical 2019 with plenty of new discoveries!
