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Before I started Love + Gratitude (cuz it's only a week after the first shot at it - sorry bout' that folks ) I made a tactical error in judgement: I remembered that Recondite, one of my favorite electronic artists (writer, engineer, DJ & Superman;) had either just finished an Essential Mix (long-running DJ mix series) or was about to release it.

After the madness (and I mean, literally BTW) ensued following my separation, I found myself driving back to Los Angeles. I didn't have a plan, no place to sleep arranged yet, nothin'. So, naturally, this was a bit of a nightmare for my OCD brain,

Movements are too big for ANY one website, online publication, forum, show/convention, person, or group. A movement is about the power of the many (or the few) that make up that community: The people whose ideas and passions are so aligned their power is gained together, organically over-time.

What a long, strange trip it's been. I've wanted to start an on-going, diary-like series for too long now. I'll be the first one to say that Transcendence For The Rest of Us was indeed a work-in-progress (the Mike Drop I started on September 25th, but I was far too overloaded with other work to keep the flow there) but it quickly morphed into something else.

[a]pendics.shuffle: The name jumped off the screen during some late-night online record shopping. One day I'll share about the site itself, as I'm on there often - but admittedly I'm very protective of the outfit: For selfish reasons of course: The spot's usually got wicked underground electronic tunes (on vinyl, CD and hi-rez downloads via FLAC & .WAV).

I love experiencing great sounding music. It's my favorite drug. The high is everlasting, and the withdrawals are nothing compared to chemicals flowing through my bloodstream. When the music stops, when I have to take a break from it (maybe I'm not in my car, or in my room, and my attention is required elsewhere, and music is not a welcome accompaniment during that time period) the great thing is I don't suffer physical withdrawals like I did when I was a dope-fiend ("dope" as in heroin, smack, or Oxycontin). Sure, I've messed with all sorts of drugs, and I don't wanna get too deeply into that here, as I probably said too much already! But music is the only one that I can return to every-time without blowing up the world around me! Now, when I say music is my favorite drug, I mean it's my favorite natural stimulant. Now, there are dangers when experimenting with any drug, natural or chemical, and music is like a narcotic for my soul. And I love narcotics! So, believe me when I say that music literally saved my life more than once.

OccupyHifi readers know it's been a trying year for me. Ok, that's puttin' it rather mildly. Pardon my French, but it's been a clusterfuck of a year: Divorce after 20-yrs of partnership (as if that isn't difficult enough) while I was trying to walk-through many years of shared memories with my former partner, dodging the shrapnel that break-up left all over the place, surrounding its vast blast radius; I ended-up hearin' about all sorts of rumors and innuendo making their rounds through-out the high-end and personal audio communities .

If you ever get tired of the way I choose to express the strange, wonderful, and occasionally morose journeys in my Hi-fi life here at Occupyhifi - I'm sorry I can't be more straight-up and editorial-like for ya. There are plenty of solid Hi-fi magazines and websites out there full of that. I even write for a couple of em, and I love that too.

I love writing about what we audio geeks call "reference-level" audio components. By reference-level we mean state-of-the-art, "reference" meaning close to referencing the real thing: The sound of music in real time and space.

I cherished this spectacular article Harry Pearson wrote for his HPSoundings blog a couple years ago about his stereo systems being Time Machines. It was like he channeled my brain directly for that piece, because I feel the same way about my systems: Headphone and stereo in-room.

I needed music tonight, and I needed something new. As I drove home in the early-morning hours, cruising at the kinda speed that says to the world: I just don't...

Miles has clocked plenty of game-time since Part I of our Bass for Miles column here at OccupyHifi. So I thought it was time to head over to Fort Miles (a.k.a Miles room at his mothers house, where his first-rate PC Gaming lair is located) and speak with Miles in his element. Admittedly, I had other motives: Like experiencing Star Wars Battlefront on Miles gaming system with my beloved Audeze LCD-X open-back planar headphones with the SubPac S2 radiating low-end through my bones as I waged war against the Dark Side.

If you've been following my OccupyHifi On-The-Road series, you know it's been a crazy, shit, I'm sorry, it's been a crazy muthafuckin' year! OK, so I got it outta my system straight out the gate. If you can't move past that bullshit I still can't help you. Stop hatin' and move on to the polite section of the interwebs. I tried to hide how heavily this twenty-year divorce journey affected me earlier on Occupy.

Miles Stratton is a dedicated PC Gamer. He's also the son of Russ Stratton, (VP of Audio/Video Systems at the Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society) and a dear friend of mine. Russ is also a diehard audiophile and fellow music addict.

It's that time of year again! I've been spendin' weeks gearin' up for my favorite audio show: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. This show has always meant far more to me than the gear displayed or even the music played. It's a time to see good friends whose paths I don't cross too often, maybe because of geography, maybe because we're too damn busy for phone calls, but the bottom line is RMAF has always been more about the people than high fidelity - at least to me.

It's a rarity, watching an audio company take the type of user-oriented action we've been editorializing about here at OccupyHifi for awhile now (long before our own blog - back when Occupy Hifi was a featured column at The High Fidelity Report ). But leave it to our friends at JH Audio for comin' out swingin' with their brand-new JH Crew Program!

I'm not sure I can keep the fact that, at forty, I'm going through a separation following a marriage that's lasted half my life from my readers. Do I have a choice? Though I'm doin' all this "work on myself" to keep movin' forward, that inescapable fact is always lurkin' in my mind. I'm no Yoda.

f you're into dance music and you haven't heard of The Chemical Brothers, well, I was gonna say you gotta be livin' under a rock. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to tell ya to stop smokin' so much rock, and open your eyes.

I love it when people get their "sheeple" on, especially in a niche group. One person says something isn't comfortable, and ten hours later there's a thread somewhere reaching out to this headphone company, addressing the clamping force issue on that user's set of cans. Users justifiably request better padding in the headband.