We seem to be marching at a dizzying clip toward the fusion of media, and discs like Play and Guero offer us a taste of the media-gumbo that is likely to emerge. It’s fun to imagine what effect this might have on our visual literacy. Peter Gabriel brings artists like Robert LePage into our homes, and D-Fuse gives us art house abstraction.
As Rubinson mentions often in his “Music in the Round” column, the explosion of home theater has been good and bad for audiophiles. The rapid developments in hardware technology and sound processing algorithms has put mid-fi sound well within reach of most budgets. But as TV monitors and projection screens — the new focal point of most systems — have grown and grown, our front speakers have moved further and further apart. And that does bad things to the fidelity of good two-channel music.