The Gloaming

The Gloaming carves new paths connecting the rich Irish folk tradition and the New York contemporary music scene. From haunting sean-nós songs to raucous folk explosions, they make music that is both ancient and utterly new. Their debut album 'The Gloaming' is something special and I highly recommend it...

Emma Stenbeck

Recently met mPHATic who has 30 years or more in the music business and has previously released a 'chill out' style album (see Mphatic on Facebook and check out his album 'Asutra' on iTunes). mPHATic is also a recording engineer & producer and has been working with Emma Stenbeck, another promising new NZ talent. Emma has recently released a single off what will be her first album once released, its called Something About You (available on iTunes) and is pretty damn good! Emma's next single is due out in July, and her EP will hopefully be out sometime in the near future after that on iTunes (and hopefully CD). Emma has done some earlier demos and such as well, including several covers, prior to working on this album and you can hear those on Soundcloud and MySpace (and some are also on YouTube). But the new single (and album) is the one to watch - try it out on iTunes!

Ethernet vs. USB for Streaming

The Sonore SOtM (Soul Of the Music) sMS-100 is an excellent Network Music Streamer that connects via Ethernet and outputs Aysnchronous USB to your DAC. It supports Vortexbox/LMS SqueezeLite, Apple Airplay, DLNA, and MPD.

In the past those of us streaming digital source material to our music systems have used S/PDIF via Optical or Co-Ax (in fact many still do from CD Transports where resolution is only 16/44 – 16 bit 44 kHz). In more recent years there has been a move to USB as the preferred source for streaming into external DAC (Digital-analogue Converters) devices or Amplifiers and AV Receivers with built in DACs. This has been due to the rise of Asynchronous USB support – and improvements in computer O/S (operating Systems) serving the source data to the DAC. However one question now is whether Asynchronous USB is still the best, or whether network streaming across a (cabled) Ethernet network (or even a high reliability Wi-Fi one) is now the better option?