Week notes 7: Deepavali

I made a resolution to stay away from Sugar last week. It was a pretty brave thing to do considering it was the week of Deepavali and there was bound to be gratuitous sweets everywhere.

Needless to say, I caved in and ate everything. Anyway, with Deepavali out of the way I have resolved to stay away from Sugar going forward. I watched this documentary called The Truth about Sugar. It is 4 years old and it does not say anything I did not know already but I found the visual approach to sugar interesting. It is definitely worth a watch.

I have been into Audio and HiFi lately. I need to write a separate post about it. I got to attend a workshop conducted by Headphone Zone on Saturday. It was a listening workshop where we put on some expensive headphones and had an instructor point out the aspects that we ought to be listening for in a track. I loved the hands-on approach and I do think I have a better grasp of the sound technicalities to look for while listening - Direction, Separation, Dynamic range, Intimacy, Speed and Freequency Response. The Stax setup I was listening to costed 4.5 lakhs (!) and I got a chance to listen to it for a good 2 hours. That was pretty sweet. I feel like I now have a benchmark to compare against.

I also confirmed another thing that I long suspected. The audio quality of Apple Music is definitely better than Spotify Premium, Youtube, Saavn etc. I haven't tried Amazon music but I suspect that it will be similar to Apple music because it also uses AAC which is a superior format compared to OGG Vorbis, which is an open source format used by Spotify. Considering music streaming is the only thing Spotify does, I wish they paid attention to this.

Apart from this, I watched Kaithi. I thought the first half was tight and well done. It started becoming a little loose in the second half. Considering how less there is in the film, I found my interest sagging. But overall I found it to be a lean, well directed film.

I also started watching Tatami Galaxy. It is great fun. Masaaki Yuasa is the most interesting director in Anime at the moment for me. I should probably write a separate post about his work sometime.