Hello, everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe and you’re in the passenger seat with me. It’s passenger seat radio. It is January 21 2022. And we are in my hot tub on my lunch hour and welcome to the show. Well, I figured, you know, my lunch hour consists of a couple of things these days. So I eat like a protein bowl, I get on the Arc Trainer for 30 minutes, I spent 20 minutes in the Jacuzzi. And then I take a five minutes shower that pretty much covers my whole lunch hour. And I thought well, instead of sitting in the hot during my lunch hour reading the news or doing whatever, I figured out what the hell let’s do a show today. I don’t have to I don’t have to sit here and veg the whole time. I got 20 minutes we could do some good stuff with that. So I got stuff to catch up on. So it all works out. Well, let’s start off with of course the big news of the day today. Well, I don’t know if it’s big news for everybody but it is to me. The legendary singer performer meatloaf is dead. Yes, meatloaf is gone. Died at 74. The reason has not been disclosed. But I was a fan of meatloaf. And it’s not that long ago we lost Jim Steinman which of course was the sort of the, the writing part of that duo of the meatloaf Jim Steinman duo. And so we lost him recently now we’ve lost. We’ve lost a meatloaf. I guess Louie Anderson died today. It’s it’s just it’s it’s been a bad couple of years for losing people that matter to my generation. And I guess you know, that’s the way it is. And it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. But yeah, a couple of minutes in, in silence for meatloaf. Who, by the way, my favorite song of meatloaf is rock’n’roll dreams come through. And that music video is always one of my favorites. Because I thought it was really well shot it was shot in a really interesting way. And it also starred a very young, maybe teen or pre teen even Angelina Jolie. So if you haven’t seen that video in 35 years, then go check it out. And you’ll see Angelina Jolie is the runaway in that video. So there’s my obituary for meatloaf, rest in peace rest in peace you’ve earned you’ve earned your slumber. Say hi to Jim. You guys can go in be bad out of hills and have so let’s see, what else do I have here? I had a bunch of stuff carried over. I want to try to keep doing the the time timely stuff first. But let me see what I got here. My hands are all wet now. Okay, so let’s talk about the other interesting news that’s happened recently. Depending on what side of the farm you’re on, this may be great news for you or it might be crappy news for you. And that is of course Microsoft. Just spent like $70 billion buying Activision lock stock and barrel. And when you say Activision, you’re talking about Blizzard Entertainment along with all the other subsidiaries that fall under the Activision umbrella, which is a lot of big IPs. Just from Blizzard alone, they get things like they get things like Overwatch, they get things like World of Warcraft, Starcraft, from the Activision side they get the Call of Duty franchise. It’s a it’s a big acquisition from you know, one of really, you know, there’s not that many major players anymore, right? I mean, in every single one of them seems to have to open their own Digital Locker right. So Ubisoft has their own EA has their own. Course Activision had Blizzard net. Microsoft has its Xbox system. Sony has the PlayStation Store the PlayStation Network. So, but but really, you know, there’s only a handful of these real big name players left of course Nintendo does their own thing. But my point is, much like Disney. Microsoft, just in general, let’s just talk about large corporations in general are soaking up everything and everybody they can in a given field. You know, Facebook has been doing it with the VR stuff.
Everybody’s, we’re gonna we’re gonna get to a really bad place here. Now listen, if if you had to put me in one camp or the other, either Xbox or Playstation, I would most certainly say I’m an Xbox guy. I’m a PC gamer, which means I am beholden to Microsoft Windows and their ecosystem. So for me knowing that Overwatch and presumably Overwatch to Diablo and some of the other franchises that I actually give a rat’s ass about still are going to be in the hands of the people that own sort of, you know, my gaming ecosystem that’s that’s not a bad thing necessarily for me. Now, I am not held Holy hell Travis is here hello Jeremy. Welcome to the show. What’s going on Travis longtime No See brother so you know you can look at and say if you’re an Xbox person God this is the greatest thing ever we can we can stop letting PlayStation have all the Call of Duty exclusives and time releases and all that other crap. I can tell you as a as an Xbox slash PC gamer. I’ve always been pissed that listen equity, I’m fine, right? If you want to release Call of Duty on every platform, God bless you. That’s what you should be doing. But to say well, PlayStation gets SpecOps for the next year. And every single DLC drops first for PlayStation you know, I don’t I don’t like that. Oh, hey, Monica. What’s up? Travis, his lovely wife. She’s a fan of the show, too. So you know, but in reality, listen, none of this is good. If you’re a Disney plus subscriber, it probably you probably love the fact that Disney bought Fox, Disney owns Marvel, Disney frickin owns everything, Hulu, they own it all, ABC, all this stuff belongs to to Disney. And if you’re a Disney plus subscriber, that’s great for you. But somebody gets screwed every single time with these sort of big acquisitions. And frankly, I’m really surprised with the FTC going after Facebook. And all of the scrutiny that’s going on now that Microsoft is allowed to buy one of the last four or five Hey, machine readable? What’s up? The last, you know, four or five big name game developers, Microsoft just absorbed them? And I don’t? I will benefit from it. Oh, so much. But at the same time, I’m not a fan. I don’t think that this was I don’t think this was the right. I don’t think we should be allowing this. I think there is. I think there’s value in competition. I think that there is there is consumer protection in keeping this sort of division going on, frankly. But listen, you know, I’m not going to change anything. I just, I find it. I don’t like the fact that we’re gonna end up having five companies own the entire planet. And if you’re not on board with their shit, then you’re you’re done. You don’t have any options. So I don’t know. I’m not a big fan. But anyway, I thought that was obviously that’s been big news this last week, and I figured we would comment on that. We’ll see how it pans out. God knows if they could fix matchmaking in Overwatch. Maybe get rid of the Blizzard net launcher, and let me run this off of steam or something else? Yeah, maybe I’ll get into Team Xbox or team, Microsoft’s camp. But you know, Microsoft is going back to their old ways. And for a short period of time, I think that Microsoft somehow, oddly enough, sort of became the good guys. Not just gaming, but in general.
You know, free, free Windows updates free this free that they finally got rid of their horrifying browser, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, and they went to a standard chromium based browser, so that everyone’s like, Oh, yeah, look, Microsoft’s are the good guys. It’s Sony. They’re the bad guys. It’s his these guys are the bad guys, whatever. But if you start if you if you’re paying attention to the news, Microsoft is turning back into their good old shitty selves. With that with things like restricting who can run Windows 11, right? That was a big deal. TPM 2.0 You have to have a certain processor, you have to have this you have to have that effectively shutting out a large piece of the marketplace, screwing over small business, PC builders and developers. All sorts of terrible, terrible things that that sort of meant to the industry. Well, it’s Microsoft and the good guys. Well, no, not really. Now their Edge browser is being forced down your throat on Windows 10 and Windows 11 Taking away the abilities and even the workarounds right so it used to be if you could click a button and say make make brave my default browser Life was good. Right and Microsoft didn’t like it and they would it would bitch at you periodically about it, but it was useless. In my body, my choice, right. But then all of a sudden edge became then edge became the default browser. For certain links, they wouldn’t tell you which ones. But certain things would open a web browser in Windows. Now suddenly magically only open an edge. You there’s even if you have a default browser or something else, you’re still screwed. And then somebody came along with I don’t remember, it was a registry hack or something along that lines that would lead the power user, which by the way, we should be able to have some say, in how our operating system runs, runs is configured right? A power user to go into the registry, Joe? Listen, 98% of the public who uses Windows will never do this, they will simply live with the fact that some links open up an edge, right? So a power user comes along and says I need control. I want to be able to have brave open and whatever, whatever files that are open. Microsoft then so normally that would nobody would care Microsoft be like, Yeah, okay, that’s 2% of the people, we don’t care. And then they know, they went back with a Windows Update and patched that power user trick out of the operating system. So now, whether you’re a power user or not, you have no choice. You’re using edge for whatever Microsoft deems that you should be using it for. Along with that they’re putting in apparently there’s sightings of the shopping extinction that gets shoved into edge that you can’t get rid of. It’s Listen, this is this is classic Microsoft and anybody who believe for a minute that that Microsoft are the good guys, or they’ve got your back or they’re the friend of the gamer. Listen, none of these companies are your friends. You know, I talk about Google takedown, Facebook. But let’s be honest, none of these people are our friends. None of these people are, look, none of these people are looking after us are looking out for our best interest. And it’s really sad, the more control falls into the hands of these two or three power entities like Microsoft and Disney, Facebook, we don’t want that. I don’t care how cheap their VR headsets are. I don’t care how great Gmail is. I don’t care that Windows 11 was free. We as consumers need to be paying attention. Because this isn’t this is going to get worse before it gets better. If it gets better at all. You know, the Federal Trade Commission is now got their size. If you’re watching the news right now, the Federal Trade Commission is all over Facebook. Now. Of course, they’re not going after the VR shit, which is where they really should be looking. Because if you want to slam dunk case, look at what Facebook has been doing to the VR marketplace. That’s a slam dunk. But no, no, they’re gonna go after WhatsApp and Instagram. Because that sexy. Oh, Instagram harms the body positive nature of our teens. You know, listen, they don’t have anything that sexy to chase Oculus or or VR for right. So they’re going to go after the sexy story. But you know, it’s like, ah, FTC is not going to back down. These headlines are great. FTC is not going to back down and bend to the will of social media, the FTC as an operating unit, the Federal Trade Commission, their entire staffs budget, a year, their yearly budget for the Federal Trade Commission is on par with three days of Facebook’s profits. Who’s winning this race, who’s got the money to drag this shit out who’s got the money to bury whatever they don’t want found? My point is, is it’s really hard to send a watchdog group after somebody when they have one, one 1,000,000th of the resources, power and reach. If Facebook wanted to wage a campaign to sway the trust and the federal government. They’ve got the power, the data and the audience to do it, we need to be concerned about this shit. And again, this isn’t just about Facebook, I love to pick on Facebook. But this is everywhere. And we really need to be paying attention folks, we are seeing this unfold in front of us in 100 years, when the you know, the anthropologist you know, dig up our you know, you know, our bones so to speak. And they say why did they see this coming? Did they really think it was okay? For one entertainment medium to own all of every single frickin streaming service. They own every single major television studio, a movie studio? Who did who thought that was a good idea. And who didn’t see it coming when Facebook literally controls half the world’s communication who didn’t see that as a bad idea. Who doesn’t see Google search engine manipulation is a bad idea. Well, you know, they’re going to look at who these people are stupid. What was the average IQ back in 20 in the 2020s because no one is showing shit of having any sort of an IQ back at that point. They just let that shit happen. Whether it was for a $300 version Reality headset, because we are not, we’re not willing to pay for anything anymore. We are much happier trading our, our, our biometric identities so that we can get free shit. It’s unbelievable. And we will we will be judged for it. Of course, people listening to this will probably not be alive at that point. But you know, our children and our grandchildren have to pay the penalty for our nonsense. Okay, I have two more big topics that I’m not going to get be able to get to in the short time that I have here because I’ve only got looks like 44 and a half minutes to tidy this up before I got to go back to work. But the last topic is let’s talk about music. So I’m a big music fan. Obviously, we open the show with meatloaf today. So a few years back, there’s a there’s a channel on YouTube called Tech mon mo a and I don’t I don’t get the naming convention myself. But this guy is all about interesting artifacts of music, like music playback devices. So pretty much anything that will play a song this guy will will get one review it and tear it apart, let you see on the inside what it looks like, show it in operation tell you interesting stories about it. And I’m kind of fascinated by that because I’m a music aficionado. And so a couple years back, he was talking about cassette players, right? We’re talking you know, audio cassette players. And of course, we all know most of the people listening to this show are old enough to remember when the Sony Walkman when music became portable. And you didn’t you couldn’t you obviously you know, there were stereo consoles in your home. But portable music wasn’t even a thing. Sony brought the Walkman to our lives and we suddenly could carry around whatever music we wanted and listen to a wherever whenever we wanted. That was a big fucking deal nowadays is like yeah, no, no, trust me, this was a big deal. And so there were eras of music, right? Yeah, the radio Of course, then you had vinyl or you know, or records that you can play on your own a track tapes, cassette tapes that move to CDs, right. And then we suddenly went digital out of nowhere then became mp3. Now we’re sitting where you own nothing where everything is all streaming service related. They could take whatever you’re listening to today and take it off. They could raise your rates, you don’t own anything, you can’t save anything, you can’t store anything, you are at the whim of streaming services. So I of course live through all of these eras. And while I do not have a proclivity for loving vinyl both I do have an affection with audio cassettes with CDs. While my audio cassette library did get overhauled and nuked, I still have probably four or 500, CDs, music CDs all the way back from the very first one I bought, which and fuck you if you don’t like it, Debbie Gibson’s out of the blue was the very first CD that I ever owned. And I think I got it from the Columbia record and tape Club, where I got 12 for a penny. But that was the very first one that I ordered. And that was the very, very first CD that I ever played. And vinyl missed me I could I could talk more about that. But I’m gonna run out of time before this is over. I’ll talk I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk more about vinyl and my, how I listened. I was part of the vinyl thing too. I owned records, I under record player hits of the 60s. Each one of those, those records came with different colored labels. And I seem to remember the green label hits of the 60s side be had happy together by the turtles. So yeah, I’ve got a history with vinyl too. But I’m getting ahead of myself or behind myself in this case. So a few years ago, tech mon said, hey, the last company that makes a decent cassette player has closed the doors. If you want a quality cassette player, new inbox, that doesn’t suck, now’s the time. Or if you’re looking to pick up some kind of quality Sony Walkman or something that you know, wasn’t 40 You know, 49 cents at Woolworths at the time, right? You need to start thinking about picking a unit up. Well, fast forward a couple of years and the used cassette tape player market is out the roof. You want something decent new old stock, whatever, you’re planning to pay three 400 bucks, no shit. So there is a there is a market for these things. Well, a few weeks back I was watching tech mon and he started going over the whole thing again only this time with CD. Right CD players, portable CD players. They don’t make them anymore. I mean, you can still get these really cheap ions or whatever but if you want something quality that the it’s over. So right now Your best bet is to go to the used market where there are still plenty of high end Sony’s and other high end quality CD players that you can purchase aftermarket secondhand whatever. And for 20 bucks, 2030 bucks, I mean, pretty much get the CD player of your dreams. And so I’ve said, You know what, I know exactly what happened here because I tried to buy a cassette player when My lovely daughter Christina sent me a mixtape for my birthday a couple years ago. And of course, I don’t have a cassette player in the house anymore, so I had to go get one. And guess what you can go to Target today and buy a cassette tape player, believe it or not a portable cassette tape player, it is a complete piece of shit. And if you got it, and you listen to the quality of it, and you tried to use it for anything even remotely useful, you will find that it’s the biggest piece of shit on the planet. So now I have learned from my mistakes. And now that I know that CD players of equality are out the door, I decided to go ahead and start getting one. So I bought one online on eBay. Nice used Sony, ESP, you know, electro shock protection, electronic shock protection the whole bit, right, this is Top of the line shit when it was out. And so I bought this for about 25 bucks, it took forever to get here. And when I got it, it came with a case, you know, a disk logic kit. Listen, it came with all the instructions and everything it was it wasn’t it wasn’t 100% complete, but it was really, really nice. And I really, really liked it. And so I fired it up. And I busted out a couple of CDs that I had handy, which was information society’s self titled album as well as Ad Grants. Best of any grant, I believe, which has Romancing the Stone on it, which by the way, good luck finding it on any streaming service because I looked everywhere. The only place you’ll find some really shitty knockoff on YouTube. So I wanted that song, I had to buy a CD to get that song. So forget about digital utopia in anything you want on Spotify, because that’s not true. But I digress. So I popped that in there. And of course, electric Avenue was like Song eight on the disk. So I put it on. That was the very first disk I put in my new player, I turned it on, and I was expecting it not to work. You know, it’s e-bay when you want. So I fired it up and boom, it comes to life. And it starts playing track one of any grant, I can’t remember what track one is on that album. But anyway, starts playing. And I will tell you right now, if you haven’t listened to real music off of real disk using real hardware, in a long time, you should probably go back and check it out. We have been listening to shitty quality streaming music for so long. We’ve been we have been, we’ve been conditioned to accept that somehow what’s being played on Spotify or YouTube music is actually high quality music. Now I don’t know about places like title or one of these other companies who their goal is to deliver high quality music. But I can tell you right now, if you go and listen to you know, I have course I had Romancing the Stone on an mp3, it was probably a 128 or 160 kbps or whatever it wasn’t top of the line wasn’t 320 or FLAC. Or, or you know, raw WAV, but it was it should have been decent. But I can immediately tell when I put this CD on that somehow streaming music has has fucked all of us because and of course, you know, it all has to do with compression. And certain highs and lows are going to be dropped during compression you’ve got there’s a ton of factors involved. My point is, is that I was suddenly reintroduced to music in a way not just a way, but in a quality that had been long since lacking. Then I decided to listen to Romancing the Stone. I tried to hit the fast forward button to jump to track seven. And the fast forward or the skip button does not work. Rewind works. I mean, if you want to skip back a track you can but this one did not. So now I’m pissed because let’s be honest, a CD player that doesn’t have skipping capabilities is limited you so I wrote the guy and he Bay I say listen, you know, this is really nice. It’s a really nice units very clean, blah, blah, blah. But dude, the Fast Forward doesn’t work I’m sending I tried everything. And he’s like, I’ll do you know, it was working when I was testing it. I don’t know, listen, let me refund some of your cash. And so I said, Yeah, I don’t want to return, I would rather not return it, you know, but if you want to cut me, you know, 510 bucks off, you know, give me some of that money back. And what I’ll do is I’ll buy a remote because all of these Sony CD players had have these little ports that allow you to extend the headphone jack along with having a remote control that you could clip on your backpack or clip on your belt buckle or whatever that way the CD player could be in your backpack, but the controls could be on your belt. So really cool. And so I found one of those for 12 bucks, so I had to pay an additional $4 to order one of these things that has been stuck in goddamn shipping hell for weeks, weeks, weeks, weeks. So yesterday it shows up and I’m like oh my god. Finally finally, you know the UPS had no clue where Are USPS had no clue where it was, they said it should have been delivered like a week ago. Nope, there’s no updates. There’s no tracking nothing, I figured it was gone. I didn’t think I was gonna see it at all. But I ended up getting it, I plugged it in. And so there’s a couple of possibilities here. One is that this remote is not compatible with this unit. But I know that it is because I looked it up, or this unit has a logic board problem somewhere, because the fast forward button on the remote is actually play pause, the play pause button does nothing, which is probably fast forward in the mapping of things rewind is actually mapped to rewind, and stop is actually stopped. So there is something screwball inside of this deck. So my quest to get a fully working portable CD player continues, and I still do not have a resolution yet. But I do encourage you, if you are a physical media owner, or even if you’re not, and you still have a CD player, you still have a record player vinyl, I would take an opportunity to re re examine it. Not only is there you know that tactile experience, right, there’s something really cool about clipping, clicking a cd into a CD player and watching it spin up. Hard to explain unless I guess unless you’ve actually seen it or, or it’s part of your nostalgia. But I also have to tell you that my very first portable CD player, if you looked at it, cross-eyed, that thing would skip like a bitch, which by the way, makes music really hard to appreciate. Which is why a lot of people had both tapes and cassettes and CDs. Because CDs required like the right environment to listen. Of course, later on, they created things like you know, electro electronic shock prevention, which by the way, that’s some great shit. So while I was playing track, one of 80 grand over and over again, and decided to shake that frickin player like a British nanny, I couldn’t make that thing, skip so that it’s got 60 seconds of skip protection. So I guess if I were willing to shake it for 61 seconds, maybe it would start to skip. But yeah, I was very impressed. Because I left. I didn’t, I didn’t really get into the high end CD stuff. I mean, listen, I was in the Navy, I had no budget, I was married, had no money. Back then I was in my 20s, late 20s. That was not me money, I don’t have a disposable income back then. So you know, I got the cheap RCA CD player that skip like a bitch if you breathed on Iran, but I do, I recommend taking another stab at it. There’s something there’s something sort of visceral about it, and I gotta get I gotta get my ass back to work, I got a couple minutes. The part of it I think is, is all the hops that the music takes, right, I think that’s part of the problem. So if you’ve got a CD, and you put in a CD player, you’re getting that music decoded right off the disk and right into your ears. If you’re playing something that’s on streaming, or an mp3 that you ripped, now you’re not only undergoing a compression process, which starts dumping shit in favour of space, right? You can go from, you know, 50 megabytes down to five megabytes without losing something. I don’t care how good the algorithm is. But then you’ve also got the the playback right, so now you’re playing back through VLC, or some Winamp type application, which is then probably being transmitted over wireless Bluetooth, your headphones, your it’s, of course, the music’s gonna sound like shit. I mean, when you start thinking about it, you know, maybe if I burned those NP threes onto a CD and played them directly back in the CD player, which it does happen to support mp3 lease, the new one I’m getting is because I ordered another one, because I’m Dammit, I’m going to have myself a CD player. Maybe Maybe there’ll be a difference, right? I’m using analog headphones. I’m not transmitting over wireless. I’m not interpreting it through another playback engine. It’s raw. It’s visceral. I don’t know. Alright, well, listen, I’ve had enough fun. My voice is starting to give out I haven’t had anything to drink in like an hour. I just got off the train and I came right in here. So I’m starting to dehydrate a little bit. Anyway, I hope everybody enjoyed the machine readable say I’ve run into songs on Apple Music That didn’t sound right to me. I played my CD ribs to compare and they were definitely different. Of course. Of course they were. I don’t I don’t I don’t I mean, like I said I’ve never tried title. I mean, I know there’s two or three big you know, if you love music, then you need to be on title because we actually have quality music not that terrible streaming shit. But who knows, right? Maybe streaming is fine. Now because let’s be honest, what have you listened to like blast top 40 Like go to last week’s Top 40 list. Is there anything in there that happens to us and orchestral backing or have anything with highs and lows? It’s all pretty, pretty mid range process stuff, right? You’re not going to lose a whole lot of that when you can press it but go and get Go and get an ELO Eldorado album and run that through a compressor. run that down through mp3 and see what it sounds like at the other end play your vinyl version of it and then get the CD rip that music down into an mp3 and see just how bad Jeff Lynn’s masterpieces get shat upon when you run it through compression to something to think about. Alright everybody hope you enjoyed the show. This is Shane R Monroe passenger seat radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care everybody.
