(This is kind of a personal article about my relationship to recorded music. Reader beware!)

If you had told me 15 years ago that I could pay $20 a month and hear almost any music I wanted to in very good fidelity on both my home audio system here in Framingham, MA and my cell phone, I would have laughed and said "Really, what an incredible bargain.” 

Streaming music actually started around 2005 and has gotten progressively more popular as more services have been developed and the fidelity has gone from OK to really good--purportedly as good as a CD or better. You know, high-res or MQA or something of the like.

There's something new at Natural Sound...a brand of audio electronics called Black Ice Audio, which fills a gap in our product offerings: value-priced vacuum tube-powered components. We have always had premium tube products...from VTL, McIntosh, and Rogers High Fidelity, but for clients in the Boston, MA area wishing to explore the magical world of tube amplifiers, pre-amps, and even CD players on a lower budget...we haven't been able to offer them something until now. So, who is Black Ice?

Last time we discussed how a 2-channel oriented listener could use their stereo to effectively enhance the experience of regular TV programming or music concert videos.  Today we'd like to talk to anyone interested in learning about the latest developments in the home theater system world that do involve using multiple speakers to create surround sound in your Boston, MA and surrounding area home.

While most of us equate "Home Theater" with "Surround Sound" and equate Surround Sound with Dolby Labs and DTS decoding, some of us are mostly music lovers who happen to have a TV in the same room as our stereo and want to use the two together. So the emphasis is on stereo music reproduction...not on the ever-increasing number of channels employed in the latest surround soundtracks on blockbuster movies. (This is not to denigrate home theater systems in any way. A sound system installation with top-notch speakers and electronics in your Boston area home theater setup will recreate what you hear in a movie theater in a very different way from any two-channel solution. But some of us don’t want more than two speakers in a room!)