Marian Schedenig

Possibly. I just figure that a high quality receiver should probably also include a reasonably high quality DAC, so that a separate *better* one would probably at least be expensive. Unless of course you want to pair a good standalone DAC with an amp/receiver that has a lousy built-in DAC. Plus, an external DAC means that you need a good quality cable between that and the amp.

As I recall, the last episode was considered a bit of a let down compared to the earlier ones by many because of the courtroom scenes. I never knew why, I thought they were very well done - and not just because of Harris (although he improves everything he's in).

My Raspberry doesn't have to reboot for updates.

They just gave him their best orchestra and a knighthood.

I saw that, but it cites the Daily Mail as its source (and nothing else).

If this is indeed true, shouldn't there be some way to get reliable (i.e. non Daily Mail) confirmation for this?

Can you tell me what the point of such a setup is? (Honest question) I have this, which cost around €40 when I first* bought it: It's got analogue and digital outputs, but I only use it digitally - I needed some relatively cheap audio device that would let me output all the standard bitrates and frequencies (up to 192kHz) so I could run my playlists without having to down convert higher resolution files. For that it works very nicely, except that the USB port is rather fiddly (* which is why I've actually bought this thing more than once when the USB port's contacts gave out after moving it around too much). I've hooked it up digitally to my amp, because I trust the amp to have a higher quality DAC than this cheap box - which as far as I remember is supposed to have a reasonably decent DAC, but probably not something to rival DACs that cost several hundred Euros. So I expect this isn't the kind of thing you're looking for. (For actual music listening, I've since equipped my Raspberry with a similarly cheap audio board that also covers the full range of output formats and doesn't need a fiddly USB connection, but I still have one of these boxes hooked up to my main PC for when I want to send its sound output to my amp)

RIP Kai Winn.

Ray, when someone asks if you're a want to see a god live in concert, you say yes!

Wow… he *sounds* like Branagh playing Johnson, but if he isn't quite exactly the spitting image of Johnson, he looks 95% like him and nothing like Branagh at all.

Because it's a (generally) annoying trope. If English is used as a substition for Russian (i.e. the actors speak English, but in the story, the characters "really" speak Russian), it doesn't make sense to speak English with a Russian accent (just like the original Russian wouldn't have an English accent). What you could argue is that local accents should be represented - which in a way is what The Death of Stalin does (having a cast with all kinds of English accents). I liked that, though others found it annoying. My favourite trick for showing that the Russians speak Russian but then switching to English for the viewers' convenience is The Hunt for Red October, where the Russians start out speaking Russian with English subtitles, but in an early long take scene with a slow, steady zoom, they seamlessly switch to English. It's *almost* good enough that you barely even notice something has changed.

Right after Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Hot take: …when you're indifferent to the music in most films released these days.

I love both versions of Blue Planet, but I could never get into Planet Earth or Frozen Planet. Fenton was tremendously successful with scoring BP (and later 2009's Life, although he apparently was only the main composer on that) like an action drama (I've posted the avian dogfight sequence from Life here before), but the follow ups always seemed rather wallpaperish to me I'm afraid.

The final escalation by Ar-Pharazon hasn't happened yet, but the conflict itself was a generations-long thing: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_Faithful In a way, this is one of the show's central problems - telling stories that span hundreds of years from the POVs of a few main characters (most of whom don't live that long) without absurdly squeezing the events of a millennium into a few weeks, and at the same time avoiding criticism that things are happening too slow/too fast/not at all. I can't say I have much use for a discussion about how much setup is permissible for a long form series when technically Tolkien's Second Age is nothing more than setup for LOTR (unlike the First Age (and what came before), which long predates LOTR and informed much of its central lore, the Second Age and Numenor, as far as I know, are mostly a direct byproduct of LOTR and was squeezed in when it became clear that the new book required more backstory that couldn't be satisfied by what Tolkien already had). But it's setup that delights me, because I know how it leads to LOTR & Co, so if the series manages to capture that (which I think is still possible), I think it achieves its primary goal. That probably by necessity makes it not for everyone, and much of the struggle is how far it can accept catering to a specific target audience. I think most of PJ's LOTR's failings (and there are a few) stem from trying to please too large an audience at the expense of story/world integrity (or perhaps rather not trusting that it would have reached the same audience without certain sacrifices) - and LOTR surely was far easier to adapt as a big epic story for everyone who likes big epic stories than anything in this new series could even hope to be.