But only a little, because this soon turns into a celebration of my speed and ingenuity – on a bicycle. I am on a… no, I am dreaming… the dreamer is on a bicycle. He is able to stay mostly well ahead and out of range of his pursuers. They catch up periodically but I suspect it’s only as a reminder that a pursuit is on, that peril is present, when the dreamer has strayed a little too far into the sheer thrill of the ride, the air, and the novel landscapes, rural and (pleasant, well-planned, futuristic) semi-urban. In the latter, multi-lane freeways lie empty, save for occasional groups of people ambling across the road on foot; these provide the only real frustration to be found in this tale, as the dreamer must sometimes wait for the pedestrians to move out of his way in a very pedestrian way, his horn having failed to motivate them to any additional sense of urgency, before continuing his journey, his ongoing escape from this motiveless chase.

Then, on one such 12-lane superhighway, again completely devoid of any wheeled traffic except him and a few prams and buggies being pushed by the slowest-moving parents ever, one of which and its attendant family he is about to accelerate away from, he notices something which makes him pause.

It’s a sound. Very faint, just on the edge of audibility, disappearing with each gust of wind, coalescing again as the air stills, so that it takes a moment to consciously know what it is; but by that time his unconscious has already recognised that he is being called, summoned, by the insistent repetition of the most ancient and secret of his names.

Doof. Doof. Doof. Doof.

- * – * -

The sound is coming from a neo-neo-classical pavilion towards the centre of the well-tended park that runs for miles alongside this deserted highway. The building, whose architecture is almost entirely ancient in style but whose bright albedo and suspicious glinting in the sunlight suggests ultra-modern construction and materials, sits like a gatehouse (but too far from the gate) astride the park’s central boulevard – a wide, smooth-surfaced path, which begins a little to the left of the dreamer’s current position and enters and exits the pavilion by means of high archways on its way to the shore of a crystalline lake or sea just visible in the distance. The dreamer repurposes his bike toward the boulevard and begins to ride, but as he cycles onto the boulevard, somehow he feels that is not right, not the done thing. There are no signs, no laws to say he must, but he knows that the approach is to be made on foot.

I am walking beneath one of those arches now. The building, the architecture, the unnatural brightness with which it glows in the sunlight, are of no interest to me. As I neared the building, and the music declared itself more evidently, I found it by turns interesting, then exciting, then compelling, but now, as if the archway were an invisible gateway to another dimension, as I cross the threshold into the building, it immediately becomes something more: overwhelmingly, transcendentally beautiful. What before was an aural, intellectually-stimulating phenomenon, opens out into a multi-sensory, sensual and spiritual experience wrapped around my whole body and soul.

When I recover my senses a little, I realise it’s not just about the choice of music, although that matters, of course it does. It’s the speakers. There’s something very special about these ones. I go in for a closer look at them, because from a distance – and, it turns out, from close up as well – there is nothing distinctive about them visually. They couldn’t look much more bog-standard: each carpet-covered rectangular housing of maybe 8 x 5 x 3 ft has two bass drivers of 14″ or so, covered with black metal grilles, and a horn tweeter. I can see only four of these units arranged around me, but the clarity of sound from these things is an epiphany.

They have no identifying features, no maker’s name or logo, nothing memorable about their visual design. So I have to enquire of the DJ, who tells me they are ED-25s.

I am awake.

I need those speakers.

This is my second attempt to write up a dream in short-story format (after this one). In this dream there were noticeable (in retrospect) shifts between a semi-lucid state, where I understood that I was dreaming but played along, and the more common state of being so enmeshed in the story that I’m unaware that I’m dreaming. These shifts seemed significant enough that I wanted to convey them somehow, so I chose to do so by flipping between first- and third-person narrative, although within the dream I was entirely acting, as I usually do in dreams, from a first-person point-of-view. I found it challenging to implement these flips in the narrative in such a way as to make it obvious that they are intentional rather than accidental, but without excessively calling attention to themselves… I’ve not attempted anything like that before, at least not deliberately…

Firstly, they hold a mirror to show you what needs healing in yourself. That ugly behaviour you see in them probably has its origins or counterpart in you; the uglier it is to you, the less you want to face it, the more you need to.

Secondly, time is running in. Our children are that much closer to the omega point. On the deepest level, they know, better than we do, which way things are heading. They can feel more keenly the pull of that strange attractor; are more aligned with it. While we have become magnetized, polarized by the dead weight of the past, they are aligned to a future of infinite potential, and are trying to guide us there. We need to listen to them.

They want to give us an inheritance. Instead of passing on to our children all our ossified and stratified millennia of pain from the past, let our children pass on to us their flexibility, adaptability and ready forgiveness.

Thankyou, my children, for being such wonderful teachers. I humbly promise to try to be a better student.

Now eat your vegetables.

Bill Griffiths is playing
Something by Bartok
A plodding piece
Simple, 2-note chords.
I fantasise
About taking the stage
By force.
Like the Chechen Rebels
in the Moscow Theatre
But no guns
Just Liberation
An audience
Captive
Ready to be Captivated
by the introduction
to Acclimatize.

Bill Griffiths is reading
A poem of his. He reads
Halt
ingly
Pauses inser
ted where they don't
belong, where they
Don't flow
Alternatelyrushedand
Not
Rushed.
And saying Nothing
that makes any sense.
Am I being cheated?
"You would do better,"
He says.
I agree, wholeheartedly.

Bill Griffiths is playing again
Something else by Bartok
A better piece this time.
One that actually requires
some skill, that actually has
some tune. He plays
Haltingly.
And then it's over.
And all I can think is,
I need to network
with people like Iain Sinclair
Have my audience delivered
on a plate.
And fuckin' use the opportunity.

There are three films being projected: a slow-mo rear-view mirror scene in the rain in the centre; on the left a real-time forward-looking “this is you driving” boring one; but on the right, zoomed in, a view looking right. We see one-frame blipvert flashes of wheels zipping past on the other side of the central reservation, the rhythm of this occasionally broken by an overtaking car sailing serenely past on this side. We’re cruising the middle lane, but with a view normally denied to the driver, that of the sheer pace of humanity, the raw velocity with which we drive ourselves toward extinction. We are a pair of alloy wheels for one frame only, and then we’re gone.

There’s few a better opportunity for the peoplewatcher, the loner, to catch sight of other loners, other peoplewatchers, aliens, standing, sitting alone, watching, than at any event associated with The KLF. They stand, unashamed, at the edges but also in the middle of the foyer, watching, observing like I, but not making notes like I, just watching. Who are these people? Who am I? Was I?

Watching the films I realise that the point of motorways is to take you through, past; never to touch, feel or experience the countryside, the people, just a journey to get from A to B and not even realise how shit it was, our lives reduced to the need to arrive, never deviate from the course ordained for us by our wise Government Minister. Ours is not to question, just to fucking drive, got to get There, never mind all the cones, never mind having an HGV up your arse, never mind the grey, the black, the spray, the Nothingness, the shit food and shit service stations, never mind the White Van Man cutting you up for the umpteenth time that day, never mind the rain, the sales exec in his Mondeo, never mind the concrete just play spot the Eddie Stobart, it beats actually THINKING.

Encased in our
own personal
Bubble
We feel nothing
see nothing except
what hits our windscreen.
No wonder people are
so divorced from reality
when the reality they face
day in day out
is the M25.

You might like to check out a more complimentary review.

They probably told us it was a supernova or a comet or something, but everyone knew it wasn’t, and nobody knew what it was; and though some of us suspected, none of us would have dared to speak our suspicions aloud, even if we could have found a way to describe them, in case the act of fixing our suspicions into words made them come true.

But they came true anyway.

At first, it was just a small, bright, jagged line, about a moon’s width across. I don’t remember exactly when it appeared or how we all noticed. I don’t anymore remember it not being there. It definitely appeared — suddenly — but it so soon became such an established part of our lives, that the idea of the daytime sky without it would have been as preposterous as the night sky without stars.

It was only visible by day — and the skies were clear blue and cloudless, back then, so we had an uninterrupted view of it for a large part of the daylight hours. Yet we all felt a curious desire to ignore it. The TV reports told us we probably ought not to look at it for too long, as it was bright enough to damage the eyes, but there was no danger of that. No-one wanted to look at it. We would catch glances, of course; see that it was still there, and yes, that it was getting worse, larger, brighter, throwing off sparks now… but then we would look away, and try, pointlessly, to continue with our lives.

For days, the whole planet pretended.

Somehow, I saw it change. I don’t know if I happened to glance that way, or if I was compelled to watch. It’s no longer possible to tell the difference.

The initial bright scar across the sky had lengthened and straightened so that it was now less like a jagged crack or tear in appearance, more like a thin letterbox or slot. I grimly wondered what was about to be delivered to us.

The sparks or meteor streaks or lightning bolts which had been arcing out of it with increasing frequency over the past two days, were now continuous, and all arced in the same direction, anti-clockwise. A mist began to swirl around with them, which soon became thick, dark clouds, all spinning the same way, and too fast, obviously, unnaturally, too damn fast. Then obviously, unnaturally, too damn red. It was big now, spreading out to take up half the sky. We couldn’t try to ignore it anymore.

The crack or scar or split or slot at the centre had been growing dimmer for a while, but now suddenly turned black; yet it seemed all the more piercing against the swirling red vortex around. Worse, at the moment this happened I felt the sudden knowledge, the instant recognition, that I was looking into the eye of a conscious being. Not truly a God, just another lifeform like us, and yet so much more advanced than us that it might as well be a God to us. There was no question of its harmful intent; no hope of resisting. Only death or slavery awaited us now.

The last thing I remember is thinking, though I have no idea why, exactly these words:

“I for one welcome our new evil eye-in-the-sky overlord.”

The eye winked. There was a searing flash, and nothing more.

I didn’t set out to write this as a literary work. This was my dream from last night; in the process of writing it down it started to sound like a short story, so I rolled with it, without spending too much time on it. I really did wake up with that phrase in my head, along with a set of vivid but rapidly-fading images of the sky.

In fact one of the first scripts I wrote was to assist with the fact that I broadcast (using darkice on my Linux box) on different stations, necessitating having multiple different configurations for darkice. What began as a one-liner to do the equivalent of darkice -c /path/to/darkice/configs/$1.cfg then expanded to do things like shut down certain daemons before broadcasting, and start them again afterwards, as my elderly PC would occasionally struggle to cope with the demands of running two MP3 encoders if it was also dealing with a large incoming mail or a disk-heavy cronjob.

I then tired of hitting reload on the server stats page to keep an eye on my listener count, so now I have a script which fetches that page every couple of minutes, parses the relevant number out of it, and shows it with a timestamp, so I have a full record of how many were tuned in at each point of the show, what the peak was etc.

Scripts followed to automate filling in the ID3 tag, and renaming darkice’s output spool name into a standard format prior to uploading it to the site.

quextal.com is a WordPress-based site with a heavily customised skin and a couple of extra plugins, nothing too fancy. After writing the first few posts by hand, I came up with a simple template-driven script which would simply wrap my plain-text tracklist of the show in some HTML to make it look a bit prettier for the site. This evolved so that it would read the metadata from the MP3 (eg filesize, bitrate, length in minutes and seconds) and put that info in there as well.

After a while I decided to have my online tracklists in table format rather than just reproducing what I write in plain text. So this meant adapting the script to split up each entry in the tracklist for the separate columns. I had the prescience to choose a roughly standardised format for my plain text tracklists anyway — at its simplest, it’s just “Artist – Title” or “Artist – Title – Label” — but over time it’s evolved a number of variations to deal with, for example, marking out who played which track when I have a guest in. I sensed it was time to create a separate library (Perl module) to parse tracklists into separate information, and a number of my scripts now use this.

Just this year I expanded the templating script into a more complex system which interfaces directly with the WordPress API. It determines which radio station the broadcast was on (which is in the filename), searches for some of my past mixes for that station on the site, and offers a selection of their post titles so I can choose one (eg with, or without, a guest DJ, as applicable) on which to base the default title for the new one, helping to keep the title format consistent. Both my current regular shows feature the number of the show in the title – the script will automatically increment this, be it in ordinary numerals or Roman numerals. Appropriate tags are chosen automatically, and any additional words for the article can be added before the script posts it directly to the site via the API.

Why stop there? Since my Tracklist library conveniently gives me information about the artists and labels played in each show, the script now also creates a Custom Field entry for each. I don’t really know why I’ve done that… just a vague sense that it might be useful at some point in the future. For now, a slight tweak at the WordPress end provides A-Z lists of artists and labels for each mix at the end of the article. At some point, if so desired, it should make it easier to search for all the mixes containing a specific artist or label…

Most recently, the thing I was finding particularly time-consuming was to fill in the label for each tune, which information I often don’t have handy during the show when I’m writing down the track. So now I have a couple of scripts to help with that. The first just looks for the “artist – title” string in all my previous tracklists and copies the label info from there if it finds it. The second, which is a work in progress, attempts to automate looking up the track details on the sites where I do most of my tune shopping, and screen-scraping the label from there.

Curiously, the net effect of all this automation has not really made it significantly quicker or easier to post a mix, compared to when I first started out and was doing it all by hand. What it has done is escalated the amount and quality of information I’m putting up, its consistency and reliability, while taking about the same amount of time and effort. Obviously that doesn’t include the effort required to write the scripts… but that’s not effort. That’s fun. It’s been a whole series of interesting little coding tasks… which of course is the main reason I did it.

While this exercise was ultimately futile for its original purpose, I still found it interesting (otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so long on it!) to consider how I might represent myself in a few words, and then sculpting an article specifically to get that result out of Wordle, but making the article a real piece of prose about the very process of its own construction. As I said, I’m a fan of self-reference. But I wonder if this can also be considered, perhaps loosely, a kind of steganography. While it contains no encryption, the article has a deeper purpose which — had I not explicitly made it the subject of the article, but instead concealed it — could be entirely hidden from view. I suppose it’s a fairly basic cipher to encode hidden messages inside a larger article according to the word frequency… but Wordle does a bit more than that. I think that, in controlled circumstances, Wordle’s output can be made reproducible for a given input and set of parameters. In which case, it would be feasible to conceal messages in a way that could not be calculated from the text alone, that could not be reliably decoded without the additional knowledge of which website it needs to be pumped through, the precise configuration parameters to use, and what further processing is required on the result — say, the message could be in just the words that Wordle makes a particular colour in one of its fixed palettes, or that are given a certain orientation.

Indeed, as Wordle’s precise algorithm is secret due to patent issues, the precise layout for a given set of parameters might be rather unpredictable without actually trying it. That makes Wordle a kind of public-private key pair, the public key being the set of parameters fed into the engine, and the private key being the secret method by which Wordle transforms those parameters into a layout. This transformation is probably relatively feasible to work out by trial-and-error, and in any case the number of configuration permutations is sufficiently low that if necessary the results of all of them could be tested and mapped fairly easily, so it only offers a fairly low security cipher. But you gain added security from the fact that very existence of a hidden message is steganographically concealed within the larger article, and, perhaps even more so, from the surprising and obscure means chosen to conceal it!

Ok, so I’ve given the game away now. If you’ve been quietly hiding secret messages in Wordle tag clouds for ages… sorry. If not, don’t start now, they’ll be onto you. But, more generally, using innocent third-party web applications as a kind of cipher function might have potential. You’d have to ensure that the output from the website isn’t just the pure decoded message, otherwise the third party has it as well. Some sort of post-processing which requires pre-shared secret knowledge is key. This could include things like piping your message through multiple web applications, either serially or in parallel, with each contributing some small part of the overall message, which can only be merged into the whole by someone with an additional piece of knowledge of how that needs to be done.

These are just idle thought experiments… I don’t advise anyone to actually use this technique for anything really secret! There are several obvious weaknesses, although they can probably be ameliorated. However, I believe it’s worth considering novel means of passing around secrets. If quantum computers actually happen as the physicists predict, all current encryption technology may be rendered useless at a stroke, as it all relies on a computationally-unfeasible mathematical problem that, theoretically, quantum computers could make feasible to solve quickly. Quantum computers also themselves have the potential to offer novel encryption techniques, but at the moment, no-one really knows how these things are going to behave… and, for a while anyway, quantum computers will be the preserve of rich governments, corporations, and other organised well-funded criminal gangs… so us ordinary folk will be at a disadvantage. The survival of our networks might depend on us being a little bit cunning…

Googling for the answer to this problem turned up lots of out-of-date suggestions to use Clearsilver and the like, but it seemed to me that a solution could be found using only what OSX provides. And indeed it can. The following has only been tested in 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The basic premise is to create a new Service to perform this task. Because Services are available globally, if you assign a shortcut to one, it should work in any application.

1. Open the Automator application, and create a new workflow based on the Service template:
   
2. In the Library pane, select Utilities, then find the action Run AppleScript and drag it into the workflow:
   
3. Replace the line:
   
(* Your script goes here *)

   with:
   
tell application "Finder"
activate
make new Finder window to home
end tell

4. Save under the name “New Finder Window Home” or somesuch. Whatever name you choose, make a note of it. Also bear in mind that if you choose a name that matches an existing menu entry in any application, that menu entry will be selected in preference to yours… if you just call it “New Finder Window”, then when Finder is the active application, its own menu entry by that name (in the File menu) will be chosen when you hit the shortcut key combo. It may be that it will have exactly the same effect, but it depends on how you have Finder configured, so to avoid confusion, give it a more specific name.
5. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts. Click the + button to add a new shortcut:
   
6. Enter the exact name that you saved it as earlier (ie New Finder Window Home, if you used the same as me), and your desired shortcut key combo.
7. It seems you have to quit System Preferences before the shortcut key will become operational. But it’s not necessary to restart other applications.

You can make the new Finder window open to somewhere other than your home directory by replacing home in the AppleScript with, for example, folder "Applications" of startup disk.

I’ve got three personal blogs including this one, although the fact that I only frequently update the one about my musical activities under the alias of Quextal, and that until very recently, Source Of Life, to which I have occasionally released potentially-useful but dreadfully hacky Perl programs, had probably been broken for months, says a lot about the current priorities in my life.

Unfortunately, feeding Quextal into Wordfondle fails to give a decent summary of what that site is about. Useful things like the titles of posts, their tags, categories, and the contents of Pages, are all ignored by the analyser, and so the result ends up dominated by the artists who most often feature in the tracklists of my recent mixes. Apart from giving the impression that I’m some kind of music industry plugger / agent / record label boss, it also makes me look like a complete stoner because of my support of one particular artist.

Using ContentedLife (wot you are now reading) instead doesn’t fare much better – I guess it conveys quite well something of my tendancy toward an interest in random disparate topics, yet utterly fails to bring out what I consider to be the most important waymarkers within that randomness.

If I’m to be represented by a disconnected soup of words, I want at least some of those words to be a reasonable reflection of my real interests and character, leaving room for a bit of serendipity of course.

So this got me thinking… how would I “tag” myself? What limited set of keywords would I choose to represent myself to a bunch of complete strangers, if I had the choice? Which I do…

As music is my first and truest love and passion, I’d have to start with some descriptions of my current musical boatfloatery ¹: epic evolving psybreaks / electrobreaks / nuskool breaks, chunky progressive psychedelic techno, journeying synthorganic minimal techno, glitchy breakbeat crunk, and miscellaneous interstitial trippy electronica. Of which, psybreaks is my particular speciality. Obviously, trying to describe music using language is an exercise in futility ² — especially my music — but as far as I know, there’s no MP3 player in these badges, so I have to use these clumsy labels as bait to tempt and seduce those who may enjoy the kaleidoscopic taste sensations of my synaesthetic electronic cocktails…

I’d want to relate the fact that I’ve been hacking about with Linux, Perl, PHP and MySQL for so long that I’m about ready now to give the whole lot up and try gardening instead.

There’d be (in some cases, necessarily oblique) references to psychedelics and consciousness, healing and mysticism, Now, Spirit, Love, Nature, Gaia, and faeries. Ayahuasca would be explicitly named, for being all of those things while transcending them all.

It would make sense to throw in a selection of ideas that I find fascinating and engaging even though I’m never likely to get even close to fully understanding them, such as quantum physics (and metaphysics), fractals, stochastic resonance, sacred geometry, tectonics, astronomy, biochemistry, psychology, geography, weather, and basically anything that seeks to answer the question “How?” (even though we know that the real answer is it’s all just gnomes).

For the sake of a complete picture, I’d need to reference Eris, the number 23, and The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (furthermore known as The JAMs, also known as The KLF) — no longer the obsession they once were, but still resonant in the formation of my character. And yes, for the same reason, Monochrome would have to be there too… initiator of countless lasting friendships, not to mention an eight year relationship, and the two best kids in the world…

And, although it’s not really anything to do with my character (“you are not your job”, as a wise man once said), I suppose it would be sensible — given that this is a conference, after all — to include a couple of phrases about my present paid employment as a Linux sysadmin and developer, which currently involves a fair bit of hacking around with EPrints and other Perl ³ shenanigans.

My original plan was to post an entry containing just these tags, repeating the ones I consider most helpful in summation of the mess of contradictions that is Me (psybreaks, for example, would have to recur several times). But while this would generate a more accurate badge, it wouldn’t exactly be an interesting read, and it may also cause search engines to believe that I’m attempting to spam their results. The ranking of this site has suffered enough from the demise of its old domain, I don’t want to get it completely blacklisted.

So, the idea now is, to write more entries to explain and expand on many of the terms above.

Hey, it could happen… somewhen…

Meanwhile, here is some music. And one more mention of psybreaks, because there isn’t enough of it in the world (a situation which I’m doing my best to rectify, in case you hadn’t guessed…)

Addendum

Feeding just this post into Wordmangle (using the single-post feed link) results in a far more apposite summary of my interests than anything I’d hitherto managed. Exactly as I’d hoped. And using an article written about the process to feed into the process appeals to my (and probably every developer’s) aesthetic appreciation of the Meta, the self-referential.

With most of the emboldened words above only having a single instance in the text, many of them are getting left out. Perhaps that’s for the best. It seems to be picking a good subset, and while for example I feel Ayahuasca should be in there, so that it can be found by people who are looking, it oughtn’t be too big: it isn’t always a great idea to shout about such things to all and sundry (been there, done that, learned lessons). So I’m generally happy with the outcome. But it omitted The KLF, and Eris. For some reason, I feel they need to be in there, subverting the whole silly idea from within. So now they are. All hail! Fnord.

Final result of feeding this post into http://www.wordle.net

For its price, the sound quality is excellent. It’s fairly packed with features, has a good range of options for input and output connectivity, plus MIDI. And it works flawlessly, out of the box, with Linux — no special setup or drivers required, ALSA knows what it is and how to deal with it in any mode.

The same is true of Mac OS, but only in the basic mode which restricts you to 16-bit 44.1kHz I/O – a driver is required for Advance mode to get up to 24-bit 96kHz support (either in, or out – we’ll come to this under Limitations). This driver can be downloaded free from the Edirol website, and seems to work fine on my new unibody Macbook Pro with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, though I haven’t used it extensively on there yet.

I guess it probably works in Windows too, but I wouldn’t know anything about that

The sound quality (for what I’ve used it for anyway) is very good. It’s stacked with features, and quite versatile… within certain limits.

First we’ll take a quick look at the features packed into this gadget, which is information you could probably find elsewhere but I include for ease of reference, and after that we’ll get to discussing those limitations in more detail.

Features

Packaged in a far more robust metal casing than you might expect in a sub-£100 device, the UA-25 provides A/D and D/A converters, digital S/PDIF I/O (unfortunately optical, rather than coax, so you may need to budget for some converters and Toslink cables), and 5-pin DIN MIDI I/O.

Analogue audio input is via combo balanced XLR and 1/4″ TRS sockets. The XLR inputs have mic preamps (see limitations below) and switchable phantom power, while one of the TRS jack inputs has switchable high-impedance (Hi-Z) mode for connecting guitars etc. Each input has a separate sensitivity (gain) control.

Analogue output is via pairs of both 1/4″ jack and RCA phono connectors on the back, and a stereo 1/4″ jack headphone socket on the front. A single Output level knob controls both the main output volume and the headphone level. I’d have preferred a separate headphone level control, but fair enough, there really isn’t much room left on the front panel!

Sample rate is switchable between 44.1kHz, 48kHz and 96kHz, 16- or 24-bit (but see below). Other features include headphone socket (but note that there is no separate headphone level knob, the Output Level controls both the level of both the main outputs and the headphones); switchable zero-latency monitoring (this does have a separate level); switchable limiter; and an LED which supposedly warns of clipping, or tells you when the Limiter threshold is exceeded… “supposedly”, because…. well, we’ll come to that…

There is no software mixer in the UA-25 at all. All the level controls, including input sensitivity, output volume, monitor volume and the various switches, are hardware controls on the unit itself. I prefer it that way, because I use the UA-25 in a fairly static configuration to record from my mixer, so I like being able to “set and forget” the input gain controls.

Finally, the UA-25 can be powered either from an included “wall wart” plugin PSU, or from the USB bus. In theory, using the separate PSU should give you better sound quality, but in practice I’ve never detected any problem from using USB power; your results may depend on what else you have drawing power from the bus — I generally don’t have anything else on there at all that has a significant power requirement, so the UA-25 isn’t competing to get power. If you have a busy bus, probably best to use the PSU.

Limitations

The UA-25 two significant limitations that you need to be aware of when deciding whether it will suit your needs.

One is well documented, and common for USB soundcards: it cannot do 24-bit 96kHz duplex (input and output simultaneously) – I think because standard USB is simply not fast enough.

The UA-25 has two modes. When Advance mode is OFF, the bitrate is fixed to 16-bit 44.1kHz and the device is full duplex. When Advance mode is ON, the device is EITHER input OR output, 24-bit, at the sample rate selected on the back (44.1/48/96kHz).

If you switch modes, or sample rates, or input/output direction in Advance mode, you have to reboot the device by unplugging and replugging from USB. The device takes a few seconds to boot up every time you do this. If you are going to do a lot of work at 24×96, that’s likely to get tedious and you ought to be looking at a Firewire device – and obviously it’s no use at all if you need full duplex I/O. I suppose you could buy two UA-25s and leave one dedicated to input and one to output. Personally, 16×44 is perfectly adequate for my requirements most of the time so I tend to leave Advance OFF unless I specifically need 24×96 for something.

In either mode, both digital and analogue outputs are available simultaneously, but input is either/or, switched from the front.

The OSX driver for 24×96 support appears to make the Advance Mode UA-25 available for both input and output simultaneously, but in fact you can only do one or the other, as indicated by the fact that the device will be called either UA-25 96kHz PLAY or UA-25 96kHz REC.

The other limitation is completely undocumented, even in the audio path diagram on top of the unit, and I only discovered it by experience: The XLR inputs are hardwired to the Mic preamps. You cannot use them for line-level inputs. I found this slightly annoying as I wanted to plug the XLR outputs of my mixer into them, but you simply cannot reduce the sensitivity enough, and risk overloading the mic preamps if you feed a line-level signal to them. So I had to invest in XLR-to-balanced-jack cables to feed them into the jack sockets.

If you are using the analogue inputs at line level from a device with balanced outputs (such as a studio mixer or a professional DJ mixer), I recommend getting decent balanced cables. Since you can’t use the XLR inputs for this, you’ll need TRS balanced jacks on the UA-25 end of the cables. If you use unbalanced cables, not only will you be more prone to pick up noise within the cable, but you won’t get the best sound quality out of the device (I don’t know why this should be, but every piece of equipment I’ve ever owned which will support either balanced or unbalanced jack into the same socket, seems to sound muddier, not just noisier, if you use unbalanced.

No Peaking

There’s a single LED on the front panel. When the Limiter is switched off, this lights up red, supposedly to indicate clipping. Unfortunately, it doesn’t indicate anything of the sort. It lights up way below 0dB (I’m not sure exactly how far below, but I’d guess about -20dB). ie this light is not really indicative of anything. I wouldn’t mind if is threshold were set a couple of dB below zero, so that you can guarantee seeing a flash if it’s actually clipping, but it can be lit up constantly and the level is still nowhere near clipping. If you enable the Limiter, the colour of the light changes to green and allegedly indicates that the Limiter is kicking in (ie its threshold, which I’d have thought should be 0dB otherwise what’s the point, has been exceeded). But in Limiter mode the LED lights at exactly the same level, still way below necessary. Whether it’s actually triggering the Limiter at that level is hard to say – it doesn’t appear to adversely affect the sound until the peaks start to creep much closer to a level that would actually clip, but the fact of that LED lighting up destroys my trust that the limiter is only kicking in when it needs to.

For live broadcasting on my radio shows, I need to be peaking fairly close to 0dB, so this makes the limiter useless and I have to ignore the LED.

Now, this situation is not unique to the UA-25: my old Phono Plus also cried wolf with the peak LED. Building in some headroom to a peak indicator kinda makes sense in 24-bit where you have a theoretical 144dB dynamic range, and indeed the norm is to “pretend” that -24dB is zero, to make absolutely sure you never clip… but in 16-bit, with only 96dB total, if you turn the gain down so the peak LED never lights you’re sacrificing an unacceptable amount of dynamic range. Or if you use the Limiter, you might be allowing the sound to be coloured by it despite the fact that there’s no need for it to be triggering at all.

Conclusion

I should point out that I only use a subset of the UA-25′s features. I’ve never plugged a guitar into it. I’ve tried a mic but only as a test. The features I’ve used are the line-level analogue I/O, digital I/O, and MIDI.

The Edirol UA-25 is a good quality, robust and versatile little box which offers excellent sound fidelity and a great range of features for the price. The limitations I describe above are annoying at times — particularly the peak LED — but overall, having owned the UA-25 for a year, for the uses to which I’ve put it, I’m very happy with its performance.