Burton changed their channel design again this year. Well everyone said it was broken when it was launched, and as they've changed it every year since perhaps they realize we were right. Here's how you make the 2011-2012 channel system work with 4x4 bindings, thanks to Dustin @Wiegele's who worked this out.

Snowboard reviews are mostly useless

Here's an example... I just rode two boards on two consecutive days. One was excellent, the other was almost useless. They're both perfectly good boards, but one happens to have the characteristics I need, the other doesn't. So if you don't weigh precisely 62kgs and ride powder fast, then your experience may differ from mine, hence the value you can get from this is limited.

More...

I've been experimenting streaming FLAC from various UPnP servers controlled by a separate UPnP control point running on Android, with the rendering being on my Naim. Control points seem to be a weak point in the chain. Maybe that's because they haven't been a big issue until recently, or perhaps it's because they have interfaces "pointing both ways", but for whatever reason it seems quite hard to get them to play well with renderers and servers.

After a while I got bored with using the remote control and the little green screen on my Naim to suck music from my UPnP server - it's just a little bit too fiddly. I ended up using the excellent Media Monkey to play FLAC, and then send the output out of the optical feed on my sound card to the Naim UPnP player.

That's fine, but then I happened to listen to the player again direct, using streamed FLAC. I noticed straight away that the sound was better when the Naim does the decoding rather than when Media Monkey did it on the PC.

I did suspect I'd turned into a hi-fi moron, but the difference was definitely noticeable and not just the level, it was more complicated than that.