The Henry Spink Foundation

I'd never heard of The Henry Spink Foundation, but John L Dixon retweeted this from Alan Henness, and now I have:

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! NOT FELICITY KENDALL!!!! http://bit.ly/9X9rJW #dreamsshattered

I set off to find out a little more. I read a little. I came across a list of therapies*. I ticked off Homeopathy, Chiropractic, and one of my favourites, Craniosacral Osteopathy from a mental list of quackery. I haven't and don't intend to read all of it. There may be some good and useful information about some good and useful therapies in amongst the bullshit. The trouble is that I already know from just five minutes perusing, that I can't trust it.

I picked something I'd never heard of from the list that they call the 'information centre'. I chose The Tomatis Method. In the second paragraph. I read:

According to Dr Tomatis this happens when muscles are not working properly and through auditory stimulation it is possible to retrain the muscles of the inner ear so that it can function without distortion.

Hang on, I thought. Muscles of the inner ear ? My anatomical knowledge comes from what I've picked up from watching Your Life In Their Hands, going to Body Worlds, playing Bones Lite, being slightly in love with Dr Alice Roberts and doing a 60 point level 2 Technology of Music unit with the Open University.

The OU course had a bit about the ear, but I didn't recall anything about muscles of the inner ear. It seemed a bit unlikely. I can wiggle my pinnae a bit, so I know we have vestigial muscles associated with the outer ear. I know we can attenuate our hearing by manipulating the ossicles, which sounds as though muscles are involved. Muscles in the cochlear seem a bit unlikely though.

So I googled. I found this kind of thing : EAR. Intra-inner-ear-musculature was conspicuous by its absence.

Next step, look up The Tomatis Method. The Official site says something different:

…listening will be disturbed when there is a dysfunction of the two muscles located in the middle ear whose role is to enable the precise and harmonious integration of acoustic information into the inner ear, and from there to the brain…

I don't want to go into the Tomatis Method in any detail. The rest of the information given by The Henry Spink Foundation suggests that it's nonsense. The point I'm trying to make is that if someone like me, a half-arsed lay anatomist with really quite rudimentary knowledge can spot a mistake like this in about 5 minutes, proper smart qualified people should be able to rip it to shreds. More worrying though is that gullible, desperate, less inquisitive people might buy into this kind of nonsense and line the pockets of these charlatans.

[Note: if there's actual evidence of the efficacy of the Tomatis Method, that would pass the scrutiny of a proper professional, like Ben Goldacre, say, I'll happily write another post singing its praises]

[* John has since called the lista real "Woo's Woo" of AltMed treatments". Genius!]

Wireless Audio done right.

With an open mind, I introduced the Sony wireless speakers to my wife. I explained that they were a complete bargain, and that if we didn't want them, I could probably re-sell them to someone at work. She was quite keen to get some music back into the living room. Our DVD player, which was used to play CDs, has migrated to another room, and music on a MacBook's speakers is obviously compromised.

After a quick demo, while she was out of the house earlier, I started to set them up properly. As I was setting them up, I discovered that our Airport Express, which I'd bought to augment a dead spot right where my wife sits on the couch, was now very close to our AV cupboard. My son had moved it a little while back.

Rather than plug in the Sony kit, I figured I might be able to hook up the Airport Express. We've a bit of an unconventional setup. Virgin V+ and Sky boxes hooked up to an old Phillips video sender, which is routed to Aego-M 2.1 speakers (fantastic) and an NEC projector (feeling its age now), which projects straight onto the living room wall, giving us a 70" picture. If the video sender is transmitting, it kills WiFi, so it's just used to switch sources. it has 4 in and 1 out, so here were 2 spare inputs.

A quick nose through my boxes of cables and connectors yielded a SCART to Phono converter (the kind you get with a PS2 or a Wii) and a 3.5mm jack to Phono cable. Perfect. I hooked it up, fired up iTunes on my MacBook Pro, the Remote App on my iPod Touch, paired them, and had audio out of the Aegos straight away.

I did briefly have a problem with Remote losing the ability to connect to iTunes. The settings were correct. The interwebs suggested a firewall problem. My firewall settings were fine, but something was screwing up with it. I switched the firewall off, reconnected, and turned the firewall on again, and it's been fine ever since.

The Remote app is brilliant. Fantastic. It can switch between multiple libraries, and it can re-route audio to either the Mac's speakers or the Airport connected speakers (or both). It's also far faster than I'd expect. I have a fairly large library (12,000+ songs), and it takes seconds to connect, seearch etc. It's as though the library is on the iPod.

This is how it's meant to be. The Sony system goes back on Monday. Turns out an 83% discount doesn't matter if the product is fundamentally flawed. Docking an iPod touch or an iPhone takes it out of your hand, and that's just wrong.

People accuse me of fanboyism, but it's only partly true. Apple generally make stuff that's better than everyone else, but often it's just because it sucks less than everyone else rather than being phenomenally good. iTunes + Airport Express + Remote is an example of phenomenally good.
but they absolutely nailed this.

With Airplay coming to third party devices, this is only going to get better.