Are your supplements safe - or could they be secretly harming you?
I strongly advocate for evidence-based supplements. But when a patient arrived for surgery carrying 16 bottles of supplements, I knew we needed to be extra cautious. Everything seemed fine until the last moment - just before anesthesia, their heart suddenly went into a dangerous rhythm. The surgery had to be canceled, and the patient needed emergency cardiac intervention.
7:44 – (3) the most important question to ask your doctor!
Your
health is too important to gamble with. Watch now to learn what you
need to do to make sure your supplements are working for you - not against
you.
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I'll discuss the hidden dangers of contaminated supplements, including microbial contamination, toxic heavy metals, and even mislabeled or illegally altered ingredients. Some supplements have been found to contain unapproved pharmaceuticals without warning, creating serious health risks. I break down the evidence behind these risks and explain why so many people unknowingly expose themselves to dangerous substances every day.
But it’s not all bad news. I believe in safe, effective supplements that truly support health. That’s why I’m sharing three essential steps to protect yourself before putting anything into your body. From verifying third-party testing to questioning the necessity of a supplement, these tips can help you make informed decisions and avoid costly, potentially harmful mistakes.
As a nurse working ICU we would ask about meds and supplements. I had one pt deny taking anything. She had surgery and we could not control oozing post op. Her friend came in with a large bag of natural supplements. I asked why they did not tell me about these when asked. Response they are "natural supplements" so cannot hurt you. I went through and found 3 that had blood thinning effect. Called the surgeon and we made a game plan to make it past the 4 to 5 days it would take for them to clear her system. Then when she was better reviewed the issue of not reporting "natural supplements" as medicine to the MD or us.
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Its subject is a centuries-old Spanish legend about a libertine as told by playwright Tirso de Molina in his 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. It is a dramma giocoso blending comedy, melodrama and supernatural elements (although the composer entered it into his catalogue simply as opera buffa). It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the National Theater (of Bohemia), now called the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787. Don Giovanni is regarded as one of the greatest operas of all time and has proved a fruitful subject for commentary in its own right; critic Fiona Maddocks has described it as one of Mozart's "trio of masterpieces with librettos by Da Ponte".
Several Versions of the Complete Opera Below
Subtitles:🇮🇹 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇨🇦
ITALIANO (CC) – ENGLISH (CC) – FRANÇAIS (intégré dans la vidéo).
Don Giovanni 🎼Teatro alla Scala Peter Mattei, Bryn Terfel 👇♪English Subtitles ♪ 👇
Peter Mattei - Don Giovanni
Bryn Terfel - Leporello
Kwangchul Youn - Il Commendatore
Anna Netrebko - Donna Anna
Giuseppe Filianoti - Don Ottavio
Barbara Frittoli - Donna Elvira
Anna Prohaska - Zerlina
Stefan Kocan - Masetto
Conductor: Daniel Barenboim
Director: Robert Carsen * Teatro alla Scala, 2011
Don Giovanni 🎼 Mozart Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles
Jamais démenti depuis la Première à l'Opéra de Prague en 1787, "Don Giovanni" est un opéra plein de péripéties écrit par Mozart. Dans le rôle principal, Robert Gleadow emmène le spectateur dans les aventures rocambolesques de ce noble séducteur.
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Mozart 🎼 Don Giovanni Herbert von Karajan, Salzburg Festival, 1987
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Don Giovanni“ from the Salzburg Festival in 1987. One of the last opera productions under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, directed by Michael Hampe. The entire performance in best possible quality is presented by the “Eliette und Herbert von Karajan Institut”. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791) “Don Giovanni”, dramma giocoso K. 527 Don Giovanni: Samuel Ramey Il Commendatore: Paata Burchuladze Donna Anna: Anna Tomowa-Sintow Donna Elvira: Júlia Várady Don Ottavio: Gösta Winbergh Leporello: Ferruccio Furlanetto Masetto: Alexander Malta Zerlina: Kathleen Battle Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor Wiener Philharmoniker Conductor: Herbert von Karajan Stage direction: Michael Hampe Set: Mauro Pagano
It's a shame that subtitles often miss so many subtleties of Da Ponte’s libretto, so many allusions, and nuances that only an Italian can grasp!
For example, in the opera's opening scene, Don Giovanni and Leporello sing at the same time almost the same expression (0:10:07), but employing the verb “precipitar(e)” in two different acceptations, often confused: Don Giovanni does not fear at all his own downfall… it’s Leporello who is afraid to suffer something harmful, while Don Giovanni is justifying to himself whatever misdeed he is ready to commit, as being compelled to, with hypocritical rhetoric… And actually, shortly thereafter he will kill Donna Anna’s father, and again will claim that his victim had it coming!
The poetic witticism of putting two different acceptations of the same verb near each other is repeated in the first scene of the II act (1:37:00).
It’s striking that someone should “make love” (“fare all’amor”) beneath a window (1:50:13).
But this idiom has shifted in meaning over time in both languages: nothing to do with the present meaning: at that time, it meant “to woo”, “to court”.
Ignoring the possible meaning hidden behind the words and overlooking the libretto’s indications often could prove misleading, as shown by the common misunderstanding of the duettino “Là ci darem la mano”. Here correctly, initially Zerlina sings toward the audience, her backs on Don Giovanni, thinking out loud, trying to decide what to do. Her aside “Quick, I’m no longer strong” is not meant to urge the seducer, but amounts to saying: “Somebody help me at once! I’m afraid my strength is failing ”. This last (half-hearted) hint at resistance is shaken at the prospect of elevating her own station through marriage and (pretty comically) finally overcome when the Don explicitly promises to improve her lot… (so much for pitying Masetto!) It really isn't about romance, on either side! It’s rather a tug of war between two different cunnings. And the words with which Don Giovanni mocks Zerlina’s expectations are not accidental. “There we shall give each other our hands” is not just an invitation to “hold hands”: he intends to evoke the ritual “join your right hands” at the exchange of the wedding vows. But “to give one’s hand”, besides to swear or to seal a vow, is done to confirm a generic agreement; “darsi la mano”, as “to shake hands” intended, binds a bargain... Similarly “there you will tell me yes” patently would lead Zerlina to foresee the wedding declaration of consent, her “I do”. But surely Don Giovanni has in mind another kind of consent…
At the end, Don Giovanni and Zerlina are going to “ristorar le pene”, “to redress”, “to reward” (with marriage, or so Zerlina believes) the sufferings endured by their innocent love... Less innocent is the pun: it seems to wink at us: definitely the two don't mean the same thing! It could approximately be rendered… (0:46:26)
But how tricky it is to… “restore” such tricks!
DON GIOVANNI 🎼 W. A. MOZART.
HD full opera
🇮🇹 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇨🇦 Subtitles:
ITALIANO (CC) – ENGLISH (CC) – FRANÇAIS (intégré dans la vidéo).
One of the best known and most popular operas ever. This version was enacted at the Festival of Aix–en–Provence, in France. The staging presents some quite radical features – very interesting and thought–provoking, by the way – concerning mainly the personality of Don Giovanni himself. A little bit too devilish, perhaps. But the singing is quite classical – and excellent.
Conductor: Jérémie ROHRER. Stage Director: Jean–François SIVADIER. Orchestre: LE CERCLE DE L'HARMONIE.
Don Giovanni: Philippe SLY. Leporello: Nahuel di PIERRO. Donna Elvira: Isabel LEONARD. Donn'Anna: Eleonora BURATTO. Don Ottavio: Pavol BRESLIK. Zerlina: Julie FUCHS. Masetto: Krzysztof BACZYK. Il Commendatore: David LEIGH. DO NOT MISS the opportunity to compare this more "classical" version with the very original staging of ACHIM FREYER (musically also excellent):
The musical level is outstanding. Extremely original and colorful "mise en scène". Its intention could possibly be – as proposed by Walter Benjamin in an insightful comment, for which many thanks – to present human beings as puppets, moved by the invisible threads of uncontrollable passions. A notion that could be fairly close to da Ponte's and Mozart's actual inspiration. 🇫🇷 NOTE:
De nombreux passages, à plusieurs voix, sont très complexes à sous–titrer de manière un tant soit peu intelligible. N'hésitez pas svp à signaler des erreurs ou à suggérer de possibles améliorations de présentation. NOTE:
This video is about a bunch of stuff you probably didn't know about CDs.
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Comments
Own your music, because you never know when you can't access "your" music online any more. 📀 Exactly. I still listen to CDs and watch DVDs. (I also read paper books.) 📀 Digital files are still the easier way to keep music alive unfortunately. CDs are excellent for sound quality but terrible for density and will eventually go bad from disc rot. I'd recommend FLAC or another unlocked lossless format to keep your music. 📀 Exactly, as long as I have electricity, I can play my 300+ CD collection. I can load up my Sony Walkmans(6) with mp3 from my CD’s. I have an aux plug in my car, 📀 For me the biggest fail was the removal of the CD players in modern cars. I have multiple CDs at home and I can’t listen to them. 📀
ONE MORE THING you probably didn't know: if you one day discover "pin-hole" rot in your favorite disk and it no longer plays through - that is, a spot that you can see daylight through when holding the disk up to a light source - you can restore it and still play it if you use a dab of acrylic paint to cover the hole on the top/label side. Once you block that hole, or even several holes, the laser is again able to read what's imprinted on the disk.
Happy Record Store Day! There are plenty of business-relatedgrievances to be filed against the annual vinyl celebration, but it’s hard to argue with the spirit of a day encouraging people to explore and buy new music. Moreover, vinyl’s just more fun as a format than MP3s or CDs; there’s something viscerally satisfying about dropping the needle, and physically spinning the record back to rewind. And in a world where people feel all too welcome to hijack the playlist at parties they attend, it’s nice to have a
harder-to-commandeer format on offer.
Let’s not fool ourselves, though. Vinyl is great, but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous. They sound different, and that’s exactly the point.
What Vinyl Can’t Do
Mastering for Vinyl
An introduction, in plain non technical language, on preparing your tunes for vinyl record cutting and pressing
A nice explanation of some of the challenges of mastering vinyl.
On a theoretical level, there’s just no reason it should be the case that vinyl sounds better. There are built-in problems with
using vinyl as a data encoding mechanisms that have no CD equivalent. Vinyl is physically limited by the fact that records have to be capable of being played without skipping or causing distortion. That both limits the dynamic range — the difference between the loudest and softest note — and the range of pitches (or “frequencies”) you can hear.
If notes get too low in pitch, that means less audio can fit in a given amount of vinyl. If notes are too high, the stylus has difficulty tracking them, causing distortion. So engineers mastering for vinyl often cut back on extreme high or low ends, using a variety of methods, all of which alter the music.
For example, one common cause of high pitches in recordings is “sibilance,” or the hiss-y sound produced by pronouncing certain consonants, notably “s” or “z"s, in a quick, sharp way (ex.: "zip,” “shack,” “sap”). This creates enough problems for engineers working in vinyl that they often have to “de-ess” recordings, either by making the pronunciation less sibilant through editing or by straight-up asking vocalists to pronounce lyrics differently.
De-essing is a common technique outside vinyl too, but then it’s an artistic choice; vinyl forces de-essing upon you. If you want to keep aggressive sibilance in for
aesthetic reasons, and want to press to vinyl, you’re out of luck. And when de-essing is achieved through re-recording vocals, it can alter the music in subtler ways, making vocalists deliver lyrics less intensely and lose a degree of artistic expression in the process.
What CDs Can Do
Since CDs rely on sampling an original analog signal being recorded, they do have some frequency limitations. While vinyl records, in theory, directly encode a smooth audio wave, CDs sample that audio wave at various points and then collate those samples. “No matter how high a sampling rate is,” Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk once wrote, “it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove.”
That’s true. CDs work by taking a bunch of samples from a source audio wave and stringing them together. But this criticism is misleading on two counts. For one thing, vinyl pressing is not error-free, and the analog groove of a given record is not a precise replication of the audio wave recorded in the master, not least due to extreme high and low frequency limitations. It’s true that CDs can’t exactly replicate the whole audio wave in a master, in every case (update: in many cases, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem means it can) — but neither can vinyl records.
More importantly, the volume of sampling that CDs do should be enough to get a replica of the original recording that sounds identical to the human ear. The sampling rate for CDs is 44.1kHz, meaning that CD recordings sample the master recording 44,100 times a second, and can capture frequencies as high as 20 kHz. That is about the limit of what humans can hear; at least one experiment has confirmed that listeners in blind tests can’t tell the difference between recordings that include frequencies above 21k and ones that don’t. You may think you can hear more than CDs are giving you. But you probably can’t.
And over time, engineers have come to make better use of those 44.1kHz. Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Institute, explains that engineers have taken to “oversampling,” making digital files that use a much higher rate than 44.1kHz, and then compressing that back down to 44.1kHz for the actual CD. “It captures the signal at a much much higher sample rate and then mathematically takes it down to 44.1kHz,” Metcalfe says. “It does a really good job of preserving information.”
Metcalfe brings up another problem with this line of CD criticism. Even if an actual recording method can hold frequencies above 20kHz, that doesn’t matter if there isn’t a microphone capable of capturing them in the first place, or a speaker capable of playing them back. And most studios don’t have microphones that record above 20kHz, and it’s very rare for speakers to play frequencies above that. Indeed, most playback systems feature low-pass filters, which specifically cut off anything above that marker.
The fact of the matter is that CDs can create closer facsimiles than vinyl can.
What do People Actually Prefer?
Simply as a matter revealed preferences, the fact that Americans buy digital copies of songs at a much greater rate than alternatives suggests that they’d rather listen to digital music or CDs than vinyl. Taking both actual albums and track sales into account, the equivalent of 243.5 million digital albums were sold last year, compared to 165.4 million CDs and 6.1 million vinyl records. Given that compressed digital audio is considerably lower in quality than either CDs or vinyl, consumer certainly seem to care a lot less about audio quality than convenience.
But that’s kind of an unfair comparison, given exactly that convenience differential. You can’t fit thousands of tracks’ worth of vinyl in your pocket and listen to it while jogging. So what happens if you set all else equal, and have people compare digital and analog audio in a controlled setting?
Unfortunately, no one appears to have done a double blind listener test comparing vinyl to CDs, but there is a good study from Florida State’s John Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan doing that with CDs and high-quality cassette recordings. While cassettes sold to consumers often featured lower audio quality than vinyl records, there’s nothing inherent to magnetic tape requiring that, and the format doesn’t suffer from the frequency limits imposed by the risk of vinyl skipping. It’s not a perfect test for our purposes, but knowing how people feel about high-quality analog stacked up to high-quality digital should tell us something about comparing vinyl to CDs.
Geringer and Dunnigan used identical microphone and mixing board setups to record four different concerts, each time using both a digital record
and a high-quality analog cassette recorder (the MR-3 from audiophile favorite brand Nakamichi). They then had 40 music majors listen to the recordings, either with loudspeakers or headphones, while letting them switch between each recording at will. The test subjects were not aware of which was the digital recording, and which was the analog one. They were then asked to record their preferences.
It turns out that the music majors had a significant preferences for digital. “Participants gave significantly higher ratings to the digital presentations in bass, treble, and overall quality,” Geringer and
Dunnigan write. The results were weaker on some points than others (recordings of string orchestras were a particularly close call) but in no case was the average rating of the analog version higher than the average rating of the digital one. The most analog-generous thing to be taken away from the study is that there are some types of music for which people have no preference. But there were several where people had a real, noticeable preference for digital.
Dylan Matthewsis a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
So Why do People Love Vinyl?
Perhaps the best audio-based case for vinyl is actually precisely the fact that it does mess up the original recording. A lot of vinyl fans talk about the “warmth” of records, particularly of the low-end. But, as Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson puts it, “the ‘warmth’ that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate.” The difficulty of accurately translating bass lines to vinyl without making grooves too big means that engineers have to do a lot of processing to get it to work, which changes the tone of the bass in a way that, apparently, many people find aesthetically pleasing.
“Warmth” also comes from flaws in record players. As the University of Waterloo’s Stanley Lipshitz once explained to Popular Science, speaker sound and the needle’s height fluctuations can cause the record to vibrate, which the needle in turn picks up and
translates into a “warmer” seeming sound.
Is it wrong to prefer that “warmer” sound? Of course not! It would be as preposterous to rule that out as a legitimate source of aesthetic appreciation as it would be to discount distorted guitar lines for being “less faithful” to the original guitar sound. Audio distortion can be beautiful and there’s nothing wrong with liking it. But there’s also something to be said for listening to music as its creators meant it to be heard, and precisely because of their “warmth” vinyl recordings sound rather different from what artists hear in the studio.
“As a recording engineer, when I go to a digital recording, what I did is exactly what I get back,” Metcalfe explains. “When you record in the analog domain, what you’re hearing there is different from what you sent in.”
Should I Stop Listening to Vinyl?
No! For heaven’s sake, no. Each format has its charms, and their overall differences in quality are often overwhelmed by differences in the quality of initial recording equipment, in mastering approaches, and in playback setup. But if you’re a vinyl collector, you also shouldn’t go around telling your friends how much purer your audio is. First off, that’s generally dickish behavior, but more to the point it’s false. Digital recording just is more accurate. That’s not the only thing worth considering by any means, but it does make the puritanism of some vinyl true believers look rather ridiculous.
Thanks to Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for help in researching this piece
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