At its heart, however, the Buddha Machine is actually a counterargument to the onset of the downloading age. For one, the entire point of the release is to have the little box. Sure, you could theoretically download each of the drones (which are actually available in mp3 form on FM3's website), push "repeat" in your media player of choice, and have something close to the original effect, but you lose much of the aura of the work that way -- evaluating these drones purely on the basis of their musical merit is entirely different than evaluating them as an aspect of an odd little artifact. For two, the sound of the drones via the machine is very, very lo-fi, creating an audible buzz in the speaker as the volume gets higher, not to mention the fair amount of hiss that accompanies the drones at any volume. An argument could be made that the constant hiss and crackle is a part of the music (much as the point of John Cage's 4'33" is not the silence, but the sounds surrounding that silence), lending a bit of entropy to the largely static drones.

All of this is not even to mention the idea that in an age where "how much have you got?" is at least as important a question as "how good is it?", an entire release that contains just under three minutes of unique sound is quite the rarity." -- PopMatters (read full review)