[jacal01]

Amazon, ebay, goodwill, etc. for previous years (and current); the sponsoring company's retail outlets (Whole Foods, Starbucks, Peet's...) for the current release.  They're only out there for a few months before they pull them back, too.
 
Just search on the station call letters.

 

[StefanJK]

  Amazon, ebay, goodwill, etc. for previous years (and current); the sponsoring company's retail outlets (Whole Foods, Starbucks, Peet's...) for the current release.  They're only out there for a few months before they pull them back, too.
 
Just search on the station call letters.

Thanks.  I'll give it a try.  I had no idea.

 

[BackToAnalogue]

But I do so enjoy the exhilaration when a tweak opens up whole new avenues of sonic nuances and inner details.  It doesn't always happen but when it does its like getting money for nuth'n and yer chicks for free…  


 


JJ

 


Please don't remind me of that song ;}

That riff is the one they used to sell us all new CD players. For many years you couldn't walk past a HiFii shop without hearing it blaring out.

Of course it sounded good, it is very simple, CDs are good at simple, but they don't do complicated so well

 

[jacal01]

Well, thank gawd my music tastes are simple...

 

[nedifer]

An interesting write-up on the surge in vinyl sales and the struggles of the industry to cope with demand using aging manufacturing equipment...
 
The Biggest Music Comeback of 2014: Vinyl Records
Sales of LPs Surge 49% but Aging Factories Struggle to Keep Pace
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-music-comeback-of-2014-vinyl-records-1418323133?mobile=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11008785394923453828404580286740594635852.html

 

[ejwiles]

  An interesting write-up on the surge in vinyl sales and the struggles of the industry to cope with demand using aging manufacturing equipment...
 
The Biggest Music Comeback of 2014: Vinyl Records
Sales of LPs Surge 49% but Aging Factories Struggle to Keep Pace
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-music-comeback-of-2014-vinyl-records-1418323133?mobile=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11008785394923453828404580286740594635852.html

Very interesting.  Thanks!

 

[valiant66]

 
And, you're overlooking one key point: many of these wonderful recording are simply not available in digital form. LPs are the only way to hear them. 
 
 

 
This is the part that has me hanging on to my vinyl collection. There are simply too many good recordings that didn't jump the digital divide. In my case I have lots of obscure Canadiana and albums/singles released during the bloom of punk rock that were never commercially successful enough for anyone to bother to re-release. Ironically, low budgets often meant there wasn't money available to over-produce this stuff, and raw off-the-floor recordings made for visceral listening experiences.
 
That being said I have a lot of crap that I really should sell off. Ironically, that schiit is much more likely to be available on CD...

 

[valiant66]

  ...that's like curling up in a ball of fear because the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the heat death of the universe spells doom for everything around us someday.

 
I think of this often when my ego gets the best of me. Worrying that I won't be remembered in the future, after I've turned into dust: then I think "Nobody remembers the 3rd rock chipper from the right working on the Pyramid of Giza and the world goes on. It won't matter if nobody remembers me..."
 
And then my ego kicks back in and it's all "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!"

 

[valiant66]

  People that call computer audio simple are completely wrong. Computer audio is just as hard/complex as vinyl. Here are just some of the issues concerning computer audio:
 
15) endless problems with meta data
 
ad nauseam

 
This is killing me right now.
 
I sank probably hundreds of hours into metadata on my iTunes collection (over 2 TB of music, about 1/3 of it Apple Lossless). When my HD crashed, I lost my iTunes xml file. Not the music, that was on another drive, but the metadata. My playlists, ratings, comments, genres, categories, all of that stuff. Gone. It's like someone reached into my record collection and just shuffled everything so I can't find it any more. Think of it this way - I've got a relatively small collection of 1,200 phylsical CDs - it's like they all just got de-categorized and de-alphabetized. Imagine trying to find a favourite CD when someone just threw all your music on the ground and then put it back on the shelves willy-nilly.
 
At least digitally you can find an artist/song/album by searching (even though iTunes makes even that harder with each "improvement"). But those perfectly curated playlists - it's like losing all your favourite mixtapes. And I'm a recovering DJ, so playlists mattered.
 
I want to type *sigh* but that doesn't come anywhere near expressing how I feel.
 
Killing me.
 
My drives have been shipped off to Drive Savers: the scare-off-the-poor quote was "between $900 and $2,900" to recover my data.
 
Killing me.

 

[valiant66]

  You're right. I just finished listening to an album on Spotify and I had to click THREE TIMES to start a new one.

So difficult...

 
LOL. 
 
So difficult...
 

 

[valiant66]

  Personally I am starting to think that maybe it would be easier to just call quits and buy a turntable.  

 
Eh... try hauling a turntable around with you so you can listen to your CIEMs on the bus...
 
Everything has its place. Vinyl's place is in the room where no other family members venture. If you have one. Digital fits into nearly everywhere else, especially if there are sticky fingers and young'uns around. Or, you know, moving out of the "sweet spot."

 

[valiant66]

Originally Posted by jacal01 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
 
I have recently discovered the radio stations collection CDs of live band recordings off of their morning drive shows, that they produce annually for charity, foodbanks, etc.  Straight pristine reproductions of their favorite songs from the various visiting groups or artists on tour around the country that year.
 
Just as performed; no congesting, mixing or remastering.  Simple, pure and faithful to the performance, and actually imparting a sense of being there.  Sweet.  With the proper conversion equipment, digital is coming right around...   

 
I lived in the UK back in the day, and I read the hi-fi (what they called it before someone invented "audiophile") magazines. Some highly respected bespectacled boffin opined (and I believed him, based on personal experimentation) that the highest fidelity musical experience available to the house-bound was live FM.
 
Yes, frequency-modulated over-the-air radio.
 
The BBC used to send their very best out to broadcast classical music. They would mic up a concert hall, then sit out in their broadcast trucks and send the live results out the world - minimal compression, no processing, just careful mic placement and gain riding. This is the environment that the BBC LS3/5a was spawned in - a speaker design that's about to have its 40th anniversary and is still used as a comparison for modern mini-monitors (read any review of the KEF LS50 speaker, a current well-deserved darling).
 
I dropped as much as I could on a Magnum-Dynalab tuner and paid some yobbo to put a decent FM ariel on the roof of my rental flat.
 
Oh. My. God.
 
Talk about the nearest thing to live music!
 
But recording it lost the magic, even with dbx on top-notch tape decks. Most of it wasn't actually "recorded" by the BBC, especially with regard to re-broadcast (or re-production) - it was just logged in case someone called in with a language complaint.
 
I've come close to that experience with some of the NPR broadcasts, but nothing has matched those old BBC live shows. Nobody in the world believes in FM any more, for a start. And as we've complained many times, most recorded music is over-produced and over-compressed.

 

[valiant66]

Gawd. Sorry for spewing. I just saw I had like six posts in a row. I'm only just now getting back online and catching up.
 
My apologies.

 

[Puma Cat]

  Gawd. Sorry for spewing. I just saw I had like six posts in a row. I'm only just now getting back online and catching up.
 
My apologies.

No worries, we're all friends here. 

 

[tonykaz]

Mr. Valiant, 
 
I feel your pain! 
 
Happen'd to me as well,
 
I now burn a back-up, duplicate disc of everything I load onto my hard Drive , I'll get a Solid State Drive on my next Mac. 
 
It's painful to loose it all, it still hurts me to think of it, it's all our shared NightMare.  
 
The AudioQuest guy, Silberman I think is his name, has a strategy requiring a parallel Memory device.  I haven't done that but I know that I should.  
 
Tony, crying for you, in Michigan