Vol. III No. 7

Better-records.com claims to offer better pressings of favorite recordings. Will some reader please refer them to I. 24 of this blog? Boston's 1st LP was a sensation. (I surmise it inspired Aja by Steely Dan. This is the gateway album for appreciating Steely  Dan.) All Side Ones of that album at radio stations are toast from so much play. Side Two now sounds superior to Side One. Also from Boston, 2 years after Boston, was The Cars' 1st LP. In the meantime, the Sex Pistols had broken into the mainstream. So you have in Boston the apotheosis of classic rock, then in The Cars a standard-bearer of the New Sound. More power to you, Better-records.com. Can you also offer cassettes and 3 and 3/4 ips tapes?

Vol. III No. 6

Digital audio engineers appropriated observations made by Harry Nyquist in 1928 on the subject of telegraph transmission. Nyquist's observations pertained to characterizing symbols only, not to characterizing continuous audio content. Digital technology developers made a wholly unjustified leap when they said, as does Advanced Digital Audio, K. Pohlmann, ed., Sams Publications, 1991, p. 33: "Although Nyquist proposed his result in terms of telegraph transmission, the result is equally valid for any kind of digital data transmission, including, of course, digital audio." Nyquist described "completely characterizing" telegraph code. Continuous audio is not completely characterized by intermittent samples.

Vol. III No. 5

R.E.M. is another act, like Madonna and Violent Femmes, which brought out its first record just before the digital era.

Murmur won't shock you, like the Femmes, or excite you, like Madonna, but you will love the smooth, rolling, moody sound and the various stumbles and miscues that tell you this is a very young group, who used very little studio time, and who really didn't give a damn about perfecting the record.

I can't resist urging the reader to listen for the unprintable refrain on side 2, which is clearly audible but not prominent in the mix.

Vol. III No. 4

I wonder at the way in which Kodak has gone so quietly into the good night of bankruptcy.

I recently received some (digital) photos on 'H-P' paper, a product of Hewlett-Packard. I'm reminded of the old Reese's commercial: 'What is your chocolate doing in my peanut butter?" What is H-P doing with Kodak's photo print market?

The H-P photos produce a strange irritation and a feeling of instability behind my eyes. Analog, film photographs never did that.

What prevents Kodak from promoting film photography as superier to digital and therefore preferable for most kinds of imaging?

This preference is not sentimental or Luddite, it is a preference for reality over illusion, clarity over distortion, substance over vacuousness.

Your intermittent, interpolated, numerically step-generated digital images are both inaccurate and irritating. Can't Kodak go to Madison Avenue to promote a product which is not?

Vol. III No. 3

The bel and decibel are the basis for audio measurement that purports to be scientific. But how scientific is a system that was created by asking listeners to determine when a given sound is twice as loud as another sound?

It is clear when you have twice as many oranges or twice as many pairs of socks. It is by no means clear when some tone is 'twice as loud' or 'half as loud' as some other tone.

One implication of this is that evaluation of 'linearity' in audio has no proper basis.

Vol. III No. 2

Readers, please take note of the 3 3/4 inches per second, 1/4 of an inch tape format on which some major label albums were released in the 60's and 70's.

Also, I heard Beyonce's "Freakum Dress" for the first time yesterday, and my comment to myself was that it sounds 'hideous' and extremely 'unmusical'. A song like this would never have gotten airplay in the 70's, when songs like "Midnight at the Oasis" were all over the charts. Note to Beyonce: Try recording in an all-analog studio. You will like what you hear.

Vol. III No. 1

An obvious problem for the audiophile is the large number of different manufacturers making system elements and components that may or may not be compatible with each other. Worse still is the matching of playback components with those used for recording and production. My variable intensity sound-on-film (VISOF) technology will consist of an entire system in which all components are optimally matched and standardized so a recording made with a given configuration will be played back on configurations that are as much as possible identical. In fact, I intend to create standardized studios with identical equipment installations where bands come in to record and where their music will be played back in virtually identical environments. These studios will be set up as refreshment bars with areas for lounging and dancing so the music can be fully and properly shared and enjoyed. Home and auto versions of the equipment, identical as much as possible while scaled to smaller size, will also be made available.