What music are you listening to these days?

[TheSwissAquarist]

Fan of old classics.

[Guppysnail]

 

[OnlyGenusCaps]

My grandfather loved country music.  Because I liked Weird Al, he bought a Ray Stevens album for me hoping it would get me listening to country.  No luck!  🤣  But that song will always bring back good memories of him. 

[lefty o]

its sad this wont do what an album will. had this on an LP as a kid, played on a higher speed, its funny as heck.

 

[JettsPapa]

On 12/4/2022 at 9:37 PM, lefty o said:

an old classic!!

 

I'm not a big fan of his, but I always liked that song.  It reminds me of another "novelty" song I'm fond of:

 

Edited December 7, 2022 by JettsPapa

[lefty o]

On 12/7/2022 at 9:51 AM, JettsPapa said:

I'm not a big fan of his, but I always liked that song.  It reminds me of another "novelty" song I'm fond of:

 

paycheck had a few good ones!

[JettsPapa]

On 12/7/2022 at 9:51 AM, JettsPapa said:

I'm not a big fan of his, but I always liked that song.  It reminds me of another "novelty" song I'm fond of:

 

I always laugh at the line that starts with ". . . but he was a gentleman about it."

[OnlyGenusCaps]

On 12/7/2022 at 9:35 AM, lefty o said:

its sad this wont do what an album will. had this on an LP as a kid, played on a higher speed, its funny as heck.

That song always reminds me of what a former president of the U of M (that would be the proper one, University of Michigan) said in the 70's about the streaking fad when interviewed one autumn 'Winter is coming. This is a problem that will take care of itself.'

[tolstoy21]

These kids are amazingly talented well beyond their years, if you're into this kind of thang.

[OnlyGenusCaps]

I've been enjoying, what I think of as, classic punk recently.  The Offspring are part of my youth.  Dexter Holland, the lead singer and guitarist of the band, and I both have doctorates in biology.  I finished my degree before he did, despite him being older than me.  Apparently though, a side hustle of punk rock can be far more lucrative than one of aquarium keeping.  There he has got me beat!  Choose your hobbies wisely, folks. 

 

[Odd Duck]

On 12/7/2022 at 6:53 AM, Guppysnail said:

 

My father often told a story about a skunk that may have been assisted into a church one Sunday by his nephews.  He supposedly had no part in it. 🙄  His 3 nephews were his age since he was 20 years younger than his oldest sister (mother of the “cousins” as they were usually called) and they were all raised together.  I think the 4 of them pretty much ran wild on the farm all summer as long as their chores all got done.

Apparently it did get pretty interesting in the church for a while that day.  How he knew this when he “had no part in the skunk’s release” has remained a mystery for all these years.  😂 🤣 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

 

 

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Having a bad day?  Impossible not to smile on "Dr. K's" channel.  Caution: you might dance out of your chair.

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Forgot about Boy George?  Here's a quick jam session he recently had with Terry Miles. Everything is improv.

 

[tolstoy21]

On 12/9/2022 at 8:26 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

 

God I remember first time I saw Pumpkins on MTV's 120 minutes right as their first album, Gish, was being released. I must have been like 18 or 19 at the time?

This was the night before I attended the first Lalapalooza  to see Janes Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Violent Femmes, etc. 

I remember trying really hard to remember the 'Pumpkins' name during the card ride to the show so as to remind myself to grab their album.

Ah to be young! 

Thanks @Chick-In-Of-TheSea for the memories!

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

@tolstoy21 I saw them in 2018. Since you’re a Gish fan, here’s Rhinoceros from the finest nosebleed seat $30 can buy!

The show was excellent. They also did a cover of Space Oddity.

[Guppysnail]

 

[Minanora]

This time of year I always listen to Yes band, Sting: if on a winters night (album), Iced Earth... I also play a few specific songs. On Christmas Eve I play Ringo Starr's "I wanna be Santa clause" just once. And every time it rains I play Bryn Terfels live performance of "if I were a rich man" I play that as loud as I can stand comfortably. It's lovely 💚 😂

[JettsPapa]

On 12/12/2022 at 1:02 PM, Minanora said:

This time of year I always listen to Yes band, Sting: if on a winters night (album), Iced Earth... I also play a few specific songs. On Christmas Eve I play Ringo Starr's "I wanna be Santa clause" just once. And every time it rains I play Bryn Terfels live performance of "if I were a rich man" I play that as loud as I can stand comfortably. It's lovely 💚 😂

For some reason back when I had an 8-track player in my truck and it was raining I would listen to Chicago's Hot Streets album.

[Odd Duck]

Sometimes when it rains, especially if I have to walk any distance through it, BJ Thomas always comes to my mind.

🎶Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red. Crying’s not for me. ‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining. Because I’m free. Nothings worrying me. 🎶

A favorite when I was a kid - before about half or more of you were born. 
 

 

It’s raining now. 😆 

[Guppysnail]

@Odd Duck I used to love playing a lot of BJ when it was raining. He just fits rainy day moods. I’m also the age of perfection 🥳

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 12/12/2022 at 10:34 PM, Odd Duck said:

Sometimes when it rains, especially if I have to walk any distance through it, BJ Thomas always comes to my mind.

🎶Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red. Crying’s not for me. ‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining. Because I’m free. Nothings worrying me. 🎶

A favorite when I was a kid - before about half or more of you were born. 
 

 

It’s raining now. 😆 

I love this!  😍  When I was a little girl I used to have a music box that played this tune.

[Tanked]

On 12/12/2022 at 3:12 PM, JettsPapa said:

For some reason back when I had an 8-track player in my truck and it was raining I would listen to Chicago's Hot Streets album.

We were lucky if our company trucks had a working radio.  It seems that every time I was out in the middle of nowhere in a rainstorm the radio was playing Kansas' Dust in the Wind!

[dasaltemelosguy]

The Princeton Record Exchange

Long ago, I was friends with three string players and a pianist from the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, sometime in the 1990s.

At that time, the premier record store in the United States was known as the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton NJ, quite literally across the street from the university.

I lived about 20 minutes from Princeton back then and my musician friends were from the Cleveland area. However, they were well aware of Princeton Record Exchange, and as such, we had an annual tradition of meeting at Princeton Record Exchange to spend a day…and often a fortune, on used records, many of which were long out of print.

Princeton Record Exchange sold only used records, yet the store was massive. It had many rooms for many categories. Using a ‘supermarket’ as a metric, it was probably ‘three supermarkets’ in size in multiple rooms with LPs stacked literally from floor to ceiling. One could spend days searching for treasures:

                 

                  

                  

                  

On one such occasion, my musician friends drove non-stop from Cleveland, OH to Princeton, NJ in an old, gutted van with a large, gaping hole in the floor that formed from years of rusting away.

I remember being in that van and getting wet when the hole in the floor would erupt like a geyser whenever they ran over puddles! 🤣!

The last time they visited Princeton Records, they bought so many LPs, they left only standing room in the van.

Along with the four musicians was the driver’s Bichon Frise “Nipp,” named after the famous RCA Records dog “Nipper” listening to “His Masters Voice,” featured on every RCA record label.

RCA’s Nipper listening to “His Masters Voice” on a Victrola

All available space in the van from floor to roof was filled with LPs such that three of them had to stand for the entire ride back to Cleveland while the driver held Nipp on his lap. Given the van’s condition---it was dangerously overstocked, it had no seats, and the driver had to keep Nipp on his lap---they chose slow, back roads for the ride home to hopefully avoid being pulled over.

At one point, the driver noticed Nipp was not on his lap anymore. The driver looked up and to his horror, he saw Nipp in the rear-view mirror!  Nipp fell through the hole in the floor and was running down the road after the van! 

Fortunately, no harm was done and everyone including Nipp eventually made it back to Cleveland along with hundreds of treasures.

And we found many rarities and treasures every time we went there. This is about one such treasure that anyone may download.

If you’re not old enough to remember this, long before digital audio, in the halcyon days of high-fidelity LPs, there was a form of recording known as Direct-to-Disc or D2D. D2D was the purest form of the LP record. D2D records bypassed most of the recording chain, and as such, it bypassed most of the generational degradation suffered by conventional LPs. D2Ds often enjoyed absolutely stunning fidelity, in some instances, rivalling the sound quality of the original master.

Normally the LP recording path went as follows;

Normal record production:

Microphone > Tape Recorder > Mastering/Editing > Mixer > LP Cutting Lathe > LP or six generations.

Direct-to-Disc (D2D) record production:

Microphone > LP Cutting Lathe > LP, only three generations.

Each generation lost some fidelity such that the typical LP was inevitably degraded for five generations before becoming an LP you would ultimately buy.

But with D2D, the music went directly to the cutting lathe, often creating extremely high-fidelity LPs with unrivaled purity and dynamics.

D2D’s had a ‘cost’ though. There was no editing, no mixing, no pauses of any kind. The entire album had to be recorded in ONE take!  

Mistakes and magic alike went directly to the LP.

D2D records were an ideal vehicle for large, showcase, demonstration discs or for program material that was simply too dynamic for regular records to reproduce (one infamous example was a Telarc recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 with real, antique cannons firing and recorded directly to the LP---many turntables or styli could not track the violent grooves on the record, created by the cannon shots).

But that dynamic capability made D2D an ideal vehicle for “The King of Instruments” as the great pipe organs were commonly called. Pipe organs are often gigantic instruments with literally thousands of pipes. They can exhibit unparalleled dynamics and frequency range, far greater than any other instrument, so they were naturally a darling for audiophiles.

The stress on the performer during D2D recording was often apparent though. The performances were often sterile and dry, as the artist strenuously labored to not make any mistakes since there could be no opportunity to pause, stop, or correct them. As such, D2D records were infamous for great sound but sterile performances, organists E. Power Biggs and Virgil Fox D2D albums being two such examples. Perfect but boring.

But there were exceptions. One such exception was “The Power and The Glory” on M&K Realtime Records. The organist, the late Lloyd Holzgraf is on fire here and liberally employs massive, almost sadistically powerful bass notes.  But sonically, these D2Ds were so superbly done, they were as close as an audiophile could get to the original event.

             

 “The Power and The Glory” was released in 1978 by what was then a small, high-end audio record company in Germany and was recorded as a two-part, D2D LP set of what was then ‘the world’s largest pipe organ’ at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles.

 A colossal instrument with more than 27,000 pipes, four of which were 32 FEET tall!

The latter pipes produced bass of thunderous volume. In fact, the frequency of some of the bass notes were so low (16Hz), they were below the threshold of human hearing such that you could ‘feel’ the bass but not actually hear it. Having been in that church, I remember the massive air pressure of these 32-feet pipes. That, along with the immensity of the church, the enormity of 27,000+ more pipes singing along, and bass so powerful it modulated your speaking voice, it’s a majestic experience.

In music, as with any art form, there’s almost never an agreement on the best performance. And no doubt that would certainly be the case here. But in audiophile circles, the emphasis was on sound quality, and in that respect, there was no argument.

“The Power and The Glory, Volumes 1 & 2” on D2D were and to this day are widely considered the highest fidelity pipe organ recordings ever made.

The problem with D2Ds was that once the cutting lathe began to wear out, that was it. No more copies could be made without a totally new performance! There was no tape to make a new lathe, no storage of any kind, once it wore out, it was gone forever. To that end, only about 1000 LPs could be made before the lathe was useless.

More than 20 years after these LPs went out of production, I was lucky enough to find used copies of these D2Ds at the Princeton Record Exchange.

The copyright on these LPs expired in 1995. They were never released on CD nor any other digital media as they would have had to be digitized from the no-longer-existent lathe. And frankly, giant pipe organ recordings were not big enough sellers to be worth their time in trying to restore these. 

Still, many people have recorded these records and have redistributed them, as you can find dozens of copies of these very records in videos all over YouTube, particularly around Christmastime. You’ll hear all the pops and clicks of these records being played on people’s turntables into YouTube videos.

These used copies have some wear and minor noise. But minor pops and clicks from LPs are inevitable of course and not really much of a distraction.

But what is highly distracting is that the fidelity of a YouTube video is really quite poor. It is highly compressed, and frequency limited such that the sonic purity and thunderous power of stellar recordings like these is all but lost.

But a High-Definition Audio transfer was created from these LPs to a downloadable audio file. These original D2D LPs have been digitized in an extremely high-resolution digital audio format (Hi-Res PCM), using some of the highest fidelity audio electronics made. Although digitization adds a generation, it’s very low loss and is the closest one can get to hearing the magic of these recordings without these original LPs and a HiFi system capable of playing them properly.

These digital copies were created in an unrestricted format known as PCM. It is highly compatible and should play on virtually any device. There is no frequency limit, no processing, no equalization, no editing, and no compression. So, there are minor pops, clicks and even vacuum tube hiss inherent to LPs and tubed electronics, as nothing is filtered out in order to preserve the originals pristine fidelity.

 One thing to note:

This gigantic pipe organ has simply enormous bass energy. Much of it will be too low in frequency to be heard on many HiFi systems, so it will be simply ignored by the playback device. But this is powerful bass, absolutely dwarfing even the loudest Rock or timpani drum. So, I would caution that should you play these recordings, start with the volume low and gradually raise it so you can hear any mechanical noises should you overload the speakers you’re using.

This won’t be a problem on a computer, laptop, phone or tablet speakers, as they can’t respond to the deepest bass notes, and as such, they will ignore it.

But if you play these on a big home theater or a HiFi system with a subwoofer, please be careful. I have seen this bass energy literally blow woofers out of their boxes!

What you will hear on most any device is the stunning detail, definition and clarity. A liquid, airy flood of reverberant sound echoing off of the massive church’s walls, floors and ceilings. The reverberant echo of the massive space is so great, it sounds more like a canyon than a church. The shimmering sound and sheer power of these recordings is simply unreal.

The primary reason the sound and video quality in YouTube videos are restricted is to reduce online streaming buffering and to reduce the size of the digital file storage on their servers. But here, as there is no compression or frequency limitations, this file is quite a large download. 4.45 GB.

The record company is long gone as is the late organist. For that matter, so too is D2D!  But if you’d like a copy, anyone is welcome to download a copy from here:

The Power and The Glory Volumes 1 & 2

As it’s a large file, the download may take some time---depending on your Internet speed---probably between 10 minutes and an hour. This link will expire on January 24^th. I hope you like it.

 

For any fellow HiFi nerds out there, this was the equipment used to digitize these remarkable recordings. Enjoy!

Analog Portion:

Turntable:  Pink Triangle (BBC) with 2” Thick Acrylic Platter, Belt Driven (the 2” thick platter is made entirely of the same vinyl as the records themselves)

Tonearm:  Helius (BBC) Carbon Fiber Conical Tube with Silver Litz/Teflon Wire

Cartridge:  Accuphase-2 Low Output Moving Coil

Preamplifier:  Melos Audio GK1+1 Vacuum Tube Phono Preamplifier, Class A, Triode, Zero Feedback, Passive RIAA

Cabling: Neuman Microphone, Discovery Paravicini, FMS-6 Zero Core Architecture, Laufer Teknik ‘Liquid Cables’-3000+ strand Litz cable

Amplification: Melos Audio ST400 Vacuum Tube Triode Amplifiers, Crown 3500 Bass Amplifiers, Melos Audio Vacuum Tube SET75 Single Ended Triode Treble Amplifiers

Loudspeakers: The Notes 8’ x 200 Driver Omnidirectional Line Arrays by Laufer Teknik

Record Cleaner: Nitty Gritty 1.0 Wet-Vac Record Cleaning System (each LP cleaned immediately prior to digitization)

 

Digital Portion:

The Memory Player Digital Audio Playback System (patented) with the

Lynx Studio E44 Analog-to-Digital Converter

 

The Recording (the digital file in the download):

Format/Resolution: 32 Bit/192kHz PCM (WAV),

Jitter Reduction: I.D.E.A.S. Jitter Reduction Software Suite (patented).

Frequency Response: 4Hz-96,000Hz.

Dynamic Range: 129dB

Size: 4.45GB

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 24, 2022 by dasaltemelosguy
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