Dave Garrett

Quite true, but I would hazard a guess that many people, even those who know better, are nowhere near as diligent as they should be when it comes to keeping backups of their digital data current. If you have a bunch of external USB drives sitting around that only get backed up occasionally, if ever, I would posit that the risk of one of those hard drives failing is far higher than that of CDs getting damaged, lost, stolen, etc. Hard drives have a finite lifespan that, all other things being equal, is much shorter than that of a CD. There's also the issue of user error as related to specific software used to manage digital music libraries, leading to the loss of digital music files. As an example, I've seen more than a few complaints from pissed-off iTunes users who accidentally nuked their libraries when something in the feature set changed during one of Apple's upgrades and they weren't aware of the consequences. That's not going to happen with a CD.

That may well be. The link I posted earlier had something that appeared to contradict this, stating that the dye color was a cosmetic issue, but I'm somewhat skeptical since they didn't really provide anything to back that assertion up. I think a bigger issue is that the shelf life claims are based on accelerated aging tests rather than real-world use. I've frequently seen claims of a 300-year shelf life for Mitsui Gold CD-Rs as opposed to a 100-year shelf life for garden-variety CD-Rs. Such essentially unprovable claims instill a false sense of security in users. What's downplayed, if it's mentioned at all, is that the dyes are photosensitive and if they are exposed to direct sunlight for any length of time, they will degrade to the point that the disc becomes unreadable. This is obviously not the case with pressed CDs.

The color of the CD-R does not matter. The silver ones still use organic dyes that are modified when exposed to laser light. Pressed CDs use a glass master to physically stamp the data into the disc (sort of analogous to how a vinyl record is pressed). The dyes in a CD-R are inherently less stable and more prone to degradation over time than a pressed CD. As for sound quality, I've never seen anything to indicate that there is a discernible difference between a CD-R and a pressed CD. That's possibly a heretical statement in some corners of the audiophile world, but so be it.

There's this: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/bear-family-and-cdrs.895471/ but that's not the one I'm thinking of. There is a 368-page catchall thread on Bear Family releases, and I think some of the CD-R discussion was buried in there, like on this page: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/your-favourite-bear-family-releases.418974/page-49 I got these from Google, and you can see other relevant search results from the Hoffman site here: https://www.google.com/search?q=bear+family+cd-r+site%3Astevehoffman.tv but it may be better if you just do a search for "bear family cd-r" on the site itself. As I recall, some folks were pretty hot under the collar, and it probably didn't help matters that one of the forum members who does work for BF was conspicuously silent about the matter.

What about the Diamond Silver cd-rs? From https://www.genesysdtp.com/faq.htm: "Q: DiamondSilver cd-r's - what are they? Are they better quality than silver/silver cd-r's? DiamondSilver cd-r's have a record surface which, before recording, is practically indistinguishable from the standard silver lacquer label surface. This is achieved by using a 'neutral' or 'colorless' dye, as compared to the light-green hue or other colors/variations of many other cd-r's. When a disc is fully burned, DiamondSilver cd-r's will look as close as possible to pressed cd's (already with content)." There have also been some discussions over at the Hoffman board about cd-rs in certain Bear Family box sets that were visually indistinguishable from pressed cds, but I have to admit I never saw what I would consider to be conclusive proof that the discs in question were really cd-rs.

eBay charges both insertion (listing) fees and final value fees. The final value fee is based on a percentage of the total sale price (including shipping but not including sales tax). I've found occasional Mosaic bargains on eBay. I picked up the Illinois Jacquet box for $45 toward the end of last year. Not sure what the going rate for that one typically is but it seemed like a pretty good deal at the time. I suspect that at least part of the reason there wasn't much in the way of bidding competition is that the seller had it listed as "The Complete Illinois Jacket Sessions".

My wife is pretty open-minded when it comes to music, and likes jazz in general. In fact, back in the 1990s it was because of where she was employed at the time that I got to see a lot of great players like Sonny Rollins and Pharoah Sanders. As far as other types of music, she's gone to see quite a few Hot Tuna shows with me, and a Roky Erickson show that was one of the loudest gigs I've ever heard, but she had approximately zero interest in seeing X, Black Flag, or Sleater-Kinney. If she had to name her favorite artist it would probably be Peter Gabriel. I've seen Gabriel several times, but she never has. The one and only time we've had a chance to see him since we've been together, I immediately procured tickets, and she came down with the flu on the day of the show and couldn't go.

Wow, that is an outrageous rate for a single CD. I was only charged 20 euros shipping for the book I purchased, and it probably weighed around a kilo. Does PostNL have different rates for printed matter?

You can look up your player model here and see if there is a region-free hack code for it: https://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks Many DVD players had hidden menus to enable region-switching. There usually aren't any glitches, you just hit the correct key sequence on the remote, and you're able to play a non-region-1 DVD just fine. Blu-ray players are different, and require a hardware modification to be able to switch regions (usually it's nothing more than a jumper plugged into a specific connector on the mainboard, but this typically involves opening up the player to access the mainboard). I haven't had a player that *wasn't* region-free/switchable since 1999. If I were just now getting into multiregion players, I'd buy a multiregion blu-ray player, but this is dependent on how many blu-rays you have or expect to have in the future. Also, not all players are created equal, and some produce better picture quality than others, but it's gotten much harder to find high-quality universal players since Oppo exited the market.

I ordered a book from a rare book dealer in Amsterdam in mid-May. It was shipped via PostNL and took a little over five weeks to reach Texas.

Are you thinking of deus62's Mosaic discographies page? I think he used to be a member here, but he revamped his site some time ago and the discographies are no longer available on it. The old URL was http://deus62.com/download-mosaic-records-discographies/ , and if you go back to snapshots that are several years old on the Wayback Machine you can pull up the page, but the actual PDFs of the discographies don't seem to be archived there.

Anyone who thinks the young are immune from serious effects of the virus should read this. Hey, so I got #Covid19 in March

The cofounder of Real Gone Music, Gordon Anderson, was also the guy that started Collector's Choice Music.

I have a Carl Reiner story that I hold very dear to me

We have a mixture of disposable, single-use masks and reusable cloth ones. We wash the cloth ones after every use and discard the single-use ones. I tend to prefer the cloth ones.