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Brandon Burke

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Posts posted by Brandon Burke

  3. What vinyl are you spinning right now??

    in The Vinyl Frontier

    Posted

    12 hours ago, JSngry said:
    12 hours ago, JSngry said:

    HeyBrandon, where the hee you brrn? Good to see you! 

     

    Been in San Francisco for the last 12 years. (DC before that.) 

    Got married, had a kid. Moved to Lawrence, KS last week to be closer to my folks, give the kid a yard, get away from crazy Bay Area cost-of-living.

    That Marsh was the 2nd thing played on the hi-fi since we got unpacked.  

     

    It appears I don't know how replies work since the site got updated either. Oh well.. 

  6. Shades of Redd: Freddie or Tina?

    in Discography

    Posted

    A friend of mine recently said he'd always wondered of Shades of Redd was actually a Tina Brooks session. I have to admit, I'd never thought of this before but he has a good point. Nothing in else in Redd's oeuvre sounds like that and, let's face it, "The Thespian" and "Swift" in particular sound a lot like other Brooks heads..

  9. Happy Birthday, Brandon Burke!

    in Miscellaneous - Non-Political

    Posted

    Just saw this. Thanks for remembering me, fellas. I really appreciate it.

    Quick update: Got married in August of '08. Corinne, my amazing wife, is now in her

    21st week of pregnancy; we just found out it's going to be a boy! Still living in SF.

    Currently enjoying:

    * The Byrds 'Preflyte'

    * v/a 'Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label'

    * Richard Crandell 'In the Flower of Our Youth'

    * Peter Lang 'The Thing at the Nursery Room Window'

    * Sun Ra 'Super-Sonic Jazz'

    * Jimmy Giuffre 'Thesis'

    * Art Farmer 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues'

    * MF Doom 'Special Herbs'

    * This year's Sierra Celebration Ale

    * Pliny the Elder IPA

    * Maille (hot)

    * Baby arugula

    * Designing new LP shelves

    * Thomas Pynchon 'Against the Day' (only 100 pages left!)

    Cheers everyone!

  11. Jazz photos from the Radio Free Europe archives

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    Howdy strangers,

    Haven't been on here in a while, i know, but i wanted to drop a line and tell you about this slide show we put up the other day. It's pretty cool stuff.

    Basically, i was looking for photographs of something completely unrelated in the Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty collection and stumbled upon several pictures of musicians visiting the RFE studios; mostly in Munich but Armstrong, for example, was in NY. Others include: Ella, Dizzy, Brubeck, Cozy Cole, Errol Garner, and Art Blakey.

    2000c120_artblakey_01_edited.jpg

    Here's the link: http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/slideshows/40546312.html

    cheers,

    Brandon

  12. What was the L O U D E S T concert you ever attended?

    in Miscellaneous Music

    Posted

    My Bloody Valentine, and I'd lay money down that it was the loudest show of any mentioned in this thread.

    Agreed - saw them in Toronto about 3 weeks ago - reported on this already. I was quite prepared with plugs and ear protectors.

    130 dB baby!

    I second that commotion! Passed on the recent reunion tour but saw them open for Dinosaur in 1992.

    Close second: Keiji Heino in Oct of 2007 (Prague, CZ). Bananas.

  16. Acetates

    in Discography

    Posted

    Due to time constraints, i'm copying parts of an article i did on lacquer discs for Wax Poetics magazine a couple years ago. (There's more, but i need to go to the paint store with my girlfriend; i'll try to hunt down the rest later.)

    Keep in mind that the audience for this article was decidedly more funk/soul than bebop or band stuff etc.

    The first thing to understand about lacquer discs, also called “acetates”, is that only the earliest examples – we’re talking 1930’s here – actually contain acetate. And while one can argue that this distinction amounts to little more than record nerdery gone wildly unchecked, it is important to consider the following: in order to properly care for audio media, one needs to temporarily forget that the piece in hand is a record, tape, etc and focus instead on the structural composition of the item itself. Evidence of this is nowhere stronger than the case of the lacquer disc, as the properties and degradation issues associated with acetate differ from those observed in nitrocellulose (lacquer), the substance most commonly found on so-called “acetate” discs; especially since most of us have a few more Jamaican dub plates than we do Edward R. Murrow radio broadcasts.

    Until magnetic tape became widely available shortly after WWII, the lacquer disc was the most common way to make instantaneous recordings; that is to say, recordings that could be played back immediately after the audio was captured. Historically, one thinks of speeches, radio broadcasts, and other public addresses when he thinks of the kinds of information typically found on lacquer discs, but the medium proved convenient well into the 1980’s. The best example of this – due, one has to think, to a heavy reliance on disc-based media playback – was its popularity among Jamaican dub engineers. By making instantaneous recordings, said engineers could not only fire off several versions in an afternoon, they could also bring them to the sound system yard that same night. Instant gratification.

    Structurally, lacquer discs are comprised of three main elements: (1) substrate, (2) information layer, and (3) the adhesive that holds them together. The substrate is the core to which the information layer is adhered; making it, for all intents and purposes, a metal record laminated in a black, vinyl-like substance. More often than not, the substrate is going to be aluminum, especially if the disc was manufactured during the last half of the 20th century. Other examples include paper and glass; the latter briefly replacing aluminum during the War effort. Each substrate introduces a different set of problems as they degrade. Glass, obviously, can crack and break, while aluminum is susceptible to warping during prolonged exposure to heat. The information layer, then, is the black substance surrounding the substrate. It is the reason why lacquers look like vinyl despite having a metal or glass core and, again, it’s almost always going to be nitrocellulose. Readers familiar with the film, Cinema Paradiso, already know what happens when nitrocellulose is exposed to extreme heat: it ignites into flames. Consequently, keep your lacquer discs away from the stove. (For real though, the nitrocellulose used in the manufacture of lacquer discs contains too many inert fillers to retain the same intense flammability as old nitrate film. It was as much a financial decision as anything else: fillers reduce the amount of raw nitrocellulose manufacturers had to purchase to make blank discs.)

    Mechanically speaking, information is committed to the surface of lacquer discs in a manner quite different from commercial records such as LPs, 12-inches, 45s, or 78s. (This is where the “instantaneous” part comes in.) Lacquers are recorded “on the fly”, meaning that a recording lathe cuts a groove into the disc’s surface in realtime with the incoming audio feed. Commercially produced records, on the other hand, are created either by injection molding or compression molding. Don’t sweat the terminology, though. The important thing to understand is that both of those methods require a mold to be made well in advance of even one completed disc. By comparison, the instantaneous recording process virtually ensures that every lacquer disc is going to be extremely rare, if not outright unique. So don’t front: you may very well have the only copy in existence.

    There's more to it but Part 1 is all i have on my internal HD right now. I go into greater detail about degradation issues in Issue #18.

    One more thing: "Copying [anything] to CD" is not a preservation solution. Recordable optical media - CD-R, DVD-R, etc - are notoriously unstable. Moreover, they only have the capacity to store mid-fidelity copies. Best practice is committing to a .WAV file at a resolution of 24bit/96k, stored on a hard drive, preferably a server with regular tape backups etc.

  19. OK Vinyl Fanatics - Tell Me About Numark TT's

    in The Vinyl Frontier

    Posted

    i'm an audiophile at work, but my home system is a vintage solid state receiver and a classic Technics 1200.

    the issues surrounding turntables and affordability are many, but chief among them are playback and durability.

    Numark are cheap, feather-light turntables to me. period. i wouldn't waste my money on them.

    for real man, think of this purchase as you would a car or a major appliance. (i.e. how soon do you want to f*ck

    around with buying another one..) brand new Technics 1200-series tables are basically the Hondas/Toyotas of TT's

    in that they're solid performers and you'll get your money back at roughly 75% should you want to sell it on craigslist

    within 2-3 years. honestly, the thing can basically fall down the stairs and still playback at near-archival capacity. that,

    coupled with the tork (when using a slipmat), is why they've been the defacto choice of DJ's for ages. i mean imagine

    how often those things get lugged around...and still perform.

    folks with $10,000 systems are out of this discussion here, as far as i'm concerned; that's a whole 'nother ballgame.

    save your money for an extra few months and get a 1200. it'll last you forever and you'll never need another table

    unless you decide to go fancy. and then hey, more power to ya if you do..

  21. Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring

    in Classical Discussion

    Posted

    I am trying to find a version of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring to start with.

    Does anyone have any to recommendation?

    I love the Charles Dutoit, Montreal Orchestra recording, but it is rare.

    If not the Chicago Sym Orch with Ozawa is on itunes and it nice

    I agree. This particular recording is more dynamic and crisp than most you'll find on the commercial marketplace. Many of the others i have on LP (Monteux conducting the Paris Conservatoire Orch on RCA Victor and Boulez conducting Orch Nat'l de la RTF on Nonsuch, for example) sound sluggish by comparison..

  22. What is the best way to clean LPs?

    in The Vinyl Frontier

    Posted

    Then, there's the cleaning solution. It appears as if the Clearaudio solution is alcohol based, allthough the manufacturer carefully has avoided specifying what the contents are. Despite it is sometimes stated that alcohol should not be used for LP cleaning, many people also seem satisfied with the results.

    So, I'd just like to hear if anyone has any comments to:

    - Using a micrifibre cloth

    - The proportion of alcohol relative to destilled water in the cleaning solution

    Standard archival practice is to avoid any cleaning solution containing alcohol,

    as it is, among other things, a drying agent. Evaporates quickly, but i'm not sure

    that's enough to recommend it. Distilled water and a surfactant (soap) free of any

    additives (moisturizers, fragrances, etc) is safer than alcohol..

  24. speaker repair in Bay Area

    in Audio Talk

    Posted

    believe me, i thought long and hard about replacing the tweeters.

    but these particular cabinets are somewhat mysterious in that i'm

    not sure how the tweeters are fixed in there and i don't want to risk

    stripping out where the screws go in, etc. point is: an audio hobbyist

    acquaintance (from three cities ago, now) put them together using

    old cabinets, so there's no general instruction manual or schematics

    to work with. who knows, i may try it out later..

    anyway, just to follow-up it appears there really aren't any speaker

    repair shop in SF. seems crazy to me but i searched everywhere. then

    i called the kinds of places that would know where a speaker repair

    shop would be, and they couldn't tell me either.

    so there you go..

  25. speaker repair in Bay Area

    in Audio Talk

    Posted

    thanks Eric. i saw this listing though Google as well, though i must

    admit to being a little intimidated by his list of clientele: Neil Young,

    the Dead, Metallica, etc. (The Clientele itself, however, is strangely

    missing..) in any case, i've decided to wing it and replace the tweeters

    myself. i have enough engineer buddies around here to help me keep

    things like frequency response and such in check. can't be that hard..

    p.s. gosh Donald, i guess i didn't realize we had *that* kind of a relationship.

    you don't still have my toothbrush do you..?

    so you don't come on here in years and then you have a problem and you expect everyone to run to your aid? that is a lot of nerve.

    Don't say I don't have your back, wayward Jayhawk (I hear she makes house calls) :g

    http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...%3Doff%26sa%3DN

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