Claude

VAT has always been charged when physical goods were sold, for example on online CD orders. This new directive concerns "digital transactions" such as downloads or other online services where no goods are shipped. Ebay has to apply VAT on their auction fees. Professional sellers on ebay already had to charge VAT on their auctioned goods, so no change there. Unlike the US, Europe never had tax exemptions for online sales. The VAT rate of the seller's country is applicable. That's why AOL moves to Luxembourg, which has the lowest VAT rate in the EU. VAT rates in Europe

Hello Evan Are "Kazaa"and "Napster" drinks? Sounds tasty

I have a good hifi system (Dynaudio Contour 1.3 speakers, Sennheiser HD580 headphones) but I cannot hear a significant difference between good CDs and SACDs. Particularly Sony SACDs (KOB, Miles Smiles, Mingus ah um) fail to impress me. Others sound better (some just different) than previous releases (the OJC material releases by Analogue Productions), but this must be due to the remastering, because the CD layer shows the same improvements. The difference I hear between Sony CDs and SACDs is in the range of sonic differences between good CD players. Something you hear only in direct A/B comparision, and not with every music.

I would like to see reissued: The Chico Hamilton Special Woody Shaw: Stepping Stones They could license them to Koch Jazz (like they did with Tim Berne and others) if they don't want to release it themselves. Remasterings wanted: - Shakti (the first album) - Duke Ellington - Blues in Orbit (currently OOP) - Weather Report - I sing the body electric

This album is available from www.candidrecords.com http://candidrecords.com/acatalog/Online_C...Insist__42.html It is usually filed as "we insist"

info@jazzmessengers.com Tel. (+34) 93 440 71 05 (international customers) Tel. (+34) 93 440 65 20 (spanish customers) Fax (+34) 93 448 47 23 No website configured at jazzmessengers.com No street address indicated (!), only a post box: Jazz Messengers P.O Box 23477 E-08080 Barcelona Good luck. I know a spanish friend who had made on online order just before Planetmusic went bankrupt. He did not receive his order by post, but managed to get his CDs directly from their store in Barcelona before it closed.

"THE MOST VITAL PART TO BOOST THE PRICE OF THIS RECORD IS THE OBI STRIP"

I've read many times that the Miles Davis 180g LP reissues (by Columbia/Sony) don't sound very good. Maybe they are made from the tapes used for the first CD reissues. Sample them before "upgrading" your CDs.

I don't know this Pioneer turntable. It may have a heavy arm, for which the choice of cartridges is more limited than with light arms (Dual, Thorens). Thorens and Dual also have the advantage of much better replacement parts availability. As a general rule, you must be prepared to change the cartridge of second hand vintage turntables. Even if it has barely been used, a cartridge suffers from being 10 or more years old. No need to search for replacement needles, as those usually cost almost as much as a new cartridge. Cartridges start at $30. Better spend $50 or more and get a good one.

Zweitausendeins also has some extremely cheap but very high quality classical box sets from Brilliant Classics. The sets cost ca $1.5 per disc. They mostly consist of licensed recordings from the 80's and 90's, produced by smaller labels such as Denon, BIS or ASV. A great bargain are the Complete Mahler Symphonies by Eliahu Inbal (15CDs, 26 Euro). This Denon production was one of the top Mahler sets available ten years ago, and sold at full price. It's the best recorded Mahler on CD, the sound is state of the art. Don't confuse it with the other complete Mahler set, which is not bad either, but an uneven mix of different orchestras. There are too many good sets to list. The Prokofiev/Scriabin Complete Piano sonatas box is very interesting too. The Brilliant Classics homepage has complete listings of the boxes content with artists and original label, but it's not very easy to navigate

I think that's the philosophy of this Verve "LP Reproduction" series. LP covers (smaller though), LP tracklist (but playable on one side only ) Bonus tracks would have done no harm, if put at the end as it is customary today.

I hope this is obscure enough I discovered it thanks to the Penguin guide. Franklin Kiermyer - Solomon's Daughter Sound samples It's the drummer Franklin Kiermyer's album, but it will be most interesting for Pharoah Sanders fans. This session has Sanders' most powerful and engaging playing in recent years. All other albums he recorded after his Impulse! period pale in comparision. This is high-energy music, comparable to some of Coltrane's later albums ("Sun ship"). Sanders imaginative and boundless playing and Kiermyers equally ecstatic drumming keep the listener's attention throughout this hourlong disc, which (fortunately) also has a couple of slower pieces. The recording too has a raw quality, being very closely miked and unprocessed. I don't listen to this album very often, but when I do I it has an almost purifying effect on my mind. More on Franklin Kiermyer here

Do you know when the Mosaic sidebar will be available, couw? I love this Opera feature. It would make my daily orders much faster

It looks rather cheap in my view (the layout, the font of the links text), not very classy compared to the products they sell. Could be from the CD-Rom "Create a webshop in 5 minutes, from a choice of 10 templates" One quarter of the screen on the right side is empty on my 17" monitor (standard 1024x768 resolution), while I need to scroll down to see the complete list of available sets. It seems to be optimized for 640x480 resolution. The musical categories are a good idea. It made me aware of the fact that "Kenton Presents Cooper, Holman & Rosolino" (#185) is a small band set. I always thought it to be a Stan Kenton big band set. This makes it more interesting.

There is a detailed review on AMG: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&u...l=Akrk9ikchbb89

Don't forget that there have been many fine non-mainstream albums on Blue Note during the 80's and 90's. Unfortunately most of them are OOP today. James Newton, George Russell, Joe Lovano, Don Pullen, Jason Moran, Greg Osby, George Adams, Kevin Hays, and many more ... They cannot be qualified as Smooth Jazz, Hip Hop, Trance, Lounge and Grammy-Award-winning-Pop.

Great post, Rooster. I fully agree.

The interest in Wynton seems to be rather low in recent times. Check the activity in this fansite forum: http://wyntonmarsalis.org/forum/list.php?f=2

Or worse, he will become A&R director

Update: WOW!! The TOCJ-marked discs are absolute winners sound-wise. I took me just a few seconds on every disc to recognize the clean full-range and undistorted sound that is a trademark of these japanese remasterings from the early to mid 90's. It would be nice to have a complete list of the spanish TOCJs. Confirmed so far: - Lee Morgan - The Cooker - Curtis Fuller - Vol.3 - Horace Parlan - Up and down - Tina Brooks - True Blue - Pete LaRoca - Basra - Hank Mobley - Poppin'

How much do you want to spend? There are good phono stages by NAD (PP1 and PP2), Creek (OBH8) and Pro-ject (Phonobox), that cost between $100-200. You can also find $25 adaptors that merely do the job, but if you intend to listen seriously to your LPs it is worth spending more (probably the only phono preamp you will ever buy)

I wasn't buying a lot of music for some time in 1998-2000 (maybe 2 or 3 CDs a month), because I had been bulding a classical music collection the previous years (much less expensive than jazz BTW) and I though I knew all the important jazz albums. But then I discovered the Blue Note bulletin board and got addicted to hard bop, which was underrepresented in my collection at that time. My wishlist grew so much faster than my purchases. I haven't stopped buying at least 20CDs per month since that time. I have a financial limit that I impose myself. I travel a lot for my job and get a fixed amount of travel cost reimbursements, which covers more than the actual cost if one finds cheap hotels and dinners. I finance my CD purchases from the money that remains after I paid my costs. This also allowed me to lose 10 kg overweight during the last year

I received my package of 8 spanish Blue Notes today. As I am in my office, I cannot check the sound. I will post my experience on sound quality later. This is what the covers say on the remastering: "Domestic" remastering: - Art Blakey - Like Someone in Love (Ron McMaster) - Charles Mingus - Complete town Hall (Malcom Addey) - Ellington & Armstrong - Chick Corea - Early Circle (Addey) No remastering engineer mentioned, but TOCJ number may indicate japanese remastering: - Lee Morgan - The Cooker - Curtis Fuller - Vol.3 - Horace Parlan - Up and down - Tina Brooks - True Blue Given that True Blue usually sells for $25-40 on ebay, this 5.75 Eur CD is a great bargain, if you can stand the awful blueish covers. I have the two Blue Note cover books in LP format, so I don't care about the CD covers.

Good luck, have fun and see you, Daniel

Has anyone actually seen these LPs? Amazon France lists the titles as CDs (probably an error, because of the title"Collection 25 cm") and as "not available". http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000...3917739-4605717