Daniel A

Well, to me IKEA is mainly about flat packages, the contents of which will require additional craftsmanship to be usable. The finished product can still be very stylish. 🙂

You might want to look at it as the soundtrack equivalent of an IKEA product. Sans the meatballs in the in-store restaurant.

I listened to roughly half of it on Spotify. I think it holds up for repeated listens. Several tracks with Ian Underwood on acoustic piano that are nice. He lays down some good voicings. Since I don't have a booklet I can't check who it is, but someone is playing very jazzy double bass on those tracks.

No problem. Couldn't resist using some myself, so i am not complaining. 🙂

I am flattered, but I realize I was not clear, and there is no real reason to be impressed. Sorry for that. I have heard needle drops of several tracks from the other releases (they are available in a thread on the Hoffman forum). I did not know any of the issues and the controversy around the series when I got my copy, but came to that thread only when I started to google around after hearing these issues on the Etcetera album. I realize many people are either not sensitive to this issue or think that the positive aspects of these remasters - there are several - are more important. It is just that I think it stands out in a negative way, and what's more, I have hardly encountered flutter to this extent on any other reissues, recent or older.

If you are sensitive to pitch variations, these reissues are not for you. Just about all releases with piano on them suffer from audible flutter to varying degrees. The "official" explanation from Blue Note/Kevin Gray is that the master tapes have aged. This is very disconcerting, since there seemed to be no problems of this kind only a few years ago. I got only one title, Etcetera, which was a nice remaster but had occasional warble in the piano (and this title is apparently one of the least affected ones). I am sensitive to this kind of issue and will not get other releases. Luckily, everything is already out there in good sound on many other releases.

Downloads seem already very outdated. For ten years now, it has seemed as if there will eventually be no other option than streaming. I know many members here would never want to move away from the physical product. But most of us are altrady adapting to the reality of the "disposable" digital world. Let's compare to the internet as a whole, or for instance this very forum. There is a lot that we like here, old threads, information etc, but most of us have probably not even considered trying to back it up on DVD-ROMs, or whatever physical solution that would be most appropriate (hard drives are curiously often not regarded as "physical" enough ). We just hope it won't suddenly be gone one day, but if it would, we would learn to live with that. Most younger people look at music in the same way; they trust it will always be there for them, without the need for private, physical copies wasting their limited space. Since the physical product does no longer dictate the format of the musical work of art - artists are releasing single tracks or collections/concerts that could be longer or shorter than 40/80 minutes playing time - the "album" is mostly a thing of the past.

Yes, but, 4 Men With Beards is an American company: https://www.discogs.com/label/36605-4-Men-With-Beards FWIW, Speakers Corner claim to master their releases from original tapes by arrangement with copyright holders Universal, Sony or Warner. https://pure-analogue.com/magnetic-tape/ They also have several reissues of material that is clearly not in the public domain.

I agree that they are good, but actually much prefer Oblique because of the darker undertones, that Chambers seems to be more hard-driving and the looser feel of the improvisation. But how do you feel about Total Eclipse compared to these two? To me, Total Eclipse is really an excellent album that has a lot of atmosphere as well. It does not have that "dark" quality of Oblique, but it has everything else. To hear early Chick Corea, Harold Land and Hutcherson together with Joe Chambers and Reggie Johnson in the rhythm section - I think it is magic.

As I remember it, it was one box (Andrew Hill?) used as a drawing board for the kids in the backseat of the car. Then, suddenly, the box was gone.

I am not an "audiophile" (according to my own definition of the word; a person with extreme expectations/requirements on sound reproduction) and I have a couple of Blue Notes on vinyl (Liberty and UA repressings, Kings, Toshibas and the odd Plastylite original). I own very few "audiophile" type reissues and I have never returned an LP. Even so, I was disappointed with the Tone Poet reissue. The mastering was fine, but the vinyl was not flat (looked like a 70s pressing from a bad batch) and the piano sound had a warble unrelated to the non-flat surface. Given the number of reports of the problems with the piano on other titles - and which is not present on other recent remasterings of the same material - I refuse to buy the explanation that it's about tape wear. I used to play around with tapes and tape machines in the 90s, and this - to me - sounds like a tape machine problem. I don't know the terminology, but I associate it with capstan or motor problems.

"You will definitely hear the difference on both iPhones and Android phones[...]" I'll believe that when I see convincing results from some ABX test.

But that's why he's lamenting the fact that nobody has cassette decks any more. I always find these (recurring) threads where people seem to think (gross simplification) that all the things you could do with plastic 700 MB storage devices that were easily damaged are now impossible in the streaming society to be backwards-looking. I will have to note, though, that I have seen album disappear - and sometimes reappear - on Spotify several times.

My concern with using CD:s in a car is that they risk being scuffed. Including the whole chain, I find it as easy (or easier) to copy 50 albums worth of MP3:s onto an USB stick and bringing it to the car as pulling 50 individual CD:s and putting them in a CD wallet. However, more often I just plug the phone into the AUX input to stream (from Spotify or my cloud storage of my own rips and recordings).

Non-streamable music will be marginalized. For many people, it is a simple question of available technology. A 12 cm disc with a storage capacity of around 80 minutes of music is considered inconvenient, and they might not even have CD playback equipment anywhere any longer. I listen a lot less to plastic disc's these days, and have rips of some of my own non-streamable music available in a cloud of my own.

https://archive.org/details/78_onb-samba-music-about-a-chemical_the-don-juan-quartet-russ-david_gbia0001879b

Happy birthday, Bob!

But is it really "artificial"? Maybe they print less copies because they don't expect to sell that many?

As has been stated here occasionally by people in the know, Mosaic does not have (and apparently cannot get) rights to digital distribution of the music in their sets. It is the rightsholders Universal and Sony, respectively, who have made the material available for streaming.

forum member David Ayers shared this Spotify Mosaic set playlist many years ago: https://open.spotify.com/user/davidayers/playlist/4VzRzvG0hYshc4mo5M8MRo?si=PelJCiA-R6-Qw621igvOSg Maybe there's more now (but I haven't found any).

Incidentally, I compared various releases of the Corea album, and the original LP still sounds best. 🙂 But that is an exception rather than the rule.

I agree that it does sound monotonous. However, sometimes I have played with drums and horns, but without a bass player, on the Fender Rhodes. Then I play bass lines behind the band, and also to some degree when I am soloing. Somehow it sounds better (and is also quite fun to play) even though the Rhodes in itself is at least as "monotonous" as a piano.

I'd hate to see this topic turn into a discussion whether TTK:s reason for not wanting to own the album is valid or not. However, as the owner of many soundtrack albums I have to say that the concept of this album does not much seem to relate to the movie. The cover seems consistent with the idea of a "lost" Coltrane album.

But remember how small CD:s are. You'll hardly notice.

Listen to the piano six seconds into "Penelope", for instance. My copy is not flat, but I have seen worse (however, the pressing is not of the quality I had expected). Anyhow, the flutter does not coincide with the "wavy" part of the surface, so it does not seem to be a pressing artifact.