Stompin at the Savoy

The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries - free if you have Amazon Prime. This is a fun dramatization of Ngaio Marsh's detective novels. The setting has been moved from the 20's to the 40's but the overall look is slightly retro and the costumes, houses, interiors, villages, automobiles etc are beautifully authentic looking. Each program is movie length.

I have all the albums on Muse and 32Jazz cds but am still kicking myself for not buying the Mosaic. Hard to find and expensive now.

Don't you wish they had gotten some people who really know the music to give short talks about the various developments in jazz. And not Wynton Marsalis, who is knowledgeable and a good player but should be taken in micro-doses. Without getting too technical they could have gotten somebody like Dick Hyman to play the same thing as swing, vs bebop for example and show the characteristics and some of the nitty gritty of it. Instead we got non-musicians, enthusiastic but vague, going on about how great various players were. We have a notion they are great; tell us why.

One of the things Burns does is ask all interviewees certain leading questions and get them to answer in much the same way. This becomes the thread of his story and each of the interviews sort of confirms this thread. Never mind that it's shallow and maybe even wrong. In the jazz series he never really discusses what's different about this music, what's going on with each development, what's good about it, etc. It's all just glossy panning of old photos and shallow generalizations... and praise, lots of praise! Endless clips of various talking heads enthusing about some musician without any real attempt to explain why.

Just read this old thread after it came up. I agree wholeheartedly with Christiern - Burns is a big fraud. I've often wondered at the way people gush over his stuff, which is mostly panning still photos and repetitious music. Slick tv with very poor interviews and scripts. I watched some or most of the jazz series and found it frustrating because there was talking over the music and they never played a tune complete, not to mention the dumb narrative he carves out of the interviews.

I got the kindle edition of vol 1 of Listening to Prestige. It's interesting. Merry Christmas!

Heat is definitely bad for cds. Depending on the climate, the car can really be a bad place for cds. A few years back I left a Dell computer keyboard sitting on the seat in a car in San Jose, CA and the thing melted! It was all distorted. Global warming has made California's interior valleys really hot sometimes in the summer.

Interiors of cars can experience heat extremes which sort of increase entropy with regard to plastic objects.

Oh sorry I guess I gave the wrong impression. He was not intentionally breaking stuff. Kids just naturally have a way of finding out the weak points of stuff. I was pretty similar as a boy. Luckily I was in my forties when I had him 30 years ago and was mellow and forgiving when he broke stuff. Shit happens!

CDs are pretty robust, generally, but they have some vulnerabilities. There is a directory area at the beginning of the data which if compromised with quite a small nick generally spells the end. It's pretty easy to mess up a cd by putting scratches and holes through the label side and screwing up the reflective layer. Steve has documented nasty issues with glue-on labels, above. When he was small my kid was pretty good at finding the weak spots in things. He showed me that it is easy to completely wreck a cd by not putting it far enough onto the spindle and then shoving the cd tray into a pc. Another time he pulled a cd up off the spindle of a laptop when the cd tray/drawer was not all the way out - bent it seriously. If I remember right it didn't snap but was totally unusable. As to vinyl - I grew up with it and I admit it used to sound amazing through the tube push-pull mono amp my dad assembled and the big tuned speaker enclosure he built. I particularly remember loving Jimmy Smith's The Cat on that rig. But I also remember the heartbreak of skips and scratches...

That last picture is a good example. The picture is there, but degraded. The picture doesn't cut off half way. There are bits of missing data spotted throughout. Q.E.D.

I'm afraid you are incorrect about this, Kevin. If you do a google image search on the phrase "distortions caused by corrupted photo files" you will see it is so.

Yes. Static, muting, skips and seize up/crashes. He may have perceived static as loss of sound stage. There is no accounting for how degraded signal is perceived - it's subjective. But the point is a significant amount of dirt does affect playback and sound quality. This was the way several disks from Wes Montgomery Riverside box - which I got at an amazing low price - looked. That's not a couple missing bits.

A good sized cloudy area on the surface of a cd is not a couple of misread bits.

I'm sorry but I disagree. I've had noticeable static, muting, skips etc from dirt which were fixed by cleaning.