riverrat

Bottom feeders like me may want to watch for the UK version of the Aftermath SACD being sold on eBay by a seller who seems to have a large supply of copies without the digipack - just the disc itself. These usually go for pretty cheap because of the lack of packaging. I bought one of these at least two years ago, and I saw some being sold recently by the same seller. It is very curious how this seller came to have such an apparently large supply of these, and why it is just this title.

I'll take the Weather Report SACD. Sending PM...

Here's one I picked up off eBay recently that is pretty good: Jean Emilien Hey Madagascar

Both of my shipments arrived intact and pretty quickly given that they came from Canada and the other side of the continent. The CDs are all in great shape and were well packaged.

PM sent RE: Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins Duke Ellington Live At The Whitney If they are still available...

PM sent, but I probably missed the boat on the ones I want.

Along these lines, do any of you folks know of a player that will play FLAC files natively? From what I understand (which isn't much) there is software available that allows FLAC playback on an iPod. But I want to explore non-Apple options too.

CCleaner. Free download, widely acknowledged to be very effective and the best one

I just received the CD referenced below - Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba Segu Blue. It is great. Thanks for the recommendation. I'm but a dabbler in African music so can't comment on its place in the grand scheme of things, but I've greatly enjoyed it over the last few months. I think you can buy with confidence. fRoots - the main UK folk/world music magazine - had it as album of the year as voted by a large panel of people from the music business world. You can see the results here: http://www.frootsmag.com/content/critpoll/

More teenagers ignoring CDs, report says George Frey / Bloomberg News "Joe Allred browses through a rack of CDs below a display of iPods at the BYU Bookstore in Provo, Utah. Apple Inc.’s iTunes music store jumped ahead of Best Buy as the No. 2 U.S. music seller as consumers switch from CDs to digital downloads. 48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007, up from 38% in 2006. Music downloads continue to grow, though, with iTunes leading the way...." LINK to full story in LA Times

PM sent RE Solomon Ilori African High Life Charles Tolliver Live at Historic Slugs Morphine Yes some scuffing Morphine Like Swimming Teka Watercolours of Brazil

Yes I think lossless files are the WAV of the future. I chose FLAC as hopefully the file type that will remain around the longest. That is the big question for me.

That is at least one thing that will keep me hanging on to my CDs, for now anyway. I've considered keeping a separate MSWord file with the cover art and perhaps stuff like the AMG or other reviews of the session in the same file as the music, and opening that up on the screen when that music is playing. Putting something like that together for my entire collection would be a GIANT time sink though. And it is probably only a matter of time before some similar service is available online. I know that there are already functions with iTunes and probably other media players for showing cover art, but I haven't checked into it, and I am guessing the availability of art for obscure jazz titles is more limited.

Are we going to see the death of the CD format as digital file storage plummets in price and people move to lossless music files on their computer? By "CD format" I mean CD, DVD-A, SACD- basically any format stored on a 5" disc. I understand that DVD-A and SACD do not seem to have a bright future. But what about CD in general? Availability of USB DACs to allow easy integration of PCs with existing stereo gear is rapidly expanding. These units are increasing in audio quality and dropping in price. The time will soon be here when PC-based systems rival the audio quality of high-end CD players, if that time has not already arrived. So what is future of CDs? Will CDs become "collectible" as demand and production of them drops off, as already seems to be happening? Even if mass produced titles are not collectible, what about limited edition jazz titles, e.g. JRVGs and XRCDs? It was thought for awhile that computers would displace books, but that has proven not to be the case. Will enough people still prefer to own "hard copies" of their music to keep CD alive, perhaps as a niche market, and maintain markets for rare titles? What say you all?

Yes, I'm aware of that. And even the redbook layer is a VAST improvement over the original remasters. I am thankful for that! My point was that the BEST sounding version of this music is not copyable, even for personal use. I was not aware of the fact that players are available with SACD/DSD outputs. Sounds like they are very high end only, which I think does not refute my point. Marketing SACD- a true improvement in CD technology- as a package that basically shuts down what I see as a consumer's right to copy the music for personal use has had much to do with its apparent failure to replace redbook CD technology in the marketplace. That's my position and I'm sticken to it!

A few semi-related comments... I think the reasons SACD isn't taking off like some hoped are more complicated than simply that most of the general public doesn't care about sound quality. It is certainly true that much of the public does not, but there is more to it than that, I think. A big factor, IMO, is that SACDs can't be copied. I bought all the Rolling Stones hybrid discs, and a few others, but the "non-copyability" makes this format pretty much a non-starter for me. If I spend the kind of money the music industry asks for an SACD I damn well better be able to copy it to my hard-drive and make my own custom CDRs. That is one of the great joys of owning music, at least for me. Another consequence of the efforts to make SACDs non-copyable is the lack of a "digital out" for the data, so there is no provision for people who want to experiment with external DACs. I'm in the process of ripping my CD collection to FLAC format, in anticipation of adding a nice quality external USB DAC and cheap PC to my system as a source. Since SACDs can't be ripped, they will be left behind in this rapidly emerging trend as well. The day is soon coming, and may already be here, when lossless digital files played back through a high quality DAC rival the sonic quality of high end analog systems. IMO, the greed of the music industry and their desire to be in total control of music consumers has doomed a promising audio format. They gouge us on CD prices, get pissed when we want to copy them and then try to cram a workaround for that (SACD) down our throats, and then wonder why the format isn't flying? The sonic benefits are clear to me. Make SACDs copyable and I will choose them, every time! In the end, the corporate greedheads are going to be out of the equation, with artists selling directly to consumers, ala Radiohead. It didn't have to be this way. New release, high audio quality, copyable CDs for $9.98 instead of non-copyable versions for $18.98 would have enabled this format to fly, and also enabled the music industry to stay in the game, IMO. OK, rant off!

Probably been said enough times, but thanks for taking the time to provide the detailed info on this great group MG! I am enjoying this thread very much. EDIT: Little bit off topic, but that is one magnificent baobab TREE in the photo on the cover of the original "Pirates Choice"!

I agree, GREAT idea for a thread. I've barely scratched the surface of African music- it is so diverse and so many recordings that are obscure but hard to find because they barely made it onto tape, to say nothing of the radar screen of most music buyers. Some favorite CDs from my collection: Baaba Maal & Monsour Seck "Djaam Leeli" Thomas Mapfumo "Chamunorwa" Mwenda Wa Byeke -Studio Album Guitar Paradise of East Africa Indestructible Beat of Soweto Vol. 1 (success of this one spawned a run of others, first one is still the best) Tinariwen "WAter of Life" the newest one, only one I have I'm looking for an obscure CD that called "African Acoustic: Guitar Songs Of Tanzania, Zaire And Zambia". Anyone seen that one?

Fela tracks do often have a certain similarity to each other, but then so do a lot of hard bop jazz tracks. If I never got to hear another Fela cut my life would be much the poorer, and I've heard a ton of them. You equate some lame copy with afrobeat, but you recognize that it is just a lame copy, not the real thing. Afrobeat may have worn thin with YOU, but don't fail to realize that is just you and that it perhaps has not worn thin with the general population. We are still absorbing the impact of afrobeat and other similar African music into our consciousness and we will be for years to come, I think.

So a guy posts that he's just had a severe stroke and needs to sell a bunch of his mosaics. 8 posts later, someone finally thinks to be sensitive enough to offer some condolences, rather than simply drool and pounce on the opportunity to buy some OOP jazz. And then its another 10 posts of jockeying for position and pestering for replies to PMs before anyone else thinks about what this person must be going through. Classy, real classy.

Does anyone know the story on the 7xxx series Blue Notes? Rebadged 4xxx series perhaps? I can't possibly imagine they would remaster those listed again. Well maybe I CAN imagine it.

Thirded, or fourthed or whatever. This thread reminds me that I also need to pick up the expanded version of Live at Leeds. They did a single (I think it was just a single) called Join Together that I always kind of liked, sounds a bit like an out-take from Who's Next.

I'm not sure it would directly relate to the problems you are having, but there is also a plug in for Firefox that screens out sidebar ads that make so many pages slow to load. These are different from pop-ups- they are all the extraneous crap that pages are designed to load before you get to see that actual content you are interested in. I have intermittent problems with AMG- sometimes when I'm doing a number of different searches, it seems to slow down and not work very well- which makes me suspicious that the site is set up in some way to discourage people from using it extensively in one session. But then I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist, especially WRT corporate America...

Here's the full text of the Dagogo editorial, for those with virus issues (I didn't have any!): "The Redbook CD standard of 44.1kHz/16-bit is not a deficient scheme, although a much more robust standard would’ve transpired our audio experience much sooner. While the engineers in the 80’s determined a digital medium with 44.1kHz of sampling rate at 16-bit of resolution would be adequate to contain all audible information for even the most critical listening purposes, they lacked foresight in the inadequacy of technologies and processes required for conveying every digital byte of a sonic experience that is fully 44.1kHz/16-bit in nature. Just as that 300hp, all-wheel-drive family vehicle provides such extra margin of performance for the routine, everyday driving, that it will always perform confidently and flawlessly for its driver in most thinkable and unthinkable circumstances, and that 50Wpc SET amplifier that can drive 99% of loudspeakers in any given day with assurances of performance will also give that much extra performance when driving medium to high efficiency speaker, so should the engineers have the foresight of pursuing an audio format incorporated with such extra performance margin in transcending the human auditory threshold, so that It would perform as intended for the inevitable, suboptimal execution in normal listening environment. Hence, with 25 years of hindsight before us now, I personally believe that in order for the promise of the 44.1kH/16-bit Redbook CD standard to come to pass, the industry should have adopted a minimum standard of 88.2kH/18-bit standard to accommodate loss of resolution in the playback process. Because it is now proven by the continuous evolution in various mastering and playback technologies, that even the sound quality of the Redbook CD standard is able to continue to gain strides. In other words, despite progress in mastering and playback technologies in the past quarter-century, we are still working towards reaping the sound of the Redbook CD conclusively. Imagine how far we would have come to the original 44.1kHz/16-bit ideal had we been bestowed with an 88.2kHz/18-bit standard from the start. It is thus regrettable that such effort is now no longer purveyed by Sony in their SACD standard. (See 9/8/07 Editorial: State of Format Evolution) But it would also seem that the ball is now in the court of the labels, as they must determine whether they want to continue supporting the existing SACD audiophile customer base. For a bleaker reality, Deutsche Grammophon, the largest classical label, has not produced an SACD in 2007, and is continuing its use of the quarter-century old Compact Disc as its primary medium, albeit featuring the latest generation of its in-house mastering technology. For the time being, readers with audiophile-grade SACD players can at least be assured of two things: 1. they are positioned to enjoy whatever music being churned out by the existing SACD labels; 2. their players are nonetheless very competent even for extracting information from the next generation of CD’s. The newest generation of CD’s I am referring to is the new K2 HD from JVC, a listening experience of which prompted my very realization of the potentials of Redbook CD yet to be exploited. The engineers at Victor Company of Japan (JVC) responsible for the XRCD process, arguably the most widely accepted audiophile CD standard, is now unveiling this latest engineering feat for the benefit of the Compact Disc audiophiles. Whereas HD stands for High Definition, the monogram K2 stands for the last names Kuwoka and Kanai, the two JVC senior engineers who developed the first JVC interface system in 1987, officially dubbed K2 Interface, for maximizing “resolution in the confines of the Red Book format” (quoted from the FIM K2 HD literature). In addition to their XRCD’s long established, high-precision, low-tolerance manufacturing process that is the pride of the industry, JVC now implements for the first time a mastering technique that is yielding such revolutionary sonics that for the first time, the company is crowning this latest engineering feat with the K2 insignia. The first compact disc in the United States bearing this K2 badge is First Impression Music’s This is K2 HD Sound! sampler. (henceforth: "the K2 HD Sampler") On K2 HD and XRCD, Mr. Ma has the following to share with Dagogo's readers: "K2 HD is an entirely new mastering system developed by the K2 team for Victor Entertainment, a separate JVC company from JVC Mastering Center in Yokohama, which produces the XRCD. Though both are a part of the larger JVC Company of Japan, Victor Entertainment and JVC Mastering Center operate independently of each other. In a nutshell, XRCD/XRCD24 is a product which is mastered by a special processor system and the glass master is cut by special XRCD laser cutter in the XRCD production line. On the other hand, K2 HD Mastering is primarily a superb and very special mastering technology. What it produces is first and foremost a K2 HD master disc (WAV file). It is not a product. The K2 HD master disc can be used to produce K2 HD mastered CD’s by any pressing plant anywhere, provided the quality is assured. In summary, K2 HD is not XRCD/XRCD24. It is K2 HD mastered discs." Seemingly squeezing the resolution of a 24-bit master tape with a top frequency limit of 100kHz into the CD, the process represents a major multinational corporation’s ongoing quest in CD technology refinement by way of preparing a vastly superior master tape of unprecedented resolution. The result is a Redbook CD that carries Sony/Philips’ original “Perfect Sound Forever” promise to an unprecedented level. THIS IS K2 HD SOUND! Consisted of tracks from six (6) of Winston Ma’s First Impression Music XRCD discs, three (3) Keith O. Johnson-produced Reference Recordings discs, another three JVC Japanese discs and one from Seou, the K2 HD Sampler also features no less than three tracks from three (3) First Impression Music and Lasting Impression Music’s discs that are already carrying a K2 serial designation for re-release in the new standard. The following is a list of tracks on this K2 HD Sampler, followed by an announced schedule and titles to become available in the K2 HD standard. Please note that at the date of this writing, not all discs from which the tracks in this K2 HD Sampler are extracted will be among those to be remastered into the new standard: During the auditioning, I compared the sound quality of the K2 HD Sampler to identical tracks of the original FIM XRCD’s in my collection, such as: Track 11 FIM SACD 052 - The Four Seasons Track 13 FIM SACD 048 - Five Songbirds (A Reference Collection of Female Vocalists FIM 048 VD - (HDCD version of the above) Track 14 FIM XR24 066 - (Limited Edition) Super Sound! Track 15 FIM XR26 067 - Super Sounds! II FIM SACD 040 - Autumn In Seattle In retrospect, contained in the Super Sound! and Super Sounds! II compilations are also a few tracks from the original FIM discs that are not put into the K2 HD Sampler. From listening sessions based on a system consisting the 47 Lab PiTracer, Wadia Reference Series 9 Decoding Computer, Wavac MD-805m monoblocks, I can surmise the following: • XRCD24’s have better delineated spatiality and dynamic balance than earlier versions of XRCD’s and HDCD’s • DSD Redbook CD layers of SACD’s (“DSD CD” henceforth) present an altogether different kind of sound from their XRCD24 counterparts • Speakers of higher caliber, such as the Audio Note AN-E SEC Silver and Bösendorfer VC 7, instill a wider margin of discrepancies between the performance of XRCD24 and DSD CD, although I concede that such comparison is unfair without experiencing the SACD layer also Superior as the XRCD’s are to all standard CD’s I’ve encountered, the K2 HD Sampler presented a more significant excursion in the prowess of the XRCD24, yielding a considerably more meticulous presentation and separation of instrument bodies. On speakers capable of producing larger soundstage, such as the Bösendorfer VC 7 and the Tannoy Churchill Wideband, the spatial prowess of the K2 HD was more easily discerned, while smaller speakers, such as the Audio Note AN-E SEC Silver and the Murata ES301 floorstander, would demonstrate a preciously more precise timbre portrayal, with a firmer medium- to bottom-end. The K2 HD Sampler and DSD CD’s offered differing perspectives in dimensionality and dynamic contrasts. Although the DSD CD’s already surpassed standard CD’s in a more full-body spatial and tonal dimensionality, its colossal, high-profile portrayal of instrument body marked a stark contrast to the K2 HD disc’s more unified and microscopic-like delineation of instrument bodies and timbre characteristics. In addition, though its tonality was not as spectacular as that of some of the DSD CD’s, most notably those from Telarc, the K2 HD disc was nevertheless subjectively more evenly distributed in energy, culminating in a more focused presentation of relative positioning of activities onstage. The biggest surprise in the K2 HD Sampler’s advantage was how DSD CD’s sounded somewhat clustered when compared to it. Vocalists were presented with a beautifully harmonious dimensionality and imaging perspective amidst accompanying musicians on the K2 HD, whilst the DSD CD’s perspectives put varying degrees of highlight on the vocalists and musicians respectively, and put forth a persistently larger-than-life scaling of the human mouth and instruments alike. A GENESIS PERSPECTIVE Gary Koh of Genesis Loudspeakers was among the few that also received a copy of the K2 HD Sampler from Winston Ma, and he has graciously agreed to share his experience on the new standard in the following: “The K2HD is astonishing. From the first second of “Symphonic Dances”, I knew that we had something special. There is a magical something in the silence of a concert hall that does not come through a CD, only when you are there "live" or your LP is ‘in song’ and it came through on that first track. I believe that this is in the sub-bass - which is why we have speakers that go down flat to 16Hz. I also noticed this also at the other frequency extreme. The decay of cymbals, and triangles sounded very much more real. The astonishing thing was that I have some of the tracks on the sample disc on SACD, and the K2HD is better! The K2HD is very much more musical. This is through the same playback chain - the Esoteric DV-50 superbly modified by Allen Wright in Switzerland. I wish I still had my LP of “Symphonic Dances” to compare, but I lost it during moving from Singapore. Well, when Winston releases Jazz in the Pawnshop and Cantate Domino, I can compare the K2HD to my first pressing of those albums! I would argue with Winston's statement "The Charm of Master Tape". I would call it "The Charm of Life". Truly a spectacular sonic achievement by the JVC engineers and FIM.” Dagogo wishes to thank Mr. Winston Ma of First Impression Music for the privilege of auditioning his latest fruit of labor, and Mr. Gary Koh of Genesis Loudspeakers for taking the time to share his insights with Dagogo’s readers."

Thank you for the replies. I found a copy of Kele Mou Bana for a decent price, and many more copies at indecent prices. Perhaps I will ask Santa for the Select, that also looks very good.