Kevin Bresnahan

I don't think I've ever heard "The Pantagon" by Cedar Walton. From the YouTube videos, it sounds OK if a little dated with rinky-dink piano & fuzzy bass. Is the consensus that it's worth picking up... for $8.87?

It was a night of sonic sludge. I wasn't expecting much along these lines but this was even worse than my lowly expectations. The bassist was just blumb, blumb, blumbing his way along, with no attempt to actually play single notes until his one solo. The drummer was pretty good and looked just like a young Oliver Platt. And let's face it, we shouldn't expect these 70 year old singers to sing like they used to... but if you can't hit the notes, it's time to hang it up guys.

Lou is 92. One of the last beboppers still (?) playing.

Biggest selling single in Japan in 1964:

When discussing how musical genres are "born" or created for the first time, I find it pretty funny that we center on Rock, a mainly UK/US creation. Back when the UK/US kids were spinning the Beatles, other countries were spinning vastly different records. Even today, pop on a Japanese radio station or an Indian radio station or a Chinese radio station etc. and hear a whole other world of popular music, some of which has been around as long as Rock. In general, people often take a rather myopic view of the musical world.

Blue Öyster Cult is at the Blue Ocean Music Hall in Salisbury, MA tonight. I don't go to many of these "classic rock" shows any more as they are usually just tribute bands with few or no original members. This band seems to have the original singers, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Recorded by board member Ted O'Reilly too.

Front row Green Monster seats are harder to get these days. I took the first one I could and went on April 11th to a game they lost to the Yankees. It was 42 degrees at game time and got colder and windier as the game progressed. It was so cold, I had to buy winter hats for me & my daughter. Surprise, the stadium kiosks were selling them. This was obviously before we had to don our winter hats but note we already had on our winter coats.

1975 Reds? The team that was practically gifted a win by umpire Larry Barnett for failing to call an obvious catcher interference on Ed Armbrister? Yeah, I know that MLB continues to say it was correct. Bunk. The rule states it's not interference "Barring an intentional action on the part of either player". Ed Armbrister intentionally stopped in front of Fisk. There was nothing unintentional about it. He says he wanted to see if the ball was fair or foul. Where does the rule say that you can intentionally block a player if you think the ball may be foul? It doesn't. FYI - that call soured me on MLB for years. That sure looked like the fix was in on that one. I still barely watch the games on TV, preferring to catch a game or two at Fenway every year. This year, I saw my first game up on the Green Monster. Bucket list box checked.

"DIGITAL RECORDING" - WTF?

Use a sniping service or wait until the last few seconds of the auction and bid the most you are willing to spend. Don't do it until the very end. Snipe it yourself.

Weren't these special LPs? I've been told that it was a miserable failure. Supposedly, the records skipped on bumps and after about 10 plays, the record was white from the tracking force needed to keep the needle in the groove.

If you still own a reel-to-reel machine, you can actually get a clone of several master tapes: https://tapeproject.com/jazz/. I'd actually love to hear one or two of these master tape clones on a good setup. Maybe a nice tube amp?

8 track car players were ubiquitous in the late 70's in New England. Nearly every one of my friend's cars had one. One of my friends had a 1972 Buick Skylark that he put one in. He got the Doors debut album stuck in it and it would only play track 4, which was the song "The End". It would ONLY play "The End". I went on a 2 and a half hour drive in that car and he kept playing it & playing it... with Morrison droning "This is the end" and all of us in the car screaming, "NO IT ISN'T!!!!!!!"

But then CDs came along and it was a win-win-win (better than LP, better than reel-to-reel & better than cassette) so a no-brainer actually.

Oh without a doubt!! I probably couldn't afford one back then even if I wanted to. I only came close to buying one well after I was out in the working world and only because I was offered the deck with a bunch of tapes - mostly classical. I just couldn't fit the damn thing into my listening room. It was huge. I was also not a huge fan of the rewinding process.

I've heard that reel-to-reel was more popular in Europe than the US. I can say with certainty that I did not personally know anyone with a reel-to-reel deck back in my early audiophile days. It wasn't until well into college that I met a few older music fans with one. I don't even remember the last time I heard one. I seem to remember an equation back then where reel-to-reel typically = tube amplification. No matter - I am 100% sure that I never saw/heard one.

Well I'll be... so this "4-track" tape, or Stereo Pak tape, only had 2 tracks that had to be switched manually? Were they the same size as 8-track tapes? I used to have an 8-track recorder. The biggest PIA was that the splice couldn't be recorded on, so when you recorded something that jumped across the tracks, it had a glitch in it. I remember recording Jim Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" and the track changed right after Jimi sang, "All along the watchtower" and before "princess kept the view". To this day, when I hear that song, my mind expects that little jump. I also had the Cadillac of car 8-track decks, the Pioneer TP900:

Um, Jim... is this a Texas thing? Because where I'm from, all "8-track tapes" only had 4 tracks. We never had "4-track tapes" or "8-track tapes" with 8 tracks. Ever. And FWIW, I almost bought a used reel-to-reel machine but I didn't have the room for it. Those suckers were huge! I hate to admit it, but I almost bought a DAT recorder several times. Thank god I never pulled the trigger as I've read the horror stories of people's entire collections becoming unreadable with time.

From the web: 'K7' was an abbreviation often used for tapes. The origin is the French pronunciation; 'Kah-set'.

As an LP buyer in the late 70's and through the 80's, I welcomed CDs with open arms. No more paper thin LPs, off center spindle holes, chunks of paper embedded in the vinyl, warble, skips in brand new records, crackles in brand new records... the list went on & on. In the beginning of CD, a lot of people jumped in with both feet. And while I still prefer CD for my listening, I find myself buying more vinyl because many modern CDs have been digitally manipulated to sound like crap.

Making them in Hanover meant that they had to import them, so yes, they were more expensive. The prices didn't really drop until quite a few pressing plants came on line - supply and demand at work. Also, in those early days, the buyers were mostly audiophiles and the prices reflected that. It's funny, but the record store I mentioned in that link above, the Capitol Record Shop in Hartford, Connecticut, became a sort of mecca for hard-to-find CDs. I was lucky in that I lived only about an hour from there. I vividly recall one trip there where I bought the first Beatles CD made, "Abbey Road", as well as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" & "The Wall", Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and quite a few more. I paid big bucks for these discs, as they were only available in Japan at the time. I went there about once a month when they got in their latest shipment. I never understood why they closed as they were always packed when I went there.

You're partially right. There wasn't a shortage of blanks... there were only 2 CD *pressing plants* in the beginning. One at Sony in Japan and another at Polygram in West Germany. For a while, every CD was produced at one of these pressing plants. All of the first CDs sold in the US, even if the printed material was printed in the US, was pressed in either Japan or West Germany. The first US CD pressing plant, Digital Audio Disc Corp (DADC) opened in Terre Haute, IN in 1984. Check this out: http://www.mh-audio.nl/tips/cdhistory.htm Fun stuff

Looking at the contents of the October 1984 edition of Digital Audio Magazine, I see that they were talking about Clifford Brown's Emarcy stuff coming out. I remember those early West Germany-pressed Emarcy CDs in the plastic blister packs with the booklet in a pocket at the top and the CD case with the CD on the bottom. I cut many fingers trying to get those damn things open. There's also mention of Sonny Rollins' "Way Out West", which would have been the early Japanese CD in the VDJ series.

Flim & The BBs was my first Jazz CD purchase too. They were on the DMP (Digital Music Products) label. Jim - going by this, I assume you were an early adopter too, because I bought this CD circa 1984-85. I bought quite a few of those DMP CDs back then because they were considered "audiophile" recordings in full DDD. I subscribed to Digital Audio Magazine back then and every month they would rate the latest CDs for sound & and music and Flim & the BBs were often topping that list. Back in those earliest days, CDs were scarce and very expensive. The first wave of them were almost exclusively Rock & Classical. I seem to remember paying close to $20-22/disc back then. But I still consider it a magical time, as we were finally able to hear music as it sounded on the master tape with no clicks or pops and without the muted highs of Dolby cassettes.