Kevin Bresnahan

I would tend to agree that you want well-made speaker wires. But I doubt that those who sell super-expensive wire are merely "people who take their work seriously". I think you give them too much credit. I'd bet that most of them are people who take making money very seriously. If these beautiful heavy duty audiophile cables didn't sell, they wouldn't make them. But I'm probably not the person to be asking about this as I've done many audio installations over the years with bare wire on both ends of regular ol' wire. This used to be the only way to wire up speakers. I always thought that they sounded fine. The regular use of wire terminations started in the late 70's. Back then, banana connectors were considered "audiophile". When I first started putting lugs onto my wires, it was for use in car audio and if you can believe it, I soldered them on with lead solder. Sacrilege!!

Electrically, lamp cord works fine. However, not all cheap wires age well. I've found that some standard, off-the-shelf lamp cord oxidizes quite a bit with age. Like this: Now, I'm not saying that even this will affect the sound, but it certainly looks ugly. I'm not an advocate for "Just get some cheap lamp cord from Home Depot and be done with it". Maybe years ago, that would be me. Today, I'm more of a "Get some good quality wire and be done with it," guy. Whether it's super-expensive wire that looks incredible or some cheaper Belkin or Monoprice cable that looks like plain ol' wire - just get good wire. Up in this thread, I recommended Blue Jean Cable. They use Belkin wire for their speaker wires. Recently, I needed to wire up the rear speakers for my surround sound set-up so I bought a spool of 16 gauge Belkin wire from Parts Express: https://www.parts-express.com/belden-6200ue-16-awg-2c-cable-plenum-rated-in-wall-speaker-wire-100-ft-usa--102-1102. It looks good and works fine. Relatively cheap too, as I had a 50 foot option when I bought mine. The other thing to remember about audiophile grade speaker wires is that some of them use ridiculously heavy gauge wire. This results in wires that look like jump ropes laying across your floor. You can forget about making tight radius turns with these "wires", as they just don't bend. They're nice to look at - almost a work of art - but functionally, they're a bitch to work with. In my recent surround installation, I had to run the wire above a dropped ceiling and down the wall on both ends. Heavy gauge wire would have made this difficult and probably would've looked ugly.

Not where it snows. They're just support structures for ice dams.

I'm seeing Chick for the first time in September, when he brings his trio to Scullers. It's weird to hear that he's 77. It seems like yesterday that he was still in his 60s. I haven't seen Dave Holland in quite a while. I used to see him every year at the Regattabar but I haven't seen him on any of the Boston-area clubs' schedules in ages. His quintets were something to see. Actually, I see that he played at Berklee Performance Center back in May. I'm not surprised that I never heard about it. They are terrible at promotion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Parker He's 74. Heck, Dave Holland is 71.

You can sample this here: https://daveholland.bandcamp.com/album/uncharted-territories After sampling several tracks, I can safely say that this is not for me. This is not a style I dig at all.

I didn't think that Transition pressed their records in anything other than styrene so I wonder why yours looks like vinyl? I've been told that some owners of these records glued the labels back on themselves. Maybe that's what you have here?

Hey, at least you know they're unfiltered.

If Barton still reads organissimo, maybe he has already voted for Hank? EDIT: Although I highly doubt that he gets any internet access!!! The political stuff stems from several Jazz artists who have recently released recordings with political messages. DB did stories about these recordings and the artists got very political in describing the recording. Several anti-Trump stories seemed to get a pass but when Terence Blanchard went with a "Black Lives Matter" stance, the letters to the editor started up. You can read it in the July issue: http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2018/DB1807/single_page_view/30.html

http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2018/DB1809/single_page_view/10.html It looks like Bill Barton still gets to read DownBeat while sitting in the minimum security Federal Penitentiary in Seagoville, TX.

I was always under the impression that the lousy bass sound from this era was due to the advent of cheap electronic pick-ups, the "direct bass" days? I thought I read where they went away from pick-ups and back to mic'ing the bass in the early 80's?

I found a track today. The sound is pretty good with the exception that it has lousy bass sound that's so typical of that era.

No, it was definitely a US/Canada thing. There was a lot of pressure from the environmentalists to eliminate them too. The record labels knew that the end was coming when they started individually sealing the CD inside the sealed longbox. They put a special sticker on the outside to let the retailer know that it was double sealed. The sticker was the yellow & red square sticker you see in this picture:

The "Black triangle" CD shown above was an early Japanese-only issue. I bought many early CDs from Japan and I don't remember any of them coming in any kind of holder. They were just sealed CDs like all of the stores use today. The longbox was a US invention, done to allow record stores to re-use their LP storage bins and (supposedly) to prevent theft. This link shows some early Japanese CD issues where you can see that none of them had any sort of additional packaging: http://www.keithhirsch.com/cd-gallery/sealed-cd-gallery As for the first US pressing of Hancock's "Maiden Voyage", the so-called "McMaster", it was issued in 1986, which puts it in the era where there was probably a longbox. After all, "Speak Like A Child" first came out on CD in the US in 1987 and as this picture shows, it came in a longbox. I have no idea if having the longbox would add value to the CD.

Thanks for the reminder... I had that one too!! (EDIT - I just checked and I sold this one on the Hoffman forums for $50 back in 2008) Ha ha ha... just looked in my .mp3 file area and I see that l also had (or have) the TOCJ-4195 version. Jeez, I've owned a lot of versions of this recording!!

Hmmm... I'll play. I've had an early 70's RVG pressed LP, the late 90's "all analog" Wally Traugott LP pressing, the McMaster CD, the BN box (also McMaster), the RVG CD, the Hoffman SACD and finally the Music Matters 33 rpm LP. I'm done too.

Original Transition LPs??? If true, just that Watkins LP with inserts alone is worth about $1,000, especially if the labels are somehow still attached to the plastic record.

Herb Ellis - Ellis In Wonderland (Verve). What a nice record. I am really digging this one. Swingers mixed with nice ballads.Foot tapping music.

Noah Preminger - Some Other Time (Newvelle Records). A vinyl-only release that I was able to pick up from the artist at one of his shows. Very nice date. Mellow as heck, which i do appreciate on appropriate occasions. Beautiful pressing - dead quiet clear vinyl. EDIT: I went to put the record away and I notice the sleeve is huge. I go to put it onto the record shelves and WTF - it's about 3/4's of an inch taller than normal! That is weird. Now playing: Counts Basie Presents Eddie Davis Trio + Joe Newman (Roulette). R-52007 (mono) white label promo. This band cooks but Shirley Scott's organ has some kind of reverb on her feed into the mix that makes it sound like she's playing in a gym. Not her best sound. I have better by all involved. This is not one I'll be playing all that often.

I just pulled my Japanese CD and it turns out that I have TOCJ-81013. I had forgotten that it was repressed.

I was an original subscriber to Music Matters' 33 rpm series so I paid $35, including shipping, and yes, that was more than I wanted to pay, but no, not for a nice vinyl copy.

I already have the excellent-sounding UCCU-5669 CD as well as the Music Matters 33 rpm LP versions so I don't think I have inferior versions at my disposal. In fact, the Japanese CD I have has 2 alternates that aren't available elsewhere.

I just can't justify $38.50 + shipping to find see if there is an incremental improvement in the sound quality. As I get older and my hearing gets worse & worse, I think my days of buying audiophile reissues are over. In this particular case, I have audiophile reissues of many of these titles. I have to wonder if I could even hear the slight sound differences.

If these were worth releasing legitimately, they probably would've come out a long time ago. You might love them, but I'll tell you straight... I would not like these. The recording quality will be so terrible that you'll miss most of the music. They're certainly not worth the >$100/LP that they're getting.

I love Rouse but I can see what Jim means in that clip he posts and I think it has something to do with how Rouse changed the way he played (just a bit) when he was with Monk. I find his playing style "choppy", in that he seems to bite off notes... sorta like Dexter Gordon does at times. In the video Jim posts, he bites off phrases while playing off the bass line, who's walking to a rather slow beat. There's a long drawn-out sameness to it. But like Jim says, *seeing* it makes it rather enjoyable. I wish I was there myself.