Kevin Bresnahan

That could be true, but the reason for this is that Ford has done little to enter the fuel efficient car world. They licensed Toyota's hybrid system and their resulting hybrid casr/SUVs weren't very good compared the other car makers' hybrids due to their poor implementation. When your sedans only get 26 MPG highway, it's pretty easy to make a crossover that gets the same. The current administration's decision to relax the MPG standards let Ford off the hook for their inability to make very fuel efficient cars. Yes, they have improved their trucks' MPG, but even with their improvements, at best they're still half of most hybrid cars. At the rate they were going, there was no way they were going to be able to get their fleet average up to 54.4 MPG. I wonder if these market trend analysts ever consider how these trends are influenced by the automakers' own advertisements? After all, the number one selling beer in the US is Bud Light. That must mean that this beer is the beer everyone wants, right? It has nothing to do with the bombardment of advertising aimed at making this so. No way!

The usual ubiquitous one original member (Mick Box - guitarist and founder). A lot of these ghost bands touring today really bug me, especially if the band doesn't have the original lead singer. Uriah Heep died in 1986 when their lead singer David Byron died. You don't see a band on tour today called "David Bowie" for a reason.

FWIW, my wife & I are on our 6th Toyota in the past 20 years, with 4 of them being hybrids and one of those hybrids being a plug-in model - my current ride - a 2017 Toyota Prius Prime. In the summer on my 63 mile commute, I average over 65 mpg by combining hybrid gas with pure electric driving. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Chevrolet, Volvo, BMW and other car companies have all committed themselves to making higher mileage cars by turning to hybrid gas/electric cars. What did Ford do? They licensed Toyota's hybrid system and dropped it into the Focus and Edge, in the process jacking the price up thousands of dollars beyond the regular gas-propelled model. I think it was clear that Ford was doing this to plod along toward compliance with CAFE standards. They failed to market their hybrids, failed to stock them at many dealers, failed to work to control the costs (making them tougher to sell) and in general, everything in their power to keep Ford hybrids from ever being a "player". They probably didn't care if they sold 10 of them a year - they only seemed to make them for the sole reason of raising their fleet average. As much as I am a fan of "Buy American" as anyone (and two of our Toyotas were made here), a part of me hopes that this backfires on Ford forcing them to have to get back to making more fuel efficient cars and less trucks & SUVs. As Jim mentions above, Ford's insistence on catering to the "monster truck" fanbase, is not only causing problems for other drivers, it isn't doing anything for our environment nor, when you come right down to it, our economy. These huge trucks burn gasoline in large quantities. If I had a Ford F250 instead of my Prius, my commuting gas costs would quadruple (at least). Taking a price of gas at $2.70, my commute cost would go from $5.20/day to $20.80/day. That's $104 a week and almost $5,000 over a year. I'm too lazy to comb through the web for the environmental reasons this sucks. I would hope everyone here already knows this anyway.

They seem to have a short memory. During the last spike in gas prices, when they shot up to almost $4.00 a gallon, a lot of people dumped their gas-guzzling SUVs and started buying more fuel efficient cars. I know someone who picked up a 2 year old mint Ford Explorer that cost almost $50K new for around $8K. If this happens again, their decision to focus on these poor gas mileage trucks & SUVs may backfire. [/NO POLITICS INTENDED/] And BTW, this is a direct result of the new administration (no names please) rolling back the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards two weeks ago. If the CAFE MPG standards were still in place, there is no way that Ford could do this as their fleet's average gas mileage will not come anywhere near the old federal standard of 54.4 MPG by 2025. [/NO POLITICS INTENDED/]

You like vinyl and that's fine. Vinyl playback adds coloration to the music and many people, myself included, like many of these audible additions. There really is no need to try and attribute your preference for vinyl to any perceived shortcomings in digital. If your digital music file was created from a vinyl source, all of the shortcomings inherent in the vinyl playback would be perfectly replicated - if done right. It's not a digital sound signature that you don't like - it's vinyl's sound signature that you do like. Regarding jitter - at a demo of an external DAC, I participated in a jitter listening test. I could not hear it's effects. I understand that it's a technical problem that could affect the analog conversion, but after my listening experiment, I doubt that this digital conversion artifact is one of the reasons you find yourself preferring vinyl. BTW, vinyl playback may be continuous, but it is anything but smooth. Look at that scratch coming up! I think this article describes the differences between DSD and PCM very well: https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/usa/en/blog/what-dsd. It describes that standard DSD equates to about 24 bit/88.2 kHz PCM. I also like the quote, "If anyone says that DSD is ‘better’ than other formats, the numbers don’t necessarily support that". This is even more true if the mastering engineer butchers the input signal.

Not in the case of SACD. Unlike this MQA CD and HDCD, SACD does not use PCM to convert the analog signal to digital. The conversion is DSD, which theoretically has much more resolution than PCM. How this additional resolution is used is all that matters. Digitize crap and you going to get perfectly reproduced crap. This is true regardless of the medium used. Cut a record from a crap tape, you're going to get a crap record. Cut a cassette from a crap LP source, you're going to get a crap cassette. This is not new. I was in a record store the other day and saw someone yank an old Applause LP off the shelf and stack it in his pile for the trip to the cash register. I had to laugh (unfortunately, out loud). He must've thought i was insane.

I loved the sound of SACD until those Police SACDs and those Peter Gabriel SACDs. In my opinion, earlier CD versions beat these releases handily. When Nick Davis butchered the Genesis SACDs, I really knew that the emperor had no clothes. Now don't get me wrong, I still think a well-mastered SACD sounds better than an equally well-mastered CD, but it's not "night & day" better. It's just a little better. It's easy to compare with a hybrid SACD that uses the same mastering for both formats.

Bill Evans - Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top Of The Gate (Resonance). I forgot I bought this 10" record at a previous Record Store Day. Keeping it going with more Bil Evans - How My Heart Sings! (OJC pressing). An exclamation point record! It must be good!

Truth be told, this sounds like another run at HDCD, which was also marketed for a while as a sort of "super CD". It wasn't and once everyone realized it, it faded away. While I applaud the engineers trying to squeeze every last drop out of the CD format, be willing to admit that while your invention is a theoretical improvement, please stop with these extraordinary improvement claims. Most of them result in small incremental improvements that any mastering engineer can destroy with a single turn of a knob.

More fun - they compare MQA to "air" (another WTF there) and claim that MQA has less ringing. Hey, anyone guess which of these plots shows "ringing"?

Here is the MQA website: http://www.mqa.co.uk/professional/the-tech More mumbo-jumbo in there too and they really don't ever say what they're doing here. "MQA captures the entire signal and then ‘folds’ it up"? They also claim that "This file will play at above CD quality on any device", without anything to back this statement up. Of course there are several (paid?) endorsements from record producers and musicians to give this some cachet.

Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet - Crash! (Prestige). A nice date that I didn't even realize was on CD as I've never seen it.

" Even if you do not have MQA-enabled hardware/software, the disc can also be played on regular CD players in UHQCD 44.1kHz/16bit resolution, which is far better than that of regular CD." What does this even mean? All CDs are encoded at 44.1 kHz with 16 Bit resolution. There must be a problem with the translation or some marketing person got a bit off track, particularly with "far better".

I thought about those Wallingtons too but when I did the math on my stack of discs... something had to go back.

David - I'll take these.

Supposedly re-mixed from the original multi-tracks. Not a favorite of mine, so I am not that familiar with the differences, but they are supposedly obvious.

Won't this set have the re-mixed version of the original sessions? I thought that all of the currently available the US/Legacy CDs use Mark Wilder's re-mix.

If you haven't ordered the Mosaic box yet, you only have until Wednesday to get this on CD.

You have a lot of catching up to do!

They did eventually sell them all out. It was the first Condon set - The Complete CBS Recordings Of Eddie Condon And His All Stars - MQ7-152 . The CD version sold out years before they sold their last LP set. It stuck around for a very long time.

Good idea but (I hate to say this) you better set your sights low as Kickstarter is a "make it or lose it" model. If you ask for too much, you might not get any. And remember, as great as a Bill Barron set might sound to you and Jim, there are just not a lot of people out there like you willing to spend "Mosaic money" on a box set. You're also going to run into the fact that there are some people, myself among them, who already have nearly all of this material on various CDs & LPs.

I remember years ago when Michael would complain about all of the Condon LP sets they had collecting dust on their warehouse shelves and how they had so much money tied up in these sets that it was hurting their ability to get out any new sets. I am pretty sure that set was instrumental in Mosaic completely abandoning vinyl for all those years.

Those will work fine. Edit to add: I am not backing down from my statement above, but thinking on it more, I would prefer a tool with the stripping holes below the pivot point. Like this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005QVRB/ref=s9_acsd_simh_hd_bw_b2Jxm_c_x_1_w?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-3&pf_rd_r=1G1T4E7SS7EKM38TDJHK&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=f6696391-cce8-5c19-a9f4-3720630a6927&pf_rd_i=553398 The reason for this is that I find that I sometimes need to spin the cutter a bit to completely cut through the outer jacket and I prefer the spin point to be near the middle - it makes it easier to spin as it's more balanced, Also, when you pull on the wire to slide off the outer jacker, you have to keep the jaws closed the whole time. I find this harder to do with the type of stripper you show above. With the holes near the middle, I can grab the tool and keep the jaws closed while pulling the whole tool. I can control the pulling force better that way too.

I guess you haven't shopped cartridges in a while. The Ortofon 2M line is pretty affordable in this realm. Sort these cartridges on price from high to low: https://www.musicdirect.com/equipment/phono-cartridges/?category=Phono%2520Cartridges&sort=sitePrice%7CDESC&page=4&pagesize=24&c1=tab-products&c2=grid. The Ortofon 2M Black shows up on page 4 out of 7 pages so almost half of the cartridges they sell are more expensive than the Ortofon 2M Black. And if it means anything, I have 2 Ortofon 2M Black cartridges. Both were bought used for less than $400.

I've used a box cutter for years but I have a lot of experience with it so I haven't gotten cut in a while. I also use wire strippers. The type I use looks like this: https://www.parts-express.com/gb-gs-366-wire-stripper-crimper--360-630. I like this type because they double as a small bolt cutter. No matter how you do it, it's important to do it in a way that you don't accidentally cut through any of the copper strands inside. So if you do buy a wire stripper, make sure to use the right sized cutting slot. You have 12 Gauge wire so use the slot labeled 12. The one labeled 14 may cut the outer jacket better or easier, but it's likely damaging the outer copper strands. These often break off inside your connector once you start moving or flexing the wire. Also, always remember that copper is not something you want inside your skin. Copper slivers infect like crazy. If you happen to get a small piece of copper in your finger, dig it out with tweezers. You're better off with a hole in your finger that you can cover up with a bandaid than an infected sore from subcutaneous copper.