Claude

Be reassured Your purchase will benefit Organissimo, because you used the search box on this page and therefore the Org referrer. It's just the link you posted above that does not contain the referrer, so other member's purchases, when made through the link, would not have generated revenue for Org. That's what I corrected with my link.

Sorry, but your link does not contain the Organissimo referrer (&frm=lk_organissimo). That has to added manually when you copy the the adress from your browser. Here's the complete link: http://www.cduniverse.com/sresult.asp?HT_S...=lk_organissimo

Interesting stuff, especially the Blakey and the Chet http://www.jazzicons.com http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=10521

IMHO, there haven't been enough topics so far on that subject to justify a seperate sub-forum.

The only ones I know are Don Grolnick's "Nighttown" (1992) and "Weaver of dreams" (1990), reissued in 1997 as a "Complete Blue Note recordings" 2CD set. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&a...10:cyc8b5m4nsqk Given that Mosaic will release a Select with some of Tony Williams' 1980's/90's Blue Note studio sessions, a reissue of the live album is not very likely in the near future IMHO.

I don't mind regular board members posting their Ebay auctions here, as long as the threads are clearly identified as such in the topic, and members don't flood the forum with seperate threads for every item.

Do you expect improved sound from this box set? Given the consistently high quality of the Sony jazz remasters from the last 10 years, I wouldn't expect this box to sound better than the Weather Report remastered CDs and SACDs that have already been released. I have a couple of them, and none sounds very good for jazz standards. They sound more like pop records, heavily mixed and processed in order to be "perfect". If I didn't already have the best individual albums I would definitely get this attractive box.

Hi Daniel, My TD160, which I bought very cheap as a re-entry into the world of vinyl, had problems with the motor (occasional vibrations), so when someone offered my a refurbished TD126, I jumped on the occasion. Around the same time, I had auctionned an SME 3009 III on Ebay. The seller of the TD126 made me an armboard for the SME. The TD126 MkIII as well as the SME III are not so well regarded on the vinyl scene today, because the TD126 MKIII uses electronic speed correction that purists hate, and the SME III - which is much lighter than the classic SME 3009 II - is often regarded as a "plastic toy arm". But this has nothing to do with their actual performance. It was a very popular top level combination in the early 80's when I first became a hifi enthousiast (at 12), so it's now a childhood dream come true for me I intended to get the ideally suited Shure V 15 VxMR for this combination, but as it recently went out of production, prices went very high and the availability of needle replacements is not guaranted. As I use the same cartridge on both turntables, I could compare their performance. The TD126 has a cleaner, more solid and transparent sound.

I just listened with headphones to the TOCJ-4231 CD released in 2000, and the stereo separation on track 1 (Aquarian moon) is more reduced than on the other tracks. On track 1, vibes, piano and bass are all in the center, while the drums are on the right. On the other tracks, the piano comes from the left channel.

Wasn't Coltrane "Live in Japan" captured for radio broadcast, and only later relesed on record? That would explain why it's mono. Like so many european radio broadcasts from the 1960's now available on record. Some 1960's studio sessions recorded or released in mono which come to my mind are french Barclay or Philips sessions reissued in the "Jazz in Paris" series, like Stephany Grapelli "Django" (1962) or Jean-Luc Ponty "Jazz long playing" (1964) Another late mono session is "Chet is Back" from 1962.

I have a Thorens TD126 MkIII with SME 3009 IIIS arm and (for the moment) Ortofon Vinyl Master Red cartridge, which looks like this one: I mainly buy used LPs which were released in the late 70's and early 80's, lots of ECM, Enja or MPS albums and stuff that has never been reissued on CD.

I agree that the looks are not the main advantage of the Mac, but the superior usability that the Macs always had was not enough in the mid-90's to compete with cheap Wintel machines on the mass market. It's the new lifestyle aspect that saved Apple. Before the iMac, the Mac was the preferred computer of professionals and geeks, but the new design also made it popular among people who normally wouldn't care about technical differences between computers, and for whom the design was the decisive purchasing factor. As far as hardware was concerned, the first iMac was a low end machine and much more expensive than a PC with comparable hardware features.

Apple would have died if they hadn't revolutionized their product range by offering the iMac, a very stylish "living room friendly" but affordable computer, while most PCs were just dull grey boxes. It was the new looks and market positioning that boosted Apple sales. On technical advantages alone (hardware and software) Apple could not have justified the price premium. In the mid 90's Apple computers were a must for professionals in the graphic manipulation and desktop publishing field, but the PC and Windows (NT4) were catching up very quickly. Today Apple has a strong base in the consumer market, which it would not have been possible to have without the new looks of the Apple product range. Look at the difference: Power Macintosh 5500 and 9600 (both from 1997) the IMac (1998)

Stefan, which aspects of the sound make you think the Select is better?

You are right Kevin, some "Blue Note 1500" sound poor. But this one sounds good, and certainly better than the Select. I highly recomment it, even if you already have the Select. In my view, this set is one of the worst jobs by McMaster, who did good work on other recent Blue Note or Mosaic reissues.

The Strata East or the Enja album? I've seen "Impact" on a list of future japanese Enja reissues sent by Hiroshi Tanno. Here's the european reissue: http://www.enjarecords.com/cd.php?nr=ENJ-2109

I just compared the "One step beyond" session included in the Moncur Select with the recent reissue in the japanese "Blue Note 1500" series. The main difference is that on the Select, the upper treble seems to be cut off, making the cymbals sound muffled, removing overtones from the horns and the vibes, muting tape hiss. On the Select, the opening of "Ghost town" sounds dead quiet and unnatural (NoNoise or not). The new TOCJ-6609 is much more enjoyable for that reason. It's not expensive, even in US stores: http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?...=lk_organissimo

Except that on "Red Garland's Piano", at 9:10 on the first track, the (mono) sound shifts from the middle to the left for 10 seconds. My CD is made in the EU. Is that glitch also present on the US pressing?

I don't think the Prestige RVG series will be nearly as popular as the Blue Note RVG seies, although the whole concept has been copied (including the design of the back covers). The market situation is different. Many of the Blue Note RVG reissues were long awaited, because most albums have been available on CD only once (some never, some twice, on McMaster and Connoisseur), and many of those went OOP some time later. So the RVGs marked the reappearance of those albums in the stores. All of the albums Concord now reissues as RVGs have always remained in print, and many of them have been reissued with new remastering several times already in the recent years (K2, SACD, XRCD). There are too many remakes. That's why I don't feel tempted by the Prestige RVGs, except for the few albums I don't have in my collection yet. This has nothing to do with the fact that Rudy Van Gelder remastered them. The two RVGs I've heard so far (Quiet Kenny, Red Garland's Piano) sound fine (I have not compared them to other versions).

It must be done with both speaker cables (either on the side of the speakers or the side of the amplifier). It will sound horrible if only the polarity of one speaker is reversed.

According to JPC, the new Enja version (24bit edition) will be released September 22. It's a midprice CD. http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/SESSIONID/fecae7c5...azz/rsk/hitlist (soundclips available)

Thanks Dan. I can browse the forum normally with the 66.... address, without login in. Here's a thread about the DNS issue. The server is ok, it's just that members cannot access it with the domain name. http://66.39.28.179/forums/showthread.php?t=90954

I don't have an english article ready, but german news just reported that the book and CD discounter Zweitausendeins has been sold to the german film distributor Kinowelt http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/78088 I hope they don't change their business model and will continue offering bargains on mid price and budget CD series. Zweitausendeins was founded in 1969, has 150 employees, 12 stores and an online shop, and an annual turnover of 40 million Euro. http://www.zweitausendeins.de/UeberUns/ http://www.kinowelt.de/unternehmen.php?lang=en

2 Ex-Teammates of Cycling Star Admit Drug Use By JULIET MACUR Published: September 12, 2006 Two of Lance Armstrong’s eight teammates from the 1999 Tour de France have admitted for the first time that they used the banned endurance-boosting drug EPO in preparing for the race that year, when they helped Armstrong capture the first of his record seven titles. Their disclosures, in interviews with The New York Times, are rare examples of candor in a sport protected by a powerful code of silence. The confessions come as cycling is reeling from doping scandals, including Floyd Landis’s fall in July from Tour champion to suspected cheat. One of the two teammates who admitted using EPO while on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team is Frankie Andreu, a 39-year-old retired team captain who had been part of Armstrong’s inner circle for more than a decade. In an interview at his home in Dearborn, Mich., Andreu said that he took EPO for only a few races and that he was acknowledging his use now because he thought doping was damaging his sport. Continued doping and denial by riders may scare away fans and sponsors for good, he said. “There are two levels of guys,” Andreu said. “You got the guys that cheat and guys that are just trying to survive.” The other rider who said he used EPO spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he did not want to jeopardize his job in cycling. “The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products,” he said. “There was very high pressure to be one of the cool kids.” Neither rider ever tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, but both said they felt as if they had to take EPO to make the Tour team in 1999. Andreu would not say specifically when he took the drug, and the second rider said he did not use EPO during the Tour. Anti-doping experts say the benefits of taking EPO, the synthetic hormone erythropoietin, which boosts stamina by bolstering the body’s production of oxygen-rich red blood cells, can last several weeks or more. Both of Armstrong’s former teammates also said they never saw Armstrong take any banned substances. Armstrong, who turns 35 next week, has long been dogged by accusations that he doped before and after his remarkable recovery from cancer, a comeback that made him a transcendent cultural figure and a symbol to cancer patients and survivors worldwide. He has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs and has aggressively defended himself in interviews and through lawsuits, even more than a year into his retirement. Multiple attempts to interview Armstrong for this article — through his lawyers, his agent and a spokesman — were unsuccessful. His agent, Bill Stapleton, wrote in an e-mail message yesterday that Armstrong would not comment because he was attending a meeting of the President’s Cancer Panel in Minneapolis. Armstrong once said that cycling had no secrets and that hard work was the key to winning. Recent events and disclosures, however, demonstrate that cycling does, indeed, have secrets. Dozens of interviews with people in the sport as well as court documents in a contract dispute between Armstrong and a company called SCA Promotions reveal the protective silence shared by those in professional cycling. A new picture of the sport emerges: a murky world of clandestine meetings, mysterious pills and thermoses that clink with the sound of drug vials rattling inside them. This year’s Tour began with a doping investigation that implicated nearly 60 riders and ended with Landis’s testing positive for synthetic testosterone. He became the third of Armstrong’s former lieutenants to fail a drug test after setting off on his own career as a lead rider. “There’s no doubt that cyclists have bought into the institutional culture of cheating, and that’s a big, big problem for the sport,” said Steven Ungerleider, a research psychologist, antidoping expert and consultant for college, Olympic and professional sports organizations. He described that culture as “a mob psychology.” A Widespread Problem In his 12 years as a professional cyclist, Frankie Andreu was a domestique, a worker bee whose job was to help a top rider like Armstrong win. He said his introduction to performance-enhancing drugs came in 1995, when he and Armstrong were with the Motorola team. He said some of the team’s riders felt that they could no longer compete with some European teams that had rapidly improved and were rumored to be using EPO. Motorola’s top riders asked their doctor, Massimo Testa, about the drug’s safety because more than a dozen young riders in Europe had died mysteriously of heart attacks. Some cyclists had linked those deaths to rumored EPO use. Dr. Testa, now a sports medicine specialist at the University of California at Davis, said in a telephone interview that he had given each rider literature about EPO, in case any of them decided to use it on their own. Dr. Testa said he urged the riders not to take the drug, but he wanted them to be educated. “If you want to use a gun, you had better use a manual, rather than to ask the guy on the street how to use it,” he said. “I cannot rule out that someone did it.” One of Armstrong’s teammates, Steve Swart, has admitted using EPO while riding for Motorola. He discussed his time with the team in the book “L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong,” which was published in 2004, only in French. The book’s allegations that Armstrong doped prompted the lawsuit between Armstrong and SCA Promotions, which was settled out of court in February. Because of Armstrong’s suspected drug use, SCA withheld a $5 million bonus after he won the 2004 Tour de France. Armstrong and Tailwind Sports, the company that owned his cycling team, sued SCA for the money. Testimony in the case was never supposed to become public. A confidential settlement awarded Armstrong and Tailwind Sports the bonus, and $2.5 million in interest and lawyers’ costs. The Times obtained the legal documents in July. In testimony in the case, Swart, a retired rider from New Zealand, said top riders on Motorola discussed EPO in 1995. He testified that Armstrong told teammates that there was “only one road to take” to be competitive. In a sworn deposition, Swart said the meaning of Armstrong’s comment was clear: “We needed to start a medical program of EPO.” EPO, cortisone and testosterone were common in European cycling, Swart said in a telephone interview. He said using cortisone, a steroid, was regarded as “sucking on a candy stick.” Cyclists acquired the drugs from European pharmacies and took them in private, Swart said. “You basically became your own doctor,” he said. He said signs of drug use were widespread at the 1994 and 1995 Tours, when there was no testing for EPO. “Everyone was walking around with their own thermos, and you could hear the sound — tinkle, tinkle, tinkle — coming from the thermoses because they were filled with ice and vials of EPO,” Swart said. “You needed to keep the EPO cold, and every night at the hotel, the guys would be running around trying to find some ice to fill up their thermos.” ‘It Was for Lance’ In the weeks before the 1999 Tour, Andreu’s wife, Betsy, found one of those thermoses in her refrigerator. She was furious. “I remember Frankie saying: ‘You don’t understand. This is the only way I can even finish the Tour,’ ” she said. “ ‘After this, I promise you, I’ll never do it again.’ ” Betsy Andreu said she grudgingly watched her husband help Armstrong traverse the mountains at the Tour that year. Later, she said, she was angry when her husband said he had once allowed a team doctor to inject him with an unidentified substance. To this day, she blames Armstrong for what she said was pressure on teammates to use drugs. Her husband, she said, “didn’t use EPO for himself, because as a domestique, he was never going to win that race.” “It was for Lance,” she said. Three years earlier, she and Frankie, who were engaged at the time, visited Armstrong at an Indiana hospital after he received his cancer diagnosis. Last fall, under court order to testify in the SCA Promotions case, the Andreus said that they had overheard Armstrong tell doctors he had used steroids, testosterone, cortisone, growth hormone and EPO. Armstrong testified that no one at the hospital had asked him if he had used performance-enhancing drugs. He testified that Betsy Andreu had lied because “she hates me,” and that Frankie Andreu had lied because “he’s trying to back up his old lady.” Frankie Andreu, once Armstrong’s close friend and roommate, testified that he never knew if Armstrong was doping. But once, he testified, he saw Armstrong sorting “little round pills” on his bed before a race. “He talked about that he would take these at different parts during the race,” Andreu said under oath, adding that he did not know what the pills were. Armstrong testified that they were caffeine. Johan Bruyneel, the longtime director of Armstrong’s team, did not respond to an interview request through a team spokesman. In a news conference he held at this year’s Tour, Armstrong said his opponents in the SCA case were “crushed — totally crushed” upon cross-examination. Sean Breen, one of Armstrong’s lawyers, said the opposing witnesses were not credible. In the case of Betsy Andreu, Breen said, “Like her testimony, I think her motives are completely unexplainable.” He added that Frankie Andreu’s dismissal as a rider on the United States Postal Service team after the 2000 season might have been one reason for their testimony. (Andreu returned to the team the next year as the team’s American director.) Armstrong has said he never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. He tested positive for cortisone at the 1999 Tour, but he was not penalized after producing a doctor’s prescription for a skin cream he said he used for saddle sores. At this year’s Tour, Armstrong said he was tired of dealing with doping accusations. “Why keep fighting lawsuits when my time needs to be spent being a dad, being a philanthropist, being a fan of cycling, being a guy that just wants to have fun?” he said. Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, said the union’s lawyers would review the SCA Promotions case after they prepared files on the riders implicated in the Spanish doping scandal that preceded this year’s Tour. In May, the Spanish police raided several apartments in Madrid and seized steroids, hormones, EPO, nearly 100 bags of frozen blood and equipment for treating blood. The Tour began in July with nine riders being barred from the event after they were implicated in the investigation. Cleaning Up the Sport Armstrong has kept his distance from cycling’s recent troubles. He is training for the New York City Marathon in November. In a few weeks, Armstrong will celebrate the 10th anniversary of his cancer diagnosis, and he has a new line of apparel from Nike commemorating the date. At the same time, some of his former teammates and rivals are struggling. Ivan Basso of Italy, Jan Ullrich of Germany and Francisco Mancebo of Spain — who finished second, third and fourth when Armstrong won the 2005 Tour — were all implicated in the Spanish scandal. Government and sports authorities continue to investigate them. One of Armstrong’s former lieutenants, the 2004 Olympic champion Tyler Hamilton, was also named in the Spanish investigation. His two-year suspension for blood doping in 2004 ends this month, but his future remains uncertain. The cycling union said it would seek a lifetime ban for Hamilton if he were found guilty of wrongdoing in the Spanish case. Another former lieutenant of Armstrong’s, Roberto Heras of Spain, tested positive for EPO last year. He is serving a two-year suspension. Landis, meanwhile, could be stripped of his Tour title. The United States Anti-Doping Agency is expected to decide whether to charge Landis with a doping violation sometime in the next week, according to Landis’s lawyer, Howard Jacobs. All of those cyclists have denied using performance-enhancing drugs, but antidoping officials hope that will change, if those athletes have, indeed, doped. Travis Tygart, general counsel for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, says he encourages athletes to be honest. “Those who stand up will hopefully influence other competitors in the sport to be clean,” he said. Ultimately, Frankie Andreu said, only riders can clean up cycling. “There’s always going to be the guy who denies and denies that he’s ever used something,” he said. “Nobody really knows what that guy is really doing when he goes home and closes the door.” Edward Wyatt contributed reporting from L’Alpe d’Huez, France. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/sports/o...amp;oref=slogin

I can't access the Steve Hoffman forum this afternoon. There is a problem with the DNS database. http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/ As this problem can be local, if someone is able to access the site, can you please do a "ping stevehoffman.tv" in a command box and post the resulting IP address here? I tried a few web-based ping sites but was unsuccesful to get a result. Thanks