Claude

My recommendations: - Tim Berne - Fractured Fairy Tales (his best album IMHO) - Marc Ducret - News from the Front - Peter Herborn - Acute insights - Miniature - Miniature - Paul Motian Trio - Broadway Vol.3 with guest Lee Konitz - Herb Robertson - X-Cerpts - Gary Thomas - Exile's gate - Gary Thomas - Till We Have Faces

"LP-sized sleeve"

I'm sure the Beatles maniacs at http://www.stevehoffman.com/forum will know.

Now on sale at Zeitausendeins: - many Winter&Winter JMT reissues for 8 Euro (Arcado, Berne, Robin Eubanks, Django Bates, ...) - recent Blue Note reissues for 7 Euro, including Connoisseurs. Most are copyprotected. Important: the database seems to be outdated, so these items cannot be found directly (at least it didn't work for me). Go to www.zweitausendeins.de --> Suchen --> Frisch ausgepackt --> limit to CDs, and wade through hundreds of results.

There are many game collections with Pac Man available: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listm...8508560-8451319 Of course you will need to check for the right format (PC, Gameboy, Playstation, etc) http://www.bookrags.com/history/popculture/pac-man-bbbb-05/

Kevin, You must be thinking of someone else, as I never said or even though about doing that. I have a very good SACD/CD player (Sony XA777), and I enjoy my 170 SACDs a lot. But I am disappointed by some SACDs with Fantasy material, especially those remastered by Fantasy themselves. Despite the hi-rez advantage, they sound inferior to the DCC remasters made 10 years ago. While the AP SACDs sound excellent, when there is a DCC counterpart I prefer that one. This is not to bash SACD, but to say that the remastering is more important than the difference between redbook and hi-rez.

The MoFi SACD are nice collectibles and Ebay prices will likely up when they are OOP. I share Hans' view on the comparision between DCC and MoFi remastering. I will add that on my system, Steve Hoffman's CD remastering also sounds better than the MoFi hi-rez layer. The same is true for other titles reissued on Fantasy or Analogue Productions SACDs. Steve Hoffman is simply the master in bringing out the best sound out of these tapes.

I mainly buy second hand LPs, in stores in Munich and Brussels or on Ebay Germany or UK. OJC LPs are only 5 Euro at www.zweitausendeins.de , but the Mikulski/ZYX pressings mostly have poor remastering.

This looks like a temporary sale. Before JPC lowered the prices (and Amazon.de followed), those sets were more expensive than the prices on the Mosaic website.

Emphasis on the "as you normally do, intiating it yourself", because what most phishing mails do is provide a link which looks like pointing to Ebay/Amazon/your bank but in fact goes to a temporary website whose only purpose is to collect the personal data people are providing. You should be suspicious everytime an email asks you to update personal data, because that is something the real companies almost never ask.

Another important factor is that many home computers are used for games, and most games run on Windows only.

I think journalists especially like Apple because of several factors: - History: newspapers and magazines need good desktop publishing software, and that has always been a stronghold of MacIntosh computers. In the early 90's, Quark Xpress and Adobe Pagemaker (?) were only available for the Mac. Windows was not competitive in that domain. That's why all publishing companies opted for Macs, also for those journalists who only need a simple word processor. - Apple is simply sexier. It offers the complete package (hardware and software), while Microsoft only sells software. Since the first iMac in 1998, Apple has focussed heavily on design, when most Wintel PCs still looked dull. So Apple is a fashionable product, while a Windows PC is just a plain machine one prefers to hide in a corner. Same for the iPod vs other MP3 players, who may be better and cheaper but not nearly as attractive. - Apple is the underdog, while Microsoft is a quasi-monopolist. Of course everyone likes the underdog, even when one prefers to buy the cheaper Windows computer.

I already have the Rollins box, bought it at Zweitausendeins when they still had ZYX box sets. I guess the Chet CDs are ZYX remasters, as this box is a collection produced by ZYX. Fantasy does not have it in their catalog.

Not to be missed: Sonny Rollins "Freelance Years" 5CD set (25€)

Sorry, I overlooked that in your post. Fortunately, ZYX makes is very helpful in identifying their bad remasters

BTW, avoid the "20-Bit-Remastered-CDs" and get the original release. There are too many bad remasters among the 20Bit discs

Thanks Oliver! I went through the ordering process with 4 discs. At checkout, shipping to Europe was indicated at 8€, worldwide 10€. I don't know if the rate is flat.

Is it this one, Tony? http://360cycleworks.com/node/60 I like the "self-propelled" part in the description

Thanks Tjobbe, The JPC search link doesn't work unfortunately. One has to search manually for "JMT" in the label field: http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/jazz/search

In my experience the DCC CDs are the best digital versions (I have two of them), but the K2 CDs are also a markable improvement over the OJCs. Definitely worth the $13.

Only books, newspapers and magazines as well as concert, cinema and museum tickets get the reduced rate. The normal VAT rate is applicable to CDs, DVDs, video games, multimedia CD-ROMs, etc. So it's not correct to say that music is discriminated compared to all other culture/entertainment products/services. That's what the music industry wanted people to believe, to support their claims. Anyway, do you believe CDs would be cheaper with less VAT? In France they are very expensive, but the CD price differences between countries do not reflect the difference in VAT rates.

VAT is 25% in Demark and Sweden. I'm of course in favor of a reduced VAT rate for CDs, but you have to understand the point of view of finance ministers in these difficult times. Once you start reducing VAT on music CDs too, the DVD industry will claim the same treatment, and so on. Reduced VAT rates were meant as an exception for certain "essential" goods such as food and medecine. Anyway, that debate on CD VAT is over for now: http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/press/20021207.html List of all VAT rates: http://europa.eu.int/comm/taxation_customs...tes_2005_en.pdf

Thanks Alfred! I ordered the Jazztet set. It is more than twice as expensive at amazon.de

West coast jazz or classical piano music (Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn)

He has converted to SACD http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=63234