Writing at home today. Cranking a lot of tracks at extreme volume that I havent heard in a long time, on a grown-up audio system that reflects my vintage -- those stand-mounted little Celestion SL-6s I bought back in 82 still are as crisp, accurate and uncolored as they were then. Those Brits know how to make a tweeter. And how to make small boxes disappear and create a soundstage that belies their size. I retain several thousand CDs here in my home -- and a lot of vinyl. Tossed the plastic jewel boxes years ago, downloaded everything to hard drives, then slotted them in big binders along with the liner notes, shelved them and spent the next decade or more mostly listening to compressed mp3 crap like everyone else. In my car or on earbuds. Whatever. Loaded up an iTunes library, usually at oh, at least 320K. Better than 128, but crap. At some time, I stopped caring about what I wasnt hearing anymore. I embraced the convenience and forgot about the beauty of the frequencies and detail I was missing and the old rituals I loved. Today, I broke out the binders and Im listening to disks... nice, fat full bandwidth, uncompressed 44.1 kHz. Doesnt matter what Im listening to. All thats important is that its a wildly eclectic grab bag of songs that matter. To me. Yes, I have some FLAC , Lossless, etc. etc. I have 6TB of storage in my little office here. I can play uncompressed music off a hard disk, I know. I know technology. I wrote about it at Billboard in the 80s when digital was being birthed and I write about it now. I also use a lot of it, both making and listening to music, too. My live pedalboard/amp rig looks like it belongs on the International Space Station. But in the same way I sometimes want to record just by grabbing my little 1937 Martin 0-17 acoustic and put a good X/Y pair of mics in front of it it, and go direct to 2-track, no EQ, no FX -- today it just makes me shivery with happiness to handle a round piece of plastic again, slot it into a good CD player, handle liner notes on actual paper again, and then close my eyes, open my ears and my head and let this music that scored my past -- the good, the bad, the ugly, the sad and all the lovely, transcendent moments of it -- coming purring and pouring out of a powerful amp, a clean preamp and a pair of monitors that just wont quit and just wash, wash, wash over me and through me.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:48:16 +0000