What are you listening to right now?

[pumpkinman]

Gary Moore ~ Back On The Streets

[pumpkinman]

Barclay James Harvest and other short stories

[pumpkinman]

Thematic ~ The Endless Light........youtube

[tmazz]

I spent most of Sunday hanging off of a 28 foot ladder painting the trim on my house. Luckily I had made a nice score at the crack House the day before so there was lots of new music to paint by. 

Benny Goodman: The King of Swing

Fine Tune 24k Gold CD

This CD from the Fine Tune Gold Collection presents vintage recordings from the 1940s 78 rpm era. They have been processed to as much as possible to remove surface noise and pressed on gold CDs. While this  does not represent high fidelity with respect to the sound of the original live performances, it does produce a very clean and faithful reproduction of what recordings of that era sounded like. That like of hollow bandwidth limited sound is part of the magic of the big band recordings of those days and this series is a very good representation of that sound.

I guess if high end audio had existed in the 1940s this is what it would have sounded like.

I worked in a commercial  (not school) radio station back in my college days and our afternoon drive time show was hosted by a  gentleman by the name of Bob Logan, who played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the 40s. He did a Big Band show and sourced all of his music from original 78s. So I have a soft spot for vintage swing music and have enjoyed finding and listening to the CDs from this series.

[tmazz]

George Shearing: Favorite Things

Telarc CD

[tmazz]

Best Of Burt Bacharach - 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection

  A&M CD

[tmazz]

Michael Feinstein: Michael & George (Feinstein Sings Gershwin)

  Concord CD

[tmazz]

And once the painting was done for the day it was time to sit down for some serious listening......

Ravel Orchestrations- Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, etc. - Oje/Minnesota Orchestra

  Reference Recordings HDCD

After hearing some of the other things that Oje had done for Reference Recordings (Mephisto & Co. etc) I had very high hopes for this disc. Engineered by Keith Johnson it had the SQ that we have come to expect from Reference Recordings, but Oje reading of Pictures just didn't do it for me. It did not have the drive and power of the Reiner, nor the finesse or delicacy of the Ansermet. Not a bad reading by any stretch of the imagination, but just not a top of the pile performance. Then again with Reiner and Ansermet as the benchmarks, the bar is set pretty high on this one.

[tmazz]

Stravinsky: The Firebird--Ansermet/L'Orchestra de la Suisse Romande

London Mono LP (English Pressing)

Now this is more like it. I found this MINT copy for 69 cents at the Crack House last Sat. The cover was VG/VG- but the vinyl looks like it had never seen a turntable. Brought it home, put it through the VPI machine and dropped it on the TT. Wow, was I totally bummed. While the vinyl looked mint it had  more snaps, crackles and pops than a box of Rice Krispies. 

With nothing to lose at this point I figured I would head back down to the basement (where else would any self respecting vampire keep his records?... especially in the daylight hours   ) and give is a rigorous scrubbing on the VPI. Washed it , dried it, popped it on the TT and Bingo, 95% of the surface noise was gone. Maybe some steam might get that last 5%........ 

Anyway, Tom is now a happy vampire. 

Great performance, nice SQ, pretty much no surface noise, all for less than the price of a Hershey Bar. It doesn't get any better than that. 

[tmazz]

Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail Rock 'n' Roll

   MCA CD


The soundtrack to a 1987 documentary film that chronicles two 1986 concerts at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis celebrating rock and roll musician Chuck Berry's 60th birthday. Guest artists performing with Berry included Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Etta James, Julian Lennon, and Linda Ronstadt.

[tmazz]

U2: The Joshua Tree

  Island CD

[tmazz]

GLENN MILLER, Fine Tune The Gold Collection

  Fine Tune 24k Gold CD

[Triode Pete]

Proprius German-pressing Double LP - Fantastic Sound Quality (5 stars!)

[tmazz]

OK, I can go there too.....

Jazz at the Pawnshop 2

Proprius LP - Swedish Pressing

[pumpkinman]