Yeah, it's been shared, but it's a cool story. But fat lot of good it's going to do if they're all stacked flat like that, getting mildewed covers etc. I want him to invest at least a little in some climate controlled space!
He's working on a controlled environment but the worst thing is he doesn't even own a turntable.
Yeah, it's been shared, but it's a cool story. But fat lot of good it's going to do if they're all stacked flat like that, getting mildewed covers etc. I want him to invest at least a little in some climate controlled space!
Cool stuff. I'm guessing the price is untouchable tho.
Not really. I think we get around $250 to $300 for a frame. That's a pretty middle of the road price for a quality frame these days.
I will admit that if I didn't work there I couldn't afford my own glasses. I've owned cars that cost less then some of my glasses and not that long ago ...
By now most of y'all know I'm an optician among other things. It was a quiet morning at the shop this past Saturday and I was poking around the frames and stumbled onto a frame line we have had for a pretty long while. I knew we had some frames that someone was using old vinyl LP's for the material and thought OK, they'll try anything and never gave it another thought. We literally have several thousand frames of all kinds and sorts including some solid wood ones. So I'm used to working with the unusual. I don't know why, but I saw a frame where the temples had a slice of the label visible on both of them. I saw Gypsy ~ Fleetwood Mac as one of the visible songs on the temple and the other temple had the WB logo from the top of the LP.
So I really took a hard look at them. They're actually very cool and well made. I went to Google them and looked them up and was happily surprised to see what they are up to. It seems that they also come to Cleveland often as we are a good source for the records they use. We are one of a few dealers in the country that carry their line and thought that I should pass this info along to share with those who really care about music and might want to take their interest to a higher level. They do custom work as you will find poking through their website.
So welcome to Spex Wax. Take a look. They're pretty cool and very well made.
Cool stuff. I'm guessing the price is untouchable tho.
By now most of y'all know I'm an optician among other things. It was a quiet morning at the shop this past Saturday and I was poking around the frames and stumbled onto a frame line we have had for a pretty long while. I knew we had some frames that someone was using old vinyl LP's for the material and thought OK, they'll try anything and never gave it another thought. We literally have several thousand frames of all kinds and sorts including some solid wood ones. So I'm used to working with the unusual. I don't know why, but I saw a frame where the temples had a slice of the label visible on both of them. I saw Gypsy ~ Fleetwood Mac as one of the visible songs on the temple and the other temple had the WB logo from the top of the LP.
So I really took a hard look at them. They're actually very cool and well made. I went to Google them and looked them up and was happily surprised to see what they are up to. It seems that they also come to Cleveland often as we are a good source for the records they use. We are one of a few dealers in the country that carry their line and thought that I should pass this info along to share with those who really care about music and might want to take their interest to a higher level. They do custom work as you will find poking through their website.
So welcome to Spex Wax. Take a look. They're pretty cool and very well made.
Thanks Kurt. Have a great Thanksgiving. I had fish and chips. That's close enough, right?
There ya go ! A hearty meal is always good.
Let me know how I did with the LAL tracks. I listened to my version of Baba against their own remaster from the 1995 CD and I think I did a decent job, considering my source and equipment vs theirs. That and there is a nasty scratch across the entire side one of WN of which Baba is the first song. Looks like a safety pin was dragged across it. It took me a whole day just to clean it up to get started on the finished product. 10 years of practice working with CD's has paid off.
Not everybody doing commercial remasters these days gets it right. The Who library is pretty damn good. Botnick's work on the Door's catalogue is primo. But whoever is doing Clapton's and Cream's is pathetic for example. Those shitty jobs are what led me to keep going.
By request I have some remastered Who songs for your downloading and listening pleasure. Two tracks from the Live At Leeds CD Magic Bus, Amazing Journey / Sparks , two vinyl rips, Underture from the first press of Tommy and Baba O'Riley from the first press of Who's Next and I Can See For Miles from the Kids Are Alright CD IIRC, which after trying for about 10 years finally got to where I'm really happy with it. I tossed in The Music Must Change from the Who Are You CD which is nice and two tracks from the old Tommy CD I did nearly 10 years ago that are so so, Pinball Wizard and The Acid Queen which I'll get around to redoing in the future. CD's are in all caps and vinyl is upper and lower case, that's how I keep track of them. 16 bit 41k and 48k wav files (the vinyl) and everything I will do in the future.
But anyway, enjoy. I'll leave them up through the remainder of the week.
By request I have some remastered Who songs for your downloading and listening pleasure. Two tracks from the Live At Leeds CD Magic Bus, Amazing Journey / Sparks , two vinyl rips, Underture from the first press of Tommy and Baba O'Riley from the first press of Who's Next and I Can See For Miles from the Kids Are Alright CD IIRC, which after trying for about 10 years finally got to where I'm really happy with it. I tossed in The Music Must Change from the Who Are You CD which is nice and two tracks from the old Tommy CD I did nearly 10 years ago that are so so, Pinball Wizard and The Acid Queen which I'll get around to redoing in the future. CD's are in all caps and vinyl is upper and lower case, that's how I keep track of them. 16 bit 41k and 48k wav files (the vinyl) and everything I will do in the future.
But anyway, enjoy. I'll leave them up through the remainder of the week.
By request I have some remastered Who songs for your downloading and listening pleasure. Two tracks from the Live At Leeds CD Magic Bus, Amazing Journey / Sparks , two vinyl rips, Underture from the first press of Tommy and Baba O'Riley from the first press of Who's Next and I Can See For Miles from the Kids Are Alright CD IIRC, which after trying for about 10 years finally got to where I'm really happy with it. I tossed in The Music Must Change from the Who Are You CD which is nice and two tracks from the old Tommy CD I did nearly 10 years ago that are so so, Pinball Wizard and The Acid Queen which I'll get around to redoing in the future. CD's are in all caps and vinyl is upper and lower case, that's how I keep track of them. 16 bit 41k and 48k wav files (the vinyl) and everything I will do in the future.
But anyway, enjoy. I'll leave them up through the remainder of the week.
As I'm trying to keep from going off the rails, here's a post I put up over in a thread at discogs about which is better a 45 or 33 piece of vinyl. It killed some time and actually seems to make some sense. But its my story and I'm sticking to it. Someone mentioned Todd Rundgren and about how no one should attempt to put an hour on vinyl and its kinda a reply to that.
... What seems to be forgotten is that we only get what the engineers give us. A 45 on paper is supposed to sound better than a 33. But in the end it all depends on the master used and the quality of the vinyl itself. A mono release on something recorded on 4 tracks is a mixdown and an engineer's interpretation of what it should sound like.
Just 3 days ago, I pulled out Initiation and ripped it for archive. Haven't played it since it was new, ripping it to cassette and putting it away per the instructions. Long ago, I did buy the CD and Treatise has been a regular listen, 5 or 6 times a year. Even with all the restrictions on vinyl technology when it was made, the vinyl is still light years better than the CD. The dynamic range is much better revealing more detail. But my 16 bit 48khz wav recording is going to sound like exactly like the vinyl played. Its not going to change sound because its now a digital file.
All vinyl is different, too. A couple of months ago, I ripped a MFSL copy of Abbey Road. Now I'm ripping the 1973 GB 3rd pressing. I was impressed by the MFSL, but this copy is sounding pretty damn good, maybe better, I'll do and A/B shortly just to find out which one I want to keep for light remastering and listening.
I've got 4 vinyl copies of Dark Side, the MFSL, the GB quad, a US early if not original pressing and another I've picked up along the way. that and about 4 versions of CD at least. But regarding the vinyl, the quad mix is distinctively different and my favorite. I wholly expect the MFSL to sound different and then the other pressings to sound different. They all come from the same source, all vinyl from the peak of vinyl in its day.
Your linear contact stylus is going to sound different from my shibata. There are so many variables, but its not just because something is digital and something is not or how fast it spins. About the only thing left to say is that I can put my vinyl rip on a CD and play the vinyl and then the CD burned rip through the same system and expect to hear no difference.
Not all engineers, lathe cutters and operators are created equally. Until we have heard better, there is no way of knowing what we're missing from what a certain engineer decided to give us.
cheers. ps. an after thought. One of the beauties of a nice vinyl rip is that you can play it as loud as you want and you won't get any feedback through the turntable.
So for a limited time, here's some of my favorite songs, several of which I have tried many times over the past 10 years to get to acceptable, using them as my baseline songs for trying out different approaches for remastering. FM Future Games is one and The Band Chest Fever is one of the others. Also included is J Beck's Freeway Jam, The two Thunderclap Newman tracks worth listening to, Something In The Air and Accidents and for a really good jam, Uriah Heap Salisbury. All from vinyl. Thrown in for good measure is Mountain's epic live version of Nantucket Sleighride from the Twin Peaks album that started out as an mp3 and was remastered in wav. At 33 minutes the wav was too big to upload so a nice 320k mp3 is up instead.
All these years of doing these remasters has been in an effort to get digital stuff to sound like its vinyl counterpart. Now that I'm fully back into vinyl, the vinyl is so good, that there is not that much to do with the songs other than to clean them up and do a couple of extra things to get them pretty. They are now not as loud and no longer blown out from pushing them too hard.
Hope you like them as much as I do. y'all. CLICKY HERE
bump for last call. Gone tomorrow night.
From the looks of things Freeway Jam is everyone's favorite with Future Games coming in second.
Thanks, Kurt. It's very cool. I always liked "Something In The Air" - I think I still have that single somewhere.
Going back to the raw rips, they now sound like the stereo was playing under your feet in the basement. Then you went in the basement.
Thanks. I know this is all subjective as all get out. But its how I am passing time and spending the winter years of my retirement. The same piece of vinyl will sound different on another turntable with a different cartridge. CD's eliminated that variable. Funny, I have an Audio Technica cartridge that was designed to sound digital. Why, I ask ? Its a DR500LC that I got 20 or more years ago over at their headquarters showroom in Stow, Ohio which is only about 20 minutes from where I live. It now sits idle. The cart you're listening to is an AT15SS which was their 2nd to the top moving magnet cart at the time.
I absolutely love the sound from a shibata type stylus. It is designed to go deeper into the groove than any other stylus tip and plays where no one has gone before. Its the foundation of my equipment. It more determines how an LP will sound than any other part of the food chain.
There is software available to mix and master, besides dealing with clicks and pops. My goal in doing so has always been to make it sound more 'analogue' not less though.
If your listening to the two tracks in the folder I just put up which are just the raw rips, try out the final remastered versions of the rips that I used software on to get there. The stuff I use does not have a single button that does all the work however. On average there are about 8 separate steps involved with about an hour or more for a 3 minute song involved.
Here's the remasters. Let me know if I've done the rips justice or not. They are all vinyl except the Mountain track which was originally a crappy old mp3 from the original Napster days.
Listening to it now. Job well done!
Going back to the raw rips, they now sound like the stereo was playing under your feet in the basement. Then you went in the basement.
I'm just guessing but isn't there software available to allow the removal of what makes it sound like vinyl? Besides the clicks and pops, i mean. Edit: Thanks for the listen, btw. I'm on Thunderclap's 2nd tune. I love it.
There is software available to mix and master, besides dealing with clicks and pops. My goal in doing so has always been to make it sound more 'analogue' not less though.
If your listening to the two tracks in the folder I just put up which are just the raw rips, try out the final remastered versions of the rips that I used software on to get there. The stuff I use does not have a single button that does all the work however. On average there are about 8 separate steps involved using 3 separate software programs with about an hour or more for a 3 minute song involved.
Here's the remasters. Let me know if I've done the rips justice or not. They are all vinyl except the Mountain track which was originally a crappy old mp3 from the original Napster days.
I want him to invest at least a little in some climate controlled space!
y'all !
