Maybe a prize for the most posts in May?

[Lance]

I was thinking, for a prize, it might be all the LP recordings of Kurt Wöss. Remember him? He appeared on Remington LPs years ago. I might even transfer them to CD for you. OR - the prize package could be ALL the LP recordings of Richard Schulze and The Telemann Society. Many of those appeared on the Vox label, are extremely rare, and have never been committed to compact disc for reasons I just will never understand. I remember a Handel Dettingen Te Deum that brought tears to my eyes. Maybe those will spark some interest in a most posts project. For our popular music friends, we could offer the entire LP colletion of Lawrence Welk (actually he's very entertaining) - give everyone a choice of one of these three possibilities. And now that Brilliant has announced a complete KARL DITTERS VON DITTERSDORF collection - over 500 CDs, since they've uncovered a huge vault with most of his music, which has never been heard, we could offer that as a very special prize, hopefully funded by our No. 1 poster, Professor Ralph Stein. That, however, will be a long time coming since Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf's repertoire is being recorded and issued at the rate of approximately two CDs per year by the Dittersdorf Society of the World. What say you great folks out in CMG Land? Other ideas?

[Corlyss_D]

OR - the prize package could be ALL the LP recordings of Richard Schulze and The Telemann Society. Many of those appeared on the Vox label, are extremely rare, and have never been committed to compact disc for reasons I just will never understand. I remember a Handel Dettingen Te Deum that brought tears to my eyes.

You won't believe this but I heard them the other day on Peter Vandegraff's program on the local NPR station. The Playford Country Dancing Master album. I bout fell off the bed.

[RebLem]

If I win, I'd like to pile all the LPs I want transferred to CD (probably about 2-300) in my car, drive to Binghamton, and have you transfer them to CD. I could go visit my niece in Buffalo, and just do the tourist thing in upstate NY, for a week while you're doing it. I'd like to visit Chatauqua, Rochester, and Cortland, among other places. I'll cover the cost of the blank CDs and the packaging and anything else you actually have to buy if you will provide the labor and make me harmless for any wear and tear on the equipment. You could keep any of the LPs you want, or even any of my LPs that I don't want copied. I'd have to make a list, I suppose.

If 2-300 is too much, name a limit.

[Ralph]

The Dittersdorf project is moving faster than Lance indicated above - advance orders have been pouring in.

[jbuck919]

I say that my seven thousandth post is coming up and my six thousandth was roundly ignored in spite of broad hints from me, the likes of which coming from Ralph did not exactly prevent us from recognizing his birthday last year. And with rare exceptions I don't post articles. Hrumpf!

[Werner]

Taking you for granted, aren't we, John?

Like, say, the foundation of a structure - just stick around - you see, you're essential!

[Lance]

I say that my seven thousandth post is coming up and my six thousandth was roundly ignored in spite of broad hints from me, the likes of which coming from Ralph did not exactly prevent us from recognizing his birthday last year. And with rare exceptions I don't post articles. Hrumpf!

Dear John:

I've belatedly made amends for this oversight. And thank you for being such a good sport about it!

[MaestroDJS]

Most posts in May? Surely we value quality over quantity. And don't call him Shirley.

I say that my seven thousandth post is coming up and my six thousandth was roundly ignored in spite of broad hints from me, the likes of which coming from Ralph did not exactly prevent us from recognizing his birthday last year. And with rare exceptions I don't post articles. Hrumpf!

Alas, my 1000th post went almost unnoticed:

http://www.classicalmusicguide.com/phpB ... 3605#93605

By coincidence, I heard that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
[snip]
blah blah blah
[snip]
PS. I wasted my 1000th post on this?

Probably just as well.

[Lance]

If I win, I'd like to pile all the LPs I want transferred to CD (probably about 2-300) in my car, drive to Binghamton, and have you transfer them to CD. I could go visit my niece in Buffalo, and just do the tourist thing in upstate NY, for a week while you're doing it. I'd like to visit Chatauqua, Rochester, and Cortland, among other places. I'll cover the cost of the blank CDs and the packaging and anything else you actually have to buy if you will provide the labor and make me harmless for any wear and tear on the equipment. You could keep any of the LPs you want, or even any of my LPs that I don't want copied. I'd have to make a list, I suppose.

If 2-300 is too much, name a limit.

Ohhh! Transferring LPs (and tracking them to CD) offers a pain where the sun don't shine. I do this, but it's in real time, and one has to stand there to put in the tracks. I get requests for this all the time and it's a huge, time-consuming job. Maybe you just better settle for the complete Lawrence Welk collection (on LP). Good? And you seem to know quite a bit about New York State! Cortland is about an hour's drive from here, as is the wonderful city of Ithaca, a personal favourite. How come you know so much about cities in New York? My curiosity is piqued!

[RebLem]

If I win, I'd like to pile all the LPs I want transferred to CD (probably about 2-300) in my car, drive to Binghamton, and have you transfer them to CD. I could go visit my niece in Buffalo, and just do the tourist thing in upstate NY, for a week while you're doing it. I'd like to visit Chatauqua, Rochester, and Cortland, among other places. I'll cover the cost of the blank CDs and the packaging and anything else you actually have to buy if you will provide the labor and make me harmless for any wear and tear on the equipment. You could keep any of the LPs you want, or even any of my LPs that I don't want copied. I'd have to make a list, I suppose.

If 2-300 is too much, name a limit.

Ohhh! Transferring LPs (and tracking them to CD) offers a pain where the sun don't shine. I do this, but it's in real time, and one has to stand there to put in the tracks. I get requests for this all the time and it's a huge, time-consuming job. Maybe you just better settle for the complete Lawrence Welk collection (on LP). Good? And you seem to know quite a bit about New York State! Cortland is about an hour's drive from here, as is the wonderful city of Ithaca, a personal favourite. How come you know so much about cities in New York? My curiosity is piqued!

No Lawrence Welk. please. We'll just have to discuss it until we find something mutually agreeable if I should win. Maybe I could pare it down to no more than 10 LPs? Would that help? #1 on my list is this LP I have which has sentimental as well as artistic value. It was selected for me by a friend, Alicia Sergheyev, a woman of great dignity and great taste, but also great poverty. She was a member of a group I belonged to for a while which met on alternate Sunday afternoons to listen to records. She felt guilty that because she was so poor, she couldn't host events, as I did, so she bought me this LP for Christmas one year which cost I think $2.50 at the time. She couldn't even afford wrapping paper, so it came wrapped in aluminum foil.

It is a record I would not have bought for myself unless I had seen an enthusiastic review of it, which I never did. Its a Vanguard Everyman Classics LP of Handel's Dixit Dominus. Eberhard Wenzel, cond., Bach Orch of Berlin, Choir of the School for Church Music, Halle, Ingeborg Reichelt, soprano, Lotte Wolf-Matthaus, alto. One of the great vocal music records of all time. It was a work I didn't even know about at the time and its not an OIP or HIP performance. But because I would never have found it on my own, because it is such a great performance, and because of its sentimental value, it is, to me, the most precious LP I own.

I don't know a lot about NY, particularly. I have only been there once, a couple of years ago for a week when my niece Jessica, who lives in Amherst and is a curator at the Amherst Museum, got married. She's the one in the family who knows about NY. Went to Tacoma, WA for her bachelor's, worked for a coule years as an archivist for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, then went to a museum curatorial program--I forget exactly what the title of her Masters degree is--at SUNY-Cooperstown. They have some kind of museum there for the students to practice at, I hear.

So, anyway, I spent a week in and around Buffalo, which looks a lot like Chicago--same kind of bungalows, and the park systems of both cities were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who had a unique design style. He also designed Central Park in NYC, of course, but for Chicago & Buffalo, and, I suppose, some other cities, he designed whole park systems, with tendrils of park-like boulevard connecting different large parks throughout the cities. In Chicago, the whole system begins with Jackson Park on the South Side, goes through the Midway Plaissance on the U of C Campus, out west on Garfield Boulevard, with small parks dotting its borders, then curving north, and finally, on the North Side, curves back east to Lincoln Park, and then back down the lakefront all the way to Jackson Park again. So, its a vast arc, a grand circle of park land, and Buffalo is laid out the same sort of way. It made me feel right at home.

Also went with family members up to Lockport and took the Erie Canal tour up there, and in fact, the wedding was in a Buffalo park. The reception was held in a banquet room in the park. Buffalo made money on us.

And why just for May? Why not make this a regular thing? But make it a little easier on yourself by making it a quarterly award instead of a monthly one, maybe? Just a thought.

Now, let me make an offer. Lance, if you will transfer just that one LP for me to CD, and return them to me (I want to keep this particular LP), quite apart from whether or not I win the prize, I am willing to offer my complete LP set on MHS of the Haydn Symphonies conducted by Ernst Maerzendorfer as an alternative prize. How about it?

[Ken]

I'm all for the idea of a 'most posts' project, and I will keenly follow along as people vie for the prize. I won't try, however, to compete for the title -- there aren't enough Borodin threads to get my yap running.

[Evelyn Laden]

Lance, I have a different suggestion: Why not award a prize to the IMGer who posts the LEAST number of posts, thereby preserving eyes, preventing mental fatigue, and possible fury (in response to political topics never offered)? Wouldn't that be a worthy cause for receiving a prize, though I can't think of an adequate suggestion for one, and in any case, am far too modest to request it. (Guess whom I have in mind as the first recipient)?

[slofstra]

Reblem,
You might consider loading those LPs onto a hard drive on a computer. From there you could go to an 'ipod', or even better - to one of those devices chalkperson has. And the copy process from the hard drive to the player device is very fast.

The problem with straight burning to CD-Rs is that they just don't last. I have a number now approaching 10 or more years old, and they all seem to go bad after a while.

Slofstra

[Chalkperson]

The problem with straight burning to CD-Rs is that they just don't last. I have a number now approaching 10 or more years old, and they all seem to go bad after a while.

Slofstra

I get around that problem by using Mobile Fidelity Gold CD's or DVD's that will last 300 years or more, in fact I often copy a cd directly on to a gold cd because that has a much greater dynamic range and improves the sound greatly...the discs are available here...


http://www.elusivedisc.com/prodinfo.asp?number=MOBCDR50

[slofstra]

None of us in the software industry ( actually a very small sample that I've talked to ) can understand why one CD player 'sounds' better than another. Or why one CD would sound better than another. A bitstream is a bitstream.

Thanks for the tip on these though. It's annoying as heck when you get to the 18th track of a burned CD and it starts to skip.

[Chalkperson]

None of us in the software industry ( actually a very small sample that I've talked to ) can understand why one CD player 'sounds' better than another. Or why one CD would sound better than another. A bitstream is a bitstream.

It's what happens to the bitstream after it leaves the disc, the D/A converter and the signal path are improved by using better components and cables, I use only pure silver interconnects and speaker cables, not copper ones, and the speaker cables are over an inch thick, which means a lot of metal, the purer the better, in fact I am in some cases using $1,000 per metre interconnects with a $500 component...your statement is true for digital signals but it all changes when it goes analog either internally or the linking between components where it is all about getting the smoothest, most accurate non-fluctuating amperage...you can even get better sounding digital files by ripping from an expensive cd player rather than a CDR burner, strange but true...

[slofstra]

The implication of the last part is that ripping goes D/A and A/D. Is that true? The first part makes sense.

[Chalkperson]

The implication of the last part is that ripping goes D/A and A/D. Is that true? The first part makes sense.

Not quite sure actually, never thouht about it, if you rip from inside the computer it must be digital. and if you connect a player it also should be digital, you would not use the analog imputs at all, why reconvert it, it depends on the source drive that is being used, the better the drive, the better the information, less jitter...

[Corlyss_D]

If I win, I'd like to pile all the LPs I want transferred to CD (probably about 2-300) in my car, drive to Binghamton, and have you transfer them to CD. I could go visit my niece in Buffalo, and just do the tourist thing in upstate NY, for a week while you're doing it. I'd like to visit Chatauqua, Rochester, and Cortland, among other places. I'll cover the cost of the blank CDs and the packaging and anything else you actually have to buy if you will provide the labor and make me harmless for any wear and tear on the equipment. You could keep any of the LPs you want, or even any of my LPs that I don't want copied. I'd have to make a list, I suppose.

If 2-300 is too much, name a limit.

Post of the Day Award to ya, Rob. Hey! CMG is not paying for all that travel . . . We're a couple of retirees on fixed incomes . . .

[RebLem]

If I win, I'd like to pile all the LPs I want transferred to CD (probably about 2-300) in my car, drive to Binghamton, and have you transfer them to CD. I could go visit my niece in Buffalo, and just do the tourist thing in upstate NY, for a week while you're doing it. I'd like to visit Chatauqua, Rochester, and Cortland, among other places. I'll cover the cost of the blank CDs and the packaging and anything else you actually have to buy if you will provide the labor and make me harmless for any wear and tear on the equipment. You could keep any of the LPs you want, or even any of my LPs that I don't want copied. I'd have to make a list, I suppose.

If 2-300 is too much, name a limit.

Post of the Day Award to ya, Rob. Hey! CMG is not paying for all that travel . . . We're a couple of retirees on fixed incomes . . .

I wasn't suggesting you pay for the travel, or even the CDs. Just the labor and the wear and tear on the machinery, nothing else. However, the revelation that CD-Rs last only about 10 yrs gives me doubts as to whether I really want to do it.

[Corlyss_D]

However, the revelation that CD-Rs last only about 10 yrs gives me doubts as to whether I really want to do it.

I thought no CDs had a life beyond 10-15 years.

[RebLem]

However, the revelation that CD-Rs last only about 10 yrs gives me doubts as to whether I really want to do it.

I thought no CDs had a life beyond 10-15 years.

From what I understand, there is still some doubt as to how long CDs will last. When I first started collecting, they were saying 50 years at the outside.

I've been collecting them now for not quite 25 years, I no longer have the first CD I bought because it was one of those things that was later reissued in a more convenient format. Actually, it was a Richard Goode piano sonata record on BOMC, later issued in a box of the complete sonatas. But I have other CDs which are 22-23 years old and still play well.

[Corlyss_D]

Weird tales from the frontlines of technology: I bought my first CD almost 10 years before I had something to play it on. I bought a laser disk - only one I have ever owned - 15 years before I had something to play it on. To this day, I have never fired it up or seen the laser disk - the title was recently reissued on DVD, so I bought it for about 1/3 of the price of the laser disk.

I'm waiting for the day when Lance goes downstairs to his studio and all the cds are sprung and everything is covered with bits and bytes like sanding dust.

[Chalkperson]

However, the revelation that CD-Rs last only about 10 yrs gives me doubts as to whether I really want to do it.

I thought no CDs had a life beyond 10-15 years.

Gold CD's will last much longer than any of us, they say 300 years...however have you thought about using DVD's instead, after all a DVD player has better sound qualities, less compression, and a good player now only costs $150 they hold 4 gigabytes as per 700mb on a cd, of course you could start investing in BluRay discs, the burners have just come out (expect them to be in Mac's next year) and they are double layer discs that will hold 50 Gigabytes...

[Lance]

[snipped] I'm waiting for the day when Lance goes downstairs to his studio and all the cds are sprung and everything is covered with bits and bytes like sanding dust.

Well, please don't even SAY or THINK such a thing! I have CDs that I bought when they first came out. I was one of those who said I would NEVER switch from LPs to CDs - until I heard, of all things, a Glenn Miller CD at a friend's house in Rochester, NY. I was immediately hooked on the clarity of sound. I stopped buying LPs (for the most part) and became a CD convert. Now, if I happened to come to my studio one day and saw all these bits and bytes like sanding dust, I would imagine it might cause a heart attack.

The ONLY CDs I have ever had problems with were the ones that were "bronzing" with age (Pearl CD issues predominantly, but there were others labels who used the same company to mass produce the CDs, labels which I cannot remember now), and then there was the RCA Caruso Edition, one of the most beautiful packages RCA ever put out. Some also had problems with the complete Rachmaninoff Edition, but my copy still plays well. In the RCA Caruso set, EVERY CD turned cancerous and could not be played at all. The back was like a cellophone that was coming off in blotches. RCA never reissued that same edition, but did come forth with a replacement edition (which I also had to purchase again) in their multi-CD white box reissue at a fraction of the price of the original CD set, which had a wonderful booklet and great documentation. I understand that it was the INK used on each CD of the first Caruso CD edition that caused the deterioration on the laser-read side. If one starts to observe this "bronzing" early on, usually the disc is still playable and thus one can make a CD copy. But this bronzing issue is/was a real bummer. For a long time, the original maker would supply a new copy (plain CD, no label), but as those recordings went out-of-print, I don't believe the offer still stood. Many of them did go out-of-print, of course.

[Corlyss_D]

[snipped] I'm waiting for the day when Lance goes downstairs to his studio and all the cds are sprung and everything is covered with bits and bytes like sanding dust.

Well, please don't even SAY or THINK such a thing!

Just pulling your beard, Herr Direktor

[Chalkperson]

The only bad discs I ever had were the Claudio Abbado Schubert Symphonies on DG must have been 18 years ago, apart from that, touch wood/vinyl I have had no other bad experiences...

[Ralph]

However, the revelation that CD-Rs last only about 10 yrs gives me doubts as to whether I really want to do it.

I thought no CDs had a life beyond 10-15 years.

*****

Wrong!