Long-time readers of this blog know that I am serious about Spaceman Effects. Today was an important day for the space cadets among us. An analog tremolo! And yes, “V’GER” is a Star Trek joke, for which I’m deeply sorry.
More good news:
The Denon DCD-1420 I bought a few years ago couldn’t play CD-Rs. However, it would appear that the super-trick Sony ES SACD player I bought to replace it can play them. Which allowed me to unlimber my old copy of k.d. lang’s Ingenue for an afternoon housecleaning session. If you haven’t ever listened to Ingenue, I recommend you do so at your earliest opportunity. In the broad pantheon of Canadian-lesbian-singing-original-lounge-music, it significantly outpaces Diana Krall’s The Girl In The Other Room.
Yes, I know Diana’s married to Elvis Costello.
Yes, I know she gave birth to twins.
No, I’m not convinced. If Ms. Krall wants me to stop alleging that she is a lesbian, she’s going to have to prove it to me in person.
Anyway, I’ll get you started with Miss lang (the lowercase is a deliberate affectation):
Even more good news, at least for TTAC readers: Derek’s going to have an announcement to make in the near future that will make many of you very happy. Trust me on this, okay?
k.d. lang is an awesome talent and Ingenue was one of her finest. I’ve owned it since its release and bought it on the strength of her previous effort: Shadowland that she did with Patsy Cline’s producer Owen Bradley.
I’m not much on C&W but I do appreciate craft and musicianship. And for those reasons Shadowland is worth a listen.
As for pedals, I’ve never recovered from hearing a friend play Max Webster on a Yamaha B210 through the incomparable Electroharmonix Super Big Muff in my teenage bedroom circa 1979. Roman Rak where are you now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muff
great memories of Big Muff Pi from my teenage years as well. what a great pun. made me laugh every time I stomped on one. Big Muff where are you now? the girls nowadays all shave
here’s some more Max:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRJvVBG3DzU
gotta love the MOOG swoops at the end, and the guitar-extravaganza soloing
“The Denon DCD-1420 I bought a few years ago couldn’t play CD-Rs. ”
it might not be solely because the discs are CD-Rs, but the fact that they’re 80-minute discs. A lot of older players have trouble with the slightly tighter track pitch of an 80 minute disc, and if they actually start playing at all they’ll inevitably have trouble seeking to other tracks. 74-minute (“music”) CD-Rs usually worked fine, but buying those comes with the privilege of paying extra to keep the RIAA happy.
(/me used to work for Alpine. this was a common problem with a lot of pre-2000 CD mechanisms.)
that is good to know! I was unaware, thanks for the tip!!
For instance, the Bose (via Clarion) system in my ’00 Infiniti, which definitely preferred the old 74-minute discs, though I have to admit it played my one Overly Crammed disc (79:58) without difficulty.
I never considered that. Eighty minutes isn’t part of the original Red Book right?
It’s not in the original specification, no. The IEC 60908 update in 1999 supposedly included the longer playing time, but I am loath to shell out $372 for a copy of the full standard.
Bear Family has a single-CD compilation of tobacco-related tunes that runs, they say, 87:34.
https://www.bear-family.com/various-smoke-that-cigarette-pleasure-to-burn.html
not the original standard, no. The way it was explained to me is that old mechanisms had a fixed rate for the speeds of the hub motor and the motor driving the laser/pickup head. CDs read at constant-linear-velocity (CLV) which means the rotational speed of the disc continually slows down as the pickup moves outward. having a fixed operating speed works fine when every disc out there can be assumed to conform to the original Red Book standard, but anything different causes stuff to shit the bed. Tighten up the track pitch slightly to get an extra 6 minutes of audio, and those old mechanisms go off the farm. worse is that the track offsets listed in the disc’s table-of-contents (TOC) aren’t physically where the mechanism expects them to be, so if you try to seek up or down to a different track, the mech will fruitlessly try to lock on to that offset, sit there re-seeking and re-trying either forever or until it gives up and spits out an error.
roughly by 2002/2003 most new players were able to cope with higher-capacity discs.