DAILYSESSION

By OurVinyl.com

[Preface: There is no argument for an objective superior. Steaks, hamburger and sloppy joes are all great. But to not know what you’re eating is only letting yourself down ….]

Any avid music fan has probably had the argument with a friend (or foe) about what the best way is, in terms of format, to listen to music. Since Napster shattered the customs of the music world in the late 90’s mp3s have become synonymous with contemporary music. The iPod has since come along and informed us we no longer needed shelves for our music collection, just a pocket. These developments are currently pushing the CD format closer and closer to its inevitable extinction. Yet ironically, as the CD slowly dies, vinyl records are storming back into popularity. So it appears that while the MP3 has unquestionably made music more portable and “share-able” (it is truly awesome to be able to bring your entire music collection on a plane ride!), it doesn’t seem to have what it takes to wipe out other formats completely.

So lets take a look at the science behind music formats and how we hear in general. An educated listener is a better listener indeed, and you may be surprised by what you didn’t know. We must start by examining sound in general.

All right, lets get some simple things straight about the way sound works for us humans and our brains. In general the human ear picks up frequencies between 20 hertz (Hz) and 20,000 Hz; hertz meaning the number of vibrations per second (“sound” is simply our brains perceiving minuscule air pressure changes, or vibrations). Yet the truth is most adults are only capable of hearing up to around 16k Hz (a little higher for females, you lucky ladies) because we lose the ability to perceive higher frequencies as we age. Sounds do indeed exist below 20 Hz (think of when you feel deep bass without actually hearing it) and upwards well beyond 20K Hz (think of a dog whistle, we don’t hear it but the pups sure do). So while we can pick up the most important swath of the sound-spectrum, there does exists a great deal of sonic information we just never hear because of the limits of our ears & brain. [Note: this phenomena also exists with our eyes, we only see a tiny portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which we call light & color]

So why care about these sounds our brains’ cannot even perceive, what the heck does that have to do with musical formats and listening to your tunes? Again, we have to look at some science basics (bear with me!). Sound is mathematical. Lets say you play an A major chord on an instrument. The fundamental frequency of an A major is 440 Hz, so that will be the most present frequency we hear, yet it will not be the only. Here is the math; that A note will also create and sound out its harmonics (or “overtones”), which are always multiples of itself. This means that 440 Hz A note will create another “harmonic” at 880 Hz (440 x 2), another at 1320 Hz (440 x 3), and another one at 1760 Hz (440 x 4) and it goes on and on. Harmonics are a large part of what make notes played by instruments interesting to our ears. Because different instruments (or vocal chords for that matter) will inherently create different harmonic relations to the fundamental frequency, this is in turn the reason why there exists a difference in sound from instrument to instrument, even when they play the same mathematically identical musical note. This difference is referred to as an instrument’s “timbre”. Think of a computer created “true tone”, one with no harmonics; it’s a shrill and sterile sound. So, consider this question; if the chords and notes that make up our music all create harmonics that are out of our hearing range, do those sounds have any affect upon what we do hear? Hold onto that thought, however, we can now begin our discussion upon music formats. [Read More]

By DiscoMusic.com

Tips to keep vinyl records clean. Directions for deep cleaning records by hand or with a vacuum record cleaning machine. A shopping list of supplies and Q & A section with answers to your record care questions is included.

Good sound starts with a clean and static-free vinyl record. Whether you are a casual listener or a fanatical audiophile and vinyl record collector, many of us here at DiscoMusic.com have accumulated thousands of vinyl records over the years. In an effort to digitally preserve your priceless records you may have considered transferring and restoring your vinyl record collection to CD by using your computer and some audio recording / editing software. Before you do, remember that in order to extract the best sound from your discs it’s important to start with scrupulously clean records and equipment including your stylus.

Cleaning Vinyl Records by Hand or with a Machine?

Vinyl discs that are kept clean and free of dirt, dust and oils from one’s fingers will sound much clearer and more importantly last longer. Since clean records have less clicks, crackle and pop you’ll have less work when it comes to the restoration phase and attain much better results. The great thing about cleaning your records is that it doesn’t take a lot of equipment, but there are choices. Let’s discuss some proven ways of cleaning records either with a record cleaning machine or by hand with brushes and ready-made record cleaning solutions. We will start with the preferred way and work our way down. [Read More]

by David Byrne – The Guardian

I’m writing this in Venice, Italy. This city is a pleasantly confusing maze, once an island of fortresses, and now a city of tourists, culture (biennales galore) and crumbling relics. Venice used to be the most powerful city in Europe – a military, mercantile and cultural leader. Sort of like New York.

Venice is now a case study in the complete transformation of a city (there’s public transportation, but no cars). Is it a living city? Is it a fossil? The mayor of Venice recently wrote a letter to the New York Review of Books, arguing that his city is, indeed, a place to live, not simply a theme park for tourists (he would like very much if the big cruise ships steered clear). I guess it’s a living place if you count tourism as an industry, which I suppose it is. New York has its share of tourists, too. I wave to the doubledecker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction?

New York was recently voted the world’s favorite city – but when you break down the survey’s results, the city comes in at No 1 for business and only No 5 for living. Fifth place isn’t completely embarrassing, but what are the criteria? What is it that attracts people to this or any city? Forget the business part. I’ve been in Hong Kong, and unless one already has the means to live luxuriously, business hubs aren’t necessarily good places for living. Cities may have mercantile exchange as one of their reasons for being, but once people are lured to a place for work, they need more than offices, gyms and strip clubs to really live.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration. Sometimes, that possibility of serendipitous encounters – and I don’t mean in the meat market – is the principal lure. If one were to vote based on criteria like comfort or economic security, then one wonders why anyone would ever vote for New York at all over Copenhagen, Stockholm or some other less antagonistic city that offers practical amenities like affordable healthcare, free universities, free museums, common spaces and, yes, bike lanes. But why can’t one have both – the invigorating energy and the civic, intelligent humanism?

Maybe those Scandinavian cities do, in fact, have both, but New York has something else to offer, thanks to successive waves of immigrants that have shaped the city. Arriving from overseas, one is immediately struck by the multi-ethnic makeup of New York. Other cities might be cleaner, more efficient or comfortable, but New York is funky, in the original sense of the word – New York smells like sex.

Immigrants to New York have contributed to the city’s vibrancy decade after decade. In some cities around the world, immigrants are relegated to being a worker class, or a guest-worker class; they’re not invited to the civic table. New York has generally been more welcoming, though people of color have never been invited to the table to the same extent as European immigrants.

I moved to New York in the mid 1970s because it was a center of cultural ferment – especially in the visual arts (my dream trajectory, until I made a detour), though there was a musical draw, too, even before the downtown scene exploded. New York was legendary. It was where things happened, on the east coast, anyway. One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune. Survival, at that time, and at my age then, was enough. Hardship was the price one paid for being in the thick of it.

As one gets a little older, those hardships aren’t so romantic – they’re just hard. The trade-off begins to look like a real pain in the ass if one has been here for years and years and is barely eking out a living. The idea of making an ongoing creative life – whether as a writer, an artist, a filmmaker or a musician – is difficult unless one gets a foothold on the ladder, as I was lucky enough to do. I say “lucky” because I have no illusions that talent is enough; there are plenty of talented folks out there who never get the break they deserve. [Read More]

by Michaelangelo Matos – NPR Music

On Friday, a documentary ostensibly about the rise and fall of a one time club king named Peter Gatien opened in New York (it opens around the country next month). In the early to mid-1990s – the height of rave culture in the U.S. – Gatien owned the biggest clubs in New York City, including Limelight, which lived in a deconsecrated Episcopal Church in the Chelsea neighborhood. Today Gatien lives in Toronto, where he was deported in 2003 after pleading guilty to tax evasion. And Limelight has . It calls itself a “Festival of Shops.”

Much of the story told in Limelight will be familiar to readers of , a book chronicling mid-’90s nightlife written by Frank Owen, who covered Limelight at its height and followed its scandalous end in the pages of local alternative weekly the Village Voice. It certainly was to the documentary’s director, Billy Corben, who read the book as he was pursuing another documentary about the man who ran the biggest club in Miami in the mid-’90s. Owen appears frequently as a kind of expert witness in Limelight.

“I had read Clubland because of our interest in Chris Paciello and Liquid in South Beach, and the Miami angle,” says Corben, best known for 2006’s Cocaine Cowboys. Corben and producing partner Albert Spellman still intend to make a movie about Paciello. But first, they’ve made Limelight, which focuses on Gatien, the eye-patched Canadian nightclub impresario who owned Limelight, Palladium, Tunnel and Club U.S.A., who was brought to trial by the City of New York under mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s mid-’90s crime crackdown, alleging that Gatien was overseeing a massive drug ring in his clubs. [Read More]