Category: Beatles

Yes It Is Something

I am annoyed that Logitech has discontinued its superb Squeezebox Touch music player. I’d be even more annoyed if I didn’t own one. Playing on the Touch right now is, for me, the ultimate expression of audio technology as it presently exists — The complete Beatles on an Apple USB flash drive. The customer reviews on Amazon are all over the place, and I am very pleased to say you can ignore all of them that aren’t five stars. (No, I didn’t have a problem with the stem, as others have reported. The drive is secured magnetically, and maybe that’s given some people trouble.)

This thing is worth every penny, and maybe I’m just giddy because I applied all of my Amex Rewards Points to the purchase and got it for only $18, as a birthday present to myself, but the sound quality is what it is, and it’s absolutely outstanding. I’ve never been carried away with the sound of most — and I mean 75% or more — Compact Discs. I have never thought that digital audio was the problem, but that 16 bits aren’t enough. The dynamic range of CD is great, but so is the contrast ratio between solid white and solid black. The fine shades of gray — the nuances — often seem to be missing. Cymbals, for example, lack the shimmer they should have. Acoustic guitars don’t quite convey the feeling of the strings vibrating. Etc.

Despite my advancing age, my ears still seem to be good up to 12 kHz, maybe even 14 kHz, and listening to the Beatles this way is really something. With CD’s, when music gets loud, with a lot of instruments and vocals, I think everything sort of collapses into a flat-sounding mess, and I lose interest. The Beatles collection, copied from the original 24-bit digital masters, and compressed in the lossless FLAC format, doesn’t do that. Every little thing can be discerned distinctly and easily.

For sure, this is a specialty item for the very few with a lot of interest and the right setup, but at last there’s something better for listening to the Fab Four than the Mobile Fidelity LP’s from 30 years ago (I have a few titles, but not the box set). Enough talk. I’m going back to listening!

Outsourcing

I haven’t been feeling the blogging bug lately. Too much else going on, my mind on other things, etc. Some of the material I was going to post has been donated to better homes — favorite sites that are devoted to single subjects.

Rob Steibel runs the excellent Kirby Dynamics blog for the Jack Kirby Museum. I sent Rob scans from two magazines with articles about Stan Lee that were published ten years apart — Castle of Frankenstein (1968), and Circus (1978).

I am a devoted follower of the tipper-topper mostest bestest Beatles photo blogger, The Gilly on Tumblr. A long time ago I said I would post Ringo’s Photo Album from 1964, but after scanning the magazine I decided that The Gilly would do a superior job of presenting it, and I was right. The scans are at this link.

Ethan Russell’s words about photos

Has it already been a week since I last posted something? Yikes! Gotta get back in the groove.

The first time I saw photographer Ethan Russell’s name was in 1970, on the back of the Let It Be album. The next time I noticed Russell’s name was in 1971, on the back cover of Who’s Next. A few years later Russell took the photo for the only album I was ever tempted to buy solely for its cover.

What should I do, put out an ugly picture? People look at it and they go “Uuugh.” It’s incidental, you know what I mean. It’s nice to have pretty pictures. It’s part of the frosting on the cake for the audience.
– Linda Ronstadt, Rolling Stone, October 19, 1978, issue no. 276, page 52.

Here’s an interview with Ethan Russell, who has a new e-book. This one I’ll have to look at on the Kindle viewer for Windows, because my Kindle Keyboard’s E-ink screen isn’t very good at displaying photos.