Category: Beatles

Groovy Beatles

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/Beatles/BeatlesVinyl.flv 512 285]

Today’s second official Beatles announcement!

Beginning November 19 and continuing into December, high-end audio retailers in several U.S. cities will host listening events for The Beatles’ stereo vinyl remasters. Each retailer will present the new Beatles vinyl on completely hand-made British hifi systems, with demonstrations of audible improvements in the new vinyl on a variety of turntables and associated equipment. A guest speaker will also accompany the events. Confirmed locations include:

San Francisco: 7pm, Monday, Nov. 19 AUDIO VISION SF (1603 Pine St., San Francisco, CA 94109)
Los Angeles: 5pm, Tuesday, Nov. 20 AHEAD STEREO (7428 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036)
Atlanta: 7pm, Monday, Nov. 26 AUDIO ALTERNATIVE (895 Indian Trail Rd., Ste. 15, Lilburn, GA 30047)
Dallas: 6pm, Tuesday, Nov. 27 AUDIO CONCEPTS (11661 Preston Rd., Ste. 280, Dallas, TX 75230)
Austin: 7pm, Wednesday, Nov. 28 WHETSTONE AUDIO (2401 East 6th St., #1001, Austin, TX 78702)
Chicago: 6pm, Monday, Dec. 3 PRO MUSICA (2236 North Clark St., Chicago, IL 60614)
Boston: 6pm, Tuesday, Dec. 4 GOODWIN’S HIGH END (899 Main St., Waltham, MA 02451)
New York: 7pm, Wednesday, Dec. 5 IN LIVING STEREO (2 Great Jones St., New York, NY 10012)
Philadelphia: 7pm, Thursday, Dec. 6 COMMUNITY AUDIO (8020 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19118)
Washington, DC: 6pm, Friday, Dec. 7 IQ HOME ENTERTAINMENT (10890 Fairfax Blvd., Fairfax, VA 22030)

I will not be buying the new vinyl pressings of the Beatles’ catalog, but I may attend the presentation at Goodwin’s in Waltham, outside of Boston. Although the stereo USB Apple is my ultimate dream format, it will be interesting to see if this new box set undercuts the going rate on eBay for the 1982 Beatles LP box set from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab. I have several of the individual MFSL titles, and they suffer from an annoying 60 Hz hum that sounds like it came from a grounding problem in the Ortofon cutting head. This is the only flaw in an otherwise sterling presentation. The 24-bit FLAC copies are, of course, completely free of hum, hiss, snap, crackle, or pop of any sort that isn’t on the original recordings. The splices in She Loves You have always bugged me, for example, and I’m not fond of the fake stereo used in I Am the Walrus.

The Beatles Live! Project

http://youtu.be/K1V51dgZe-8

(That suspenseful music sounds more like Batman than Beatles!)

Official Beatles announcement:

The first stage of the development of THE BEATLES LIVE! PROJECT, an Apple authorised project, has begun!

Digging deep into the world’s TV and radio archives and fans’ basements and attics, the hunt is on for never-before-seen media captured during The Beatles’ concert tours dating back to October of 1963—when the name Beatlemania was coined—and continuing through The Beatles’ final concert in Candlestick Park (August 29, 1966). The project has commissioned global research teams and developed social media tools to collaborate with the public, concert goers, and students—in every location where The Beatles performed!

The ultimate goal: to combine footage, images, music interviews, and stories in a definitive, emotional and visceral feature film about Beatlemania.

This cultural phenomenon not only brought the world together through song, but helped usher in what is now recognized as a golden age of contemporary music.

Production company OVOW Productions Inc. has assembled a global team of archivists, collectors, information specialists, artists, social media strategists, amateur media groups, Beatles fan clubs, writers, academics, and film restoration experts to support the activities in the field. The research will be active through December of 2012.

The Footage Exploration Challenge
Were you there? Were your parents there? Your grandparents? Now, fans from all over the world can become a true part of Beatles history by contributing their original footage, photos, or audio recordings of The Beatles in concert.

Visit http://www.TheBeatlesLiveProject.com/ to upload your media and stories, and to learn more about the project.

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!