I am standing at the confluence of
three streams. The river that comes from this triad of sources is a
new found love of Music.
The first having the good fortune of
cheap memory, the second is the bit torrent of FLAC recordings from
the span of 30 years of the Grateful Dead, and third is a pair of
1975 Advent loudspeakers from my second year in college.
The heart of the system is a Yamaha
Natural sound receiver that featured a “CD Direct” circuit that
allows the analog signal from my Sound Blaster audio card, to go
directly into the main amplifiers, without any colouration of “bass”
or “treble”. Only two controls still work, Power and Volume.
As a youngster, about the same time
these lads from San Francisco were making these soundboard tapes, I
was lusting for a great stereo. I dreamed of having something like my
own Jukebox, with a remote control, and stacks of great records. 45
rpm and 33 long playing. I had a reel to reel, and would record both
sides of an album so I didn't have to flip the record.
Who knew in 1975 that the Advent
Loudspeaker would still garner high praise in the audiophile world,
same for the crystal clear Yamaha amplifiers? Who knew that vinyl
would give way to CD and record flipping was in the past?
The first stream is the cheap memory. I
was at Best Buy looking at computer stuff and noticed a One-Terabyte
external drive was only $20 more than the one half it's capacity. And
I discovered bit torrent about the time when I could hear a
significant difference between taped concerts that I downloaded as
MP3 files and the world of FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) open
source files. I can hear a big difference, like an upgrade of your
speaker wire or a new pair of interconnects used to give me.
I had only filled half of my 500 Gb
drive with tons of RAW photo files, and the MP3 collection of shows
and albums. I had plenty of room.
I discovered etree.org files , which
are all FLAC, with no tolerance for MP3 lossy files. The files are
huge, a Gigabyte each. But it is worth it.
I am enjoying a May 3, 1977 show at
The Palladium in New York. It is so good. Soundboard tapes, the
“wholly” grail of Tape collectors. Now since the Dead are
systematically releasing these tapes as CDs, getting the lossless
files for free is a Big Deal,
The final touch is a Clementine front
end on my Linux box. It is more intuitive that even a Windows media
player, and it handles FLAC files.
It is a beautiful thing, dude!
