I now get lots of emails most of which I am not going to share with you [You can thank me later.]…

One email talked about their being 2700 exhibits this year… No. Wait. that is 2700 exhibitors. OK, at an average of, say, 5 exhibitors per exhibit? Is that a good number? … we get 540 exhibits. I expect about 160 - 180 high-end audio rooms [about 60 of which are at T.H.E. Show] so high-end audio is a third of the show [ and T.H.E. Show a 3rd of the high-end audio portion]? Maybe so - looking at how much time it takes me to photograph everything.

Hmmmm… WARNING - there was a lot of Wile Eyed Guessing in that last paragraph

Unfortunately, no ’sonic spoiler’ as everything is packed up or plundered to take to CES 2008 to set up our two exhibits. Doh! But we are taking this so we can all hear it at the show.

We heard the downloadable at RMAF 2007 - a 128K MP3 [thanks Steve!] It was pretty good, musically, but sonically - it was OK for one song, as we were interested in whether their style had changed much - but as one heard the whole MP3 album the muffleling and lack of harmonics and dynamics and … etc… got to be a little wearing.

We ordered in December 10th, which was the first day it came out. Didn’t QUITE get here for Christmas, but close enough.

It has two CDs and two LPs. The LPs run at 45 rpm.

We wish everybody a healthy and prosperous and musically fulfilling new year. May you all find great new music and some great equipment to play it on.

This is our Happy Little Fake Fiber Optic with LED holiday tree this year. With so many live trees outside, and having to dump it so soon after Christmas to go to CES, it didn’t seem right to cut down one this year.

It was fun hunting for things to put under the tree. For the record:

Audio Note SOOTTO interconnects
Nordost ODIN interconnects
A top to the EDGE NL Reference ‘pyramid’ amps we had laying around from when ours were made
Mel Torme ‘Swinging on the Moon’
A Ginger Bread house ornament
A Chocolate Santa Claus
Audio Aero Prestige remote control
A quad of EL84 tubes
Phonic PAA3 frequency analyzer
Radiohead 2plus2isfive
TiVo wireless ethernet device
HRS Nimbus Couplers

OK, I am not in the mood to be packing and this is the way I waste my time

Runner ups are below…

This post was supposed to show how the grooves techno LPs look different than, say, jazz or classical LPs.

Not sure how well the photos illustrate this - but let’s just continue on as if they do a remarkable job, shall we? Please? Perhaps I’ll find and post a better example later.

While we were shopping a few weeks ago in the dollar record bin -there was a certain angle where the LPs looked ‘broken’, and Neli said as much - but my impression is that the drum machines create these rhythmical pasterns on the LPs that makes them look very … different.

Capturing that angle in photos is a little difficult - and again, I am not sure these two albums are extreme enough to point out the unique signature of this genre.

Do other genres have signatures? Most people know that the grooves are shallower, reflecting less light, during quiet parts - female vocals for instance.

Can people tell which genre an LP is just by looking at it?

Can people tell what song it is? Can they, like some can just by looking at sheet music, start humming the music by just ‘Lookin at da Grooves?’

… Used LP’s of course…

While making a post about the patterns in the grooves of certain genre LPs, and taking photos to illustrate same, I detected that some of the photos indicated a state of filth that was kind of disturbing.

Now, mind you, these are $1 - $2 records that I bought just to see…, well, you know, it was one of those exploratory missions where we seek to explore strange new music - which only works if one is wealthy or the per cost is kind of very, very low.

Some of these photos make the grooves look very digital don’t they? You can just see the dots and dashes, the 0’s and 1’s, in this view. Well, this IS techno music, so it makes sense, no?

And what is with that semi-circular pattern? It is not visible in the other photos. Did someone set a cup down on this at some time in the past? Are there messages in these grooves that perhaps even the musicians are unaware of? Not sonic messages, but visual - like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos book, where near the zillionth digit of Pi pictures of circles and stuff can be found?.

Nahhhhh.

so those of you without cleaning machines - this is what your cartridge has to dodge and bump over while trying to play the LP for you.

Yes, we need to show the AFTER photos after a cleaning or two. But I think the machine is going to be packed up for the trip to Las Vegas and so there might be a wait - until after the show, and subsequent show reportage.

As you can / will see in the companion post, in many other photos of these albums they look just fine and dandy - they look perfectly playable.

By the way, these two LPs HAVE been brushed off with a standard carbon fiber brush.