by Michael

Dark Star [Grayfolded]… Forever

The Grateful Dead playing Dark Star forever and ever and ever… Or. Are. They?

[Dark Star] Grayfolded 1 & 2 – John Oswald Grateful Dead. As CDs or as 3-LP 180-gram set

Let me pull some quotes from the Amazon comments:

“What Oswald did was use parts of the Dead playing “Dark Star” to create his own piece.”

“In some pressings of [CD] disc 2, there are three minutes of extra music hidden before the Multiple Garcias shout “transitive nightfall of diamonds”.

“He has taken over a hundred hours of tapes from the Dead Vaults ,all of performances of Dark Star and compiled ,segued and overdubbed a symphony of the Dead.”

“…as we hear Jerry Garcia in 1971 duelling with Jerry Garcia in 1991”

Part of “The Dark Star” effect, for me, is that we could listen as they actually had the guts to subject unwary crowds to this kind of  “This is how your thoughts sound on Pluto. Say Hello’ music. And how much the crowds [and me!] liked it.

This is not that.

That said, this album sounds like it would be very … uh…. inspiring. Yeah. That’s it. I bet they sell a lot in Boulder. It’s on my list [have to see if Neli will… uh…. not like…. them tampering with perfection by remixing the Dead like this. 🙂 ]

[Thanks to TwoGoodEars for posting about this album. Wow.]

in Music / News 3 comments
 by Michael

High-end Audio Super Tweeters

We added a page for high-end audio super tweeters to the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Super tweeters are high fidelity stand-alone devices that produce very high frequencies. They tpically [I would say] start at about about 5000 Hz and often rise to above 20,000 Hz.

The help fill in high-frequency harmonics which in practice helps the midrange and other frequencies sound more authoritative and real – as well as adding the ‘air’ and ‘image solidity’ that one might expect.

Thought there would be a large number of these. But if there are, they are hard to find [kind of the reason for collecting them all in the guide in the first place].

One of the more popular, the MuRata series of spherical super tweeters, has stopped production:

MuRata Super Tweeters:

Translated from the Japanese:

“Notice of end of production of spherical tweeter and spherical speakers
concerning (harmonic enhancer) all models spherical tweeter and our spherical speakers then it has expanded over the long time, I was allowed to end all production and sales.
Inquiries such as repair for this product, toll-free: or, (00: 00-12 13:00: 00-17 9 excluding weekends and holidays, our regular holiday) 0120-015-008 here to ask I would like to. With Thanks very much for your patronage of the past, as will your understanding, thank you.”

As usual, if anybody knows of any high-end super tweeters [and we do not mean regular tweeters, which seems to be a lot of what Google finds] then PLEASE let us know about them.

 

 

 

 

in News 2 comments
 by Michael

Our inner ears generate their own sounds

Our inner ears generates its own sounds – which might account for some dichotomy between measured and subjective quality of some high fidelity systems.

Seems to me that this effect, linked to below, would tend to make the subjective experience better than it would ordinarily be. Both aiding listening and confounding ‘golden ear’ evaluation of absolute quality of high fidelity audio

“Not only can the human ear detect sounds, it can also generate them. If the ear hears the two upper tones of a major triad, it produces the fundamental of the chord which can then be measured. This phenomenon [is] called “otoacoustic emission”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-audiometric-reliable.html

 

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