Friday, February 22, 2008

Friday night: being a parent

Watching my son play with his Habas chew toy. It's not quite what I imagined when I found out I was gonna be a dad, but it' magical in it's own way.

Earlier, he and I danced while listening to Oscar Peterson "plays". It was a nice break from this week, which has been full of "work stress." I've got a major project due date coming up, and I'm trying to tie up a lot of loose ends. Hopefully it wraps up nicely!

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Digging Deep

This morning has been a blast. My wife had the opportunity to nap while I watched the little guy. We played with some giant stuffed dinosaurs that were a gift from g'ma and g'pa. He's sitting up now, and would just go nuts tipping all over the place trying to tackle and eat the dinosaurs.

Also this am:

Another prize from the "all records except polka" stash:

The Shangoons: Jungle Drums


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It's got a pretty nasty gash across side 1 from label to edge, but there's nothing audible until the last track. I guess I'll just miss out on "the lion sleeps tonight" which is a shame, but it's the only track on the whole album that I knew before hand.

The rest is a total gem. I realy like this record!

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

All 45s, all night

Last night I was witness to one of the most amazing manipulation of the vinyl medium in my short lifetime.

Dj Shadow & Cut Chemist present: The Hard Sell. Dj Shadow is probably most famous for his work "endtroducing", which is an amazing work of sampling that really launched the (now defunct) mowax label. Cut Chemist is probably most famous for his work with Jurassic 5, Ozomatli, and apparently had a role in the movie Juno.

The Hard Sell is an 8 turntables, 4 mixers, 2 dj's, 100's of 45's extravaganza.

The sound manipulation was something I'd never seen before, and a true testament to both of these gentlelmen as dj's and producers. It really doesn't do much good for me to talk about it, but here's a few random tidbits that I really enjoyed.

A free random highlights:

LZ's stairway to heaven cover, using the lyrics to the theme from Gilligan's Island.
*I've found out through a listener more informed than myself that this is Dr. Demento's Stairway to Gilligan's Island

A kaleidoscope of tunes that recreated "potholes in my lawn" by de la soul, including a voiceover of a man who wished he was a plug, morphing into the lyrics "plug one, plug two, plug one, plug two"

The finale, which included 45s being played offcenter creating a wow and flutter event which was a lesson in physics.

Visuals were by Ben Stokes. If you like eye candy, I'd check this guy out. He really put something up that complimented the music playing.

*videos available on youtube if you search for "the hard sell" I'm sure that a DVD will be made available after the tour.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

lil' A

It was a big week for my little man. He had his second swimming lesson, which went much better than the first. The first time we went, the instructor told us to dip our children in. Adrian went absolutely ballistic. Apparently it's MUCH better to gently touch their toes in and let them know that they're not in any danger. We didn't listen much to the instructor the second time, and my wife went in with him. He didn't smile until he got out, but I have a feeling that he's going to enjoy going back.

Also, this weekend we went down to my parents house to meet up with a photographer that my wife hired. While we are pretty happy with where we live, and love our place, there are so many massive trees that we don't get hardly any direct sunlight.

Here's a couple of pics of my little guy:

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Saturday, February 2, 2008

Stylus cleaning

Yesterday I received a package from Mehran of Sorasound. I had ordered a stylus force gauge (how had I lived without one?) and an Onzow zerodust in a package deal. First off, Mehran was very pleasant to deal with. His package arrived via USPS as fast as can possibly be expected.

I first checked my VTF, amazingly it read 1.85-g only 0.05 g over the recommended for the AT 440Mla that's been my main squeeze for over a year. This carts got well over 1000 hours on it, and while I regularly alternate between a b&o stylus brush and the AT brush that came with the cart, there has been a slow accumulation of crap building up on the back of the sylus.

With that in mind I had purchased a magic eraser (ME) per Doug Deacon's recomendation on audioasylum. While the vinyl asylum (VA) is often filled with people jocking the gear and tweaks that they've purchased and/or tried ad infinitum/nauseum there is occasionally the random gem of info. However, the use of ME comes with several warnings of people who have lost their stylus in the material. So, tenderly, with the volume on, I lowered the cart onto the ME hearing a slight crackle, and let it set for a couple of seconds before raising the cart with the arm lever.

Nope, there was still some gunk back there. Not quite visible with the naked eye, but easily visible with my loupe. (Why I have a loupe is quite a different story, but hey, it was free!). That was last week. I was hoping the zerodust would be able to take of that for me.

and it did. The cart sounds like it did at 100 hours. Shallbehealed class (A*+)^3 recommended. The wife likes it too. (ie, takes up no space in our house, didn't have to take out the equivalent of a home loan, and makes our system sound better.)

Friday, February 1, 2008

Decisions!

I've decided to keep my Pearl preamp. It didn't help that when I went to demo it again, the damn thing wouldn't make a peep. I'm sure this is it's way of saying it wants to stay in our house!