September 2006 – LonelyMachines

TDK Flower Series

These are 2005 Special Edition MiniDiscs from TDK:

Here they are with my trusty DR7:

They’re a slight variation on the HO series. The bottom two discs are the standard TDK “Fine” series. They’re good workhorse discs as they’re somewhat inexpensive, and I can write directly on the colored surface. The TDK’s are my first choice for field recording since they’re the most durable and least error-prone brand I’ve come across.

The one on the top right is an old HiSpace disc. Pretty as they are, the HiSpace discs (which are generally very cheap) can be hit-or-miss; the good ones last forever, while the bad ones die almost immediately.

Music

Loudness Wars, continued.

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This happy little nugget is from the new Tool record. A friend bought me a copy for my birthday, and I have to say, it’s quite good. Listening to it through headphones, I noticed the drums (Danny Carey is a wonderful drummer, BTW) sounded “mushy,” particularly the snare. The decay on the cymbals was muted as well.

I went ahead and ripped it, which was no small feat, since the CD is copy-protected. Thank goodness for Linux and cdparanoia. My hatred for copy-protection is a whole other topic, but I did think these CD’s were supposed to me marked in some way…

Anyhow, the above snipped (click image for detail) is the waveform from “Vicarious.” Smashy, smashy! Not only is the whole thing hard-limited at -1.7db (the slight artificial headroom at the top margin), but it still clips. Peak levels for a good recording should be around -9db.

The ReplayGain value is an indication of how many decibels the track would have to be reduced by to fit an 89db industry standard, in this case 8.5.

Continued...