Bells, whistles and alphabetic order
I am a gadget freak. I openly admit it. I am especially vulnerable when it comes to audio and video equipment. (Check out Matt’s account of a recent visit to my house. That boy has a wild imagination, but he captures the essence of my fascination for all things electronic.)
My latest love is Super Audio CD or SACD technology. An SACD player looks just like any old CD player except that it produces much better music. While CD players sample a musical waveform at 44 thousand times per second, SACD players do that same job 2.8 million times per second. The result is a much clearer, warmer sound well beyond anything a CD can put out.
One problem with being a gadget freak is that with each new musical format that hits the market and ends up on my component rack, I have to start over buying many of the same recordings that I already own. Some records (Steely Dan’s Gaucho comes to mind) I own in four different formats.
The making of SACD content is a labor of love for many of the sound engineers that work with the technology. If they have the original studio recordings at their disposal, the SACD engineer can put out a new recording from music laid down on tape 30 or 40 years ago that sounds as good or better than the original.
It’s fun to watch for new SACD recordings as they show up at the record stores. There still aren’t that many discs out there. In the SACD department of most music stores, you can stretch your arms out and reach from A through Z. That’s just what I did the other day at Best Buy. I stretched out and picked up two SACDs from the shelf: The Animals Retrospective and the Zombies Greatest Hits.
The Animals and the Zombies. I held both discs in my hand. This made me laugh. I loved the poetic potential there. The symbolic richness. The metaphoric balance. The cosmic grooviness. Or maybe it was just the goofy notion of taking these discs home to bracket the alphabetic ends of my SACD collection. Whatever the reason, I decided to buy them both.
I got kind of a funny look from the checkout girl at Best Buy. “It’s got kind of a metaphoric balance, don’t you think?” I said. “The Animals. The Zombies.”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said. “That’ll be $31.50.”
There was no sense even bringing up the cosmic grooviness.
10:11:02 PM  Stories
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