March 12, 2014:
I’ve finished “Emerson Lake & Palmer In Concert,” recorded in 1977 and released in 1979. The group broke up in 1978. The record company was reportedly pretty pissed about that, and cut the planned two-record set down to one.
It’s still pretty good, though.
And I’ve concluded that all the commercial tapes with problems were (a) acquired from Columbia House during my one-year membership circa 1980, and (b) stored in the box I sometimes kept in the car. Now, we kept the car in the garage, and did not leave it sitting out in the sun for days on end, but these may have gotten a little warm on occasion.
I suspect Columbia House’s questionable quality control was at least as big a factor as the in-car storage.
I’ve started (but not completed) Blondie’s “Autoamerican,” and the sound quality leaves something to be desired. It, too, was from Columbia House. It’s not quite bad enough to pay the eight bucks for the MP3 download, though.
ELP in concert was from Columbia House, but it’s okay. Not as crystal-clear as the Vivaldi, but still entirely acceptable, much better than the Blondie or Cheap Trick.
March 12, 2014:
I may reconsider about “Autoamerican,” actually. It’s pretty bad. I’m going to leave it overnight and see how I feel tomorrow when I get back from running errands.
March 13, 2014:
Yeah, I finished transferring the music from tape to MP3, played it back, and said, “Yecch.”
Bought the album from Amazon, complete with three bonus tracks, one of which I had actually been unsuccessfully looking for several years back.
It sounds much, much better.
March 13, 2014:
Sigh. Just finished up Cheap Trick’s “At Budokan.” It starts just fine, but the last cut on Side 1 starts to sound a bit muddy, and the sound quality deteriorates all through Side 2, starting from decent and working down to crappy.
I’m not sure whether it’s worth a second attempt, or whether I should buy a new copy, or replace the worst tracks, or just live with it.
As for the album itself, “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” were major hits and they’re still good. The rest of the album isn’t up to that level, but it doesn’t suck. Especially “Need Your Love.”
That’s pretty much the last plain old album of music on cassette, though there’s still a “hits of the ’60s” compilation that’s still in the original shrink-wrap.
And of course, there are still fifteen or twenty music tapes from various unofficial sources, and lots of spoken-word stuff.
March 13, 2014:
Well, that quality problem has gotten more complicated.
I had a K-Tel tape still in the shrink-wrap. It sounded lousy, more than its circumstances could explain when I tried playing it, so I got out my old hand-held, battery-powered pocket tape recorder.
It sounded fine on that.
So there is something seriously wrong with the tape deck, and I’ve hooked the pocket one up to the computer instead, with fresh batteries.
Now I need to filter out noise — this was never meant for music — but instead of too slow, it (like my turntable) runs very slightly fast. And I expect to go through a lot of batteries.
March 14, 2014:
And in case it wasn’t obvious, I can hook that hand-held recorder up to the computer, and I did. I had to filter out all the noise — this one does not have any Dolby or anything like that, as it’s designed for reporters or the like taping spoken word — and I’m not sure just how reliable the speed is, but it seems to match up pretty well with the official times.
Anyway. “Back to the 60’s Rock ‘n Roll,” from Dominion Entertainment, is now in MP3 form. Most of this is not the originals, but re-recordings by the original artists or an approximation thereof (e.g., Paul Revere and Mark Lindsay fill in for Paul Revere & the Raiders, since the rest of the original band wasn’t available).
Going by what I’ve found on the web this was sold in LP and CD form by K-Tel, but that name does not appear anywhere on the cassette tape version.
Anyway. It’s mostly not the originals, but it’s not bad. It’s nice to have “Psychotic Reaction” in my collection, and none are total stinkers. And once I switched to the small recorder and filtered the tape hiss, it sounded pretty good — the bass is maybe a bit weak.
March 14, 2014:
Not a tape, but I’ve just added another album.
Y’see, I’ve been putting away my CDs — I emptied both my 200-disc carousels, and hauled out all the empty jewelcases I had stashed away, and put the CDs into their appropriate receptacles. It was a fairly large job, actually, as neither discs nor boxes were in order, but I finished today.
Except that I can’t find the case for the soundtrack of “Gladiator,” and I can’t find the discs of “Patty Smyth” and X’s “Ain’t Love Grand.”
So I spent part of the afternoon rummaging around my office, hoping they’d turn up. Went through stacks of CD-ROMs hoping the CDs might have wound up there by mistake.
I didn’t find the missing items, but I did find a CD I’d never played, let alone ripped — “Colour Moving and Still,” by Chantal Kreviazuk. No idea where I got it, or when, but what the hell, I ripped it to my collection. It’s playing right now. It’s not bad. I don’t think she’ll ever be a real favorite, but I’m enjoying it.