Phish’s resurgence saw me grabbing some CDRs out of cold storage for some listening. I’ve been slowly building some shelves in the basement that, when finished, will hold all or most of the CDRs that I have collected over the years of live concert recordings. I’m jumping the gun a little bit by opening the boxes up, but I realized that I miss them.
For a bunch of reasons, the live music archive cannot completely satisfy my jones. I mentioned picking up a new HDD a little while ago to give me well over a TB in storage within the ol’ PC (not counting external storage drives). So, I’ve begun grabbing a handful of shows at random and ripping them from the CDRs on the PC as flacs. Flac seems like a good compromise. To accompany this venture, I had some amazon dollars from christmas sitting around so I picked up one of these:
A Cowon D2+. This image is probably about life-size. It is a nifty little player. I chose this one because nearly every site I visited suggested that Cowon’s digital players have, by far, the best sound quality. I was led to believe that the D2+, and other Cowon products, are the choice of audiophiles.
Well, I’ve had it long enough to say that those reviews seem to be spot-on. The sound quality is far better than my iPod and the D2+ has no trouble driving my Grado’s. One big issue that I wasn’t aware of, but which may be getting fixed someday thanks to a firmware update, is the lack of gapless playback. Is there any player that handles flac that also has gapless playback? It also has to feature drag-and-drop file transfer because of the way I am doing this project. This one has some nice little features but the overall experience is a bit lacking. It is a touch-screen player but the GUI is a bit mysterious. I have to say, however, that the overall effect is somewhat similar to my old, beloved Karma. It also features a nice suite of EQ and audio enhancement features that are extremely customizable. I am having some fun tweaking these with my various environments: car stereo, Grado, in-ear Shure’s (at work).
I got the cheapest version, 8GB, but I added a 16GB SD card to it for a total of 24GB. It’s not enormous, but I don’t want it to hold my library. What I really want to do with it is load it up with a number of shows from my collection — to incentivize me to dig them out of the basement, rip them to flac and then listen to them. It will not permanently hold these shows, but rather feature a rotation. I’d also like to work in a new CD here and there, also. i.e. a CD that isn’t Dead/Phish/etc. But, rather a new, contemporary release. Force myself to spend some time with this stuff and get myself off shuffle a little bit. I’ll still use my iPod/iPhone for impulse listening, as well as family car rides, etc. This is more for my solo listening and when I am particularly in the mood for the Dead, etc.
Here’s the first batch, covering 20 years from ‘71 to ‘91 — It should be relatively obvious that this isn’t systematic at all. I just reached into the box and grabbed a handful of shows:
- 04/05/1971
- 02/22/1973
- 06/18/1974
- 06/17/1975
- 11/17/1978a (Loyola Rambler Room)
- 04/21/1984
- 06/30/1986
- 04/22/1987
- 07/17-19/1989
- 06/20/1991
A nice little smorgasbord, I think. More later.
– edit: if there is a theme to the above shows, maybe it’s ‘Second Set Surprise Splits of Bobby Songs’. There’s the famous Sugar Mag from the Alpine Valley shows and the strange Throwing Stones from the 91 Pine Knob show.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Pearl Jam
I recently came across an article in a German magazine which advocated this abominable practice. I reproduce the picture which accompanied this dispiriting message, so that you can cringe at your leisure.
When that article was written the brewery was in the process of acquiring this particular wood to use in the construction of barrels for the brewing of this beer. I haven’t tried it yet. Am very interested, though. 
