Friday Travel

You CAN travel without moving!

Download the 111MB .aif file Travel Sound Collage here.

In this piece you will hear the following locations: der Kölner Dom/the Cologne cathedral – listen for the large space and a coin dropping in a donation box, the main railway station in Cologne – listen for announcements and the ICE (beautiful German highspeed train) opening its doors, a farm in Austria – listen for the pitch fork delivering hay to the cows, birds in Cologne…. and much more. I mixed the sounds, all recorded with a SoundDevices 722 digital recorder in April of 2007, in form of a collage. Found Sound. For some of the recordings I wore my OKM microphones (((check out their recording samples here))). I mentioned the OKMs in my Diary before. They look like little earphones and are worn like those. Wearing them, my ears shape the incoming sound – a process similar to the Neumann K100 binaural head we used to record Up Close (((that album was recorded at 24/96 and if there is interest I could make one song available in the form of a 24bit AIFF or FLAC file))).

Enjoy!


Found on Matt’s Flickr

Thursday

I listened to a sound collage I made a couple of years ago, from sounds I recorded in April of 2007 in Germany and Austria. It sounds amazing and I thought about making it available in the form of a .aif file (CD quality: 16/44.1). You can travel without moving!

It was only 28ºF this morning and I discussed transportation with myself. Arguments for and against using my bicycle were exchanged, but in the end I bundled up and took off on the Mariachi Bullitt to meet Jon for breakfast. We discussed that there seems to be more interest in audiophile sound these days. Good!

Gizmodo had these two items this week:

Vietnamese Audiophile Turns a Room Into One Giant Speaker

Why We Need Audiophiles

The second one is particularly interesting as it compares SACD to great vinyl. Then I found this piece, which compares SACS and DVD-Audio and prefers DVD-A. I also noticed that Logic 8 allows the burning of DVD-A. DVD-A does sound very promising. When I was still with Epic Records I spoke to an executive there, it must have been around 1999, who had one of only seven DVD-A players in the country, and he raved about the sound quality! I myself have never heard it. (((however I have heard 24/96 in my studio, because One Guitar and Up Close were recorded like that…)))

While we are staying in Manhattan in May (((five nights at the Blue Note))) Jon and I will try to locate an audiophile dealer there. We want to listen to DVD-A players and see what the fuss is about. I don’t think DVD-A will be a commercial option and we’ll have to wait until high quality 24/96 or 24/192 files can be losslessly compressed and downloaded.

I was glad I decided to ride my bike and ended up riding for about an hour today. I enjoy the easy communication with pedestrians. How can a pedestrian communicate with a car or SUV, especially when the windows are tinted and inpenetrable!! Like talking to a tank.