Dolmot

Finally listed most of my CDs from all genres on Discogs. There was a lot of crap but some gems too and a few items I had forgot entirely... Let's see when I manage to get started with vinyl.

I have that single...and most of my work is caffeine-powered.

I can't say a thing about the actual motives of Andreas & Mathias, but I think that getting an artist identifier Yggdrasil (9) on Discogs suggests that the name might be slightly overloaded (or, unoriginal). By the way, it seems that the shipping costs were accurate. The disc arrived in a neat pre-paid, CD-sized envelope, which is allegedly good for up to 2kg. It surely comes in handy if you're ever distributing depleted uranium from Sweden in CD-sized padded envelopes. However, I guess someone at the post attempted doing multiple barrel rolls with his vehicle. The fancy special plastic case had broken somewhere along the few hundred lousy km it had to travel. Bah. No silver platters or other extras either. The music is still very nice, though.

Wait, the same Sideffect who's still on the front page after reviewing TransStellar on 5th and posting a light-hearted reply on 6th? This is too strange for coherent commentary right now.

Woo, we're invisible!

Very good indeed. I have a bunch of pro-piracy friends whose favourite excuses include "artists have too many Ferraris parked next to their swimming pool and record labels are evil megacorps". And of course, "there's only one good song on a CD / music is nowadays streamlined crap". Every time I'd like to show them the handwritten postcards I've got from Vincent with those CBL albums and whatnot. Not too many Ferraris in this scene either...

OK, it's great and I bought it...but the announced $10 price could be called misleading. First, there's a hidden tax and second, shipping was $8 for a single CD. Do they deliver it on a silver platter with a complimentary blowjob?

Did you visit Moria?

The trend of calling mastering "bad" is also everywhere but it gets more complicated when people should agree, what makes it good. (Apart from tautological arguments like "it's good when it's enjoyable to listen". Well duh.) The truth is that there's no single configuration of, say, dynamics, which would fit every situation. I have some ambient/chill CDs which alter between very quiet and loud sections (a bit like good classical does). They sound excellent on headphones in a quiet room. However, when I tried them in a car with a heavy noise floor from traffic, tires etc., 90% of time I didn't hear a thing. Conversely, CDs with "ghettoblaster" mastering are good for cars and crap stereo but extremely tiring to the point of being unlistenable on headphones. There are CD series which are directly intended for commercial lounge/café use. They're extremely flat and constantly on red. The whole point is to provide a static muzak experience where every part can be heard over conversation but none exceeds it. Again, good for its purpose but awful for home listening when you could actually enjoy more dynamics. Nevertheless, CDs in general shouldn't be pressed flat. If that's what you want, get a proper DSP component for your setup. It's relatively easy to flatten dynamics during playback but next to impossible to recover them properly if the product is already compressed to hell and back, twice.

Can you give any particular examples?

Dimension 5 - Ganymede (or Guitar Mix)?

Not dead but sleeping.

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Me neither...although by that time I was busy with everything else and only checked the samples briefly. They didn't produce any "must have" reaction back then so I skipped that one. No idea if I'm really missing much as I have little recollection of the whole thing. I've found Solar Fields releases to follow a gentle downward curve for me, going from "very good" to "alright" over release year. Nothing deeply wrong with it, yet there's plenty of other music with more novelty value to discover. Sync24 and Connect.Ohm were good, for example, but there's definitely a whole world outside Ultimae as well. Just keep on browsing... It could have been 10e good but not 50e good, for sure.

I'm starting Mercurytrip as we speak.

May I clarify that you can use Matlab for actual reseach/number-crunching work too, not just taking/giving courses...

For me it's been a full time job for several years...

Music-wise it's among the best goa albums in this millennium. Sound-wise it's among the flattest and most fatiguing. There are no highs, no lows, no peaks, no valleys. I don't think I've ever managed to listen it through. Maybe I should try some kind of dynamic expansion to make it listenable.

That wouldn't get too high on my list of worries. Compare that to, say, Korea, which is technically still in war (armistice) over a direct land border and producing end-of-the-world-imminent-right-now headlines every month with little really happening. There are dozens of disputed territories like those rocks around the world. The whole point is that neither side can give up as it would make them look weak and cowardly. However, there's nothing tangible to gain from nearly worthless rocks, compared to the risks of a full blown war that would ensue. Therefore both sides keep on rattling sabres and issuing heavy-worded statements while largely agreeing that nothing is really going to happen over the matter. The press, of course, loves headlines where the whole issue is effectively called a prelude to WWIII. It sells better than "same old, nothing's going to happen". Don't buy it if there are no real news. If even Korea can remain in a standstill for decades, I wouldn't expect Japan and China to start a major war which would cost them utter fortunes, all recent development, and their whole reputation. At least not for a few islands. That would make a convenient excuse for other motives, though.

Alright, why do I get spam from Hado even though I've never bought a thing or them nor subscribed to anything? I guess I'll skip this compilation just because spammers are the lowest form of human scum and I'd love to see each and every one of them hanged, drawn and quartered.

Radical Distortion could be sold to me as '97 MFG stuff and I'd probably be fooled...

Yep, and usually Alien Project as the second option. That acronym is heavily overloaded...

That's what I've been pondering as well. Maybe I'll use similar approach. A direct re-release doesn't count as 2012, not even with 2012 overcompr remastering. However, Blue Moon Sampler might fit in as it never was truly available back then. Etnica is wholly unreleased. UX was updated so heavily from the 1997 version that it's a new release in my book. (A shame the CD version got postponed but it's released nevertheless.) If there are any official rulings regarding these matters, let me know...

(Not participating but...) I saw this line and started wondering.

Really? Doesn't appear so in the cart system...