Let's get physical

For those of us who treasure physical media, it is the best of times and the worst of times. I have noticed a number of recent releases that, rather disgracefully, have had no physical release at all (Booka Shade I'm looking at you). Whilst on the other hand there are hundreds of lavish vinyl releases (and a good many re-releases) that, whilst sold at a premium, continue to fly the flag for physical media.

The only area of music retail that I can see dying is the compact disc. Nobody is buying them and people seem to be disposing of their CDs en masse without a second thought. I can go online or walk in a charity shop and replace hundreds of my 'lost' CDs from the 1990s for next to nothing. This is great for filling holes in your collection, but no help for new releases.

I had cause to reflect on this situation the other day when a CD I bought still had a price ticket on. This vintage £1.99 price tag was from the chain Our Price circa 1998.

In the 1990s a trip into the city was essentially a tour of the record shops for me. First visit the two HMV stores, up the road to Our Price and quick look through a couple of independent shops before the longer walk to the fantastic labyrinth that was the Virgin Records store. I can't deny that seeing the Our Price logo made me nostalgic for those days.

By chance I was walking through the city the day after I received the CD in question and decided to walk to the last bastion physical music sales: HMV. And guess what? It was closed. I don't mean I visited outside of opening hours, I mean it was shut for business. Gone. And just like that my youth evaporated.

But I don't buy many NEW CDs anymore. I tend to buy vinyl and use the download code. When I do buy CDs I order them online as it is cheaper and more convenient that going to HMV. The days of me walking into a record store and emerging with £100 of CDs have long since gone.

So, yes, I helped kill HMV. I helped kill the CD. They have disappeared like grains of sand through my fingers and they took my youth with them.

Cheapo Hi-FI: mission accomplished?

A few months ago I set myself a challenge of building a separates Hi-Fi on a budget. I think I spent about £150 in total and ended up with an OK little set up. However, whilst some components were bought for very little money, the turntable swallowed up three quarters of the budget. In the midst of the current vinyl resurgence, a bargain turntable is a very hard thing to come by. However, a few weeks ago I happened across one such bargain.

 
A new charity shop (or 'thirft store' as our American cousins say) opened not far away and I went for a look. Hiding amongst the toasters and old Sky TV boxes was a very dusty mini turntable. It had no stylus and looked a bit unloved. There were still signs of life as when I plugged it in and moved the tone arm, the platter span. The price? £5. I put it back on the shelf just as my wife walked past and said, "That's worth the gamble for £5". So the turntable came with me.

On closer inspection is turns out I had bought a Sony PS-J20 mini turntable. Miraculously the lid was scratch and crack free and the unit cleaned up quite nicely. As I expected, the platter was spinning WAY off correct speeds. But with an RPM calculator app on my phone and a few tweaks on the (rather temperamental) potentiometers, it was soon running at 33.3 and 45 rpm quite nicely.

The instructions I downloaded suggested this little beast was circa 2000 and was missing a few accessories such as a mat for the platter and an EP adapter. Once I located the correct stylus and ordered the accessories, the turntable was beginning to look pretty good. All of the automation of the tone arm and buttons worked as expected. All good so far.

Before I committed any of my precious vinyl to this turntable I looked at the tracking force to check the stylus wasn't going to try to gouge its way through the record. Happily the scales said 2.5g. Rather respectable I thought.

How does it sound? Well it's OK. It's not the greatest, but it does a job. There's a lot of distortion on "S"sounds on some records and the tone is quite thin (compared to the admittedly bass heavy SL-1200). But the automation is handy when you just want to leave a record spinning in the background and its compact size means it fits anywhere.

Yes, I spent more in restoring it than the purchase cost, but it was worth it. With a bit of effort and good luck you can have a reasonable standard turntable for £20. Despite its shortcomings this has to be better than any ION or Crossley type disaster on sale today.

Split agenda

"Agenda" is the new Pet Shop Boys EP and it seems to have created something of a 'Marmite divide' in Pet Shop Boys fans. For my part, I have stalled on issuing my verdict as I have been so perplexed by the whole thing.

The 4 tracks were issued across 4 days via YouTube as 'lyric videos'. The first time I heard the initial offering "Give Stupidity a Chance" I was bitterly disappointed. To my ears, this track was just "Winner" rejigged into a faintly satirical jibe at Donald Trump. I hated it.

The second track to be released was "On Social Media" and this represented a slight improvement. I enjoyed the more electronic and dance orientated sound here. Whilst some of the lyrics were quite clever, the track still only felt like b-side filler grade when compared to the heights we know the boys are capable of.

By the third day I wasn't holding out much hope. Even the title "What Are We Going To Do About The Rich?" made me roll my eyes. A whole EP full of barbed, satirical, left leaning lyrics from a pair of multi millionaires wasn't really doing it for me. Yes, Neil and Chris have back catalogue littered with political commentary and witty observations; but a whole EP full of it was not for me. Happily the music on this track wasn't a complete loss and there were some fine moments of aural stimulation.

Most listeners seem to regard the final track "The Forgotten Child" as the standout cut here, but I was a little bored by it. Thankfully this song isn't a social polemic, but by the time I had waded through the preceding material I had little time for it. A victim of being tarred with the same brush.

Then I began to read with astonishment that some people were actually enjoying this crap. The aural disintegration of my favourite band was happening right before my ears and all I could see were like minded people dancing round the funeral pyre. What was going on?

The answer came when I ditched YouTube and downloaded the digital files. Suddenly, I found these songs transformed from grubby little caterpillars into beautiful butterflies (or at least exotic moths). Ditching the f***ing awful visuals and giving the music my full attention had a transformative effect.

So for any Pet Shop Boys fan struggling to come to terms with "Agenda" try LISTENING to it. Give it your full attention and then make your judgement. Don't base your opinion on some crappy 192kbps stream that is accompanied by terrible visuals that keep shoving the lyrics in your face. Consume this music as you did when you made your judgements about "Please", "Introspective" or whatever releases you love by the boys. I'm sure that if we were all to give these tracks a level playing field they will stand up.

Jarre is back?

Back in 2011 I lamented on an inexorable decline in the quality of Jean-Michel Jarre's music. The album "Electronica I" was a step in the right direction, but didn't really do much to dissuade me of this belief. The second instalment of "Electronica" continued this slight upturn with my dream collaboration of Jarre and Pet Shop Boys finally becoming a reality in the brilliant track "Brick England".

I found the subsequent appearance of "Oxygene 3" surprising but the content was unremarkable. It was something if a 'vanilla' album to my ears. Inoffensive, but without a great deal new to say. Whilst we can all be thankful it wasn't another "Teo and Tea", "Oxygene 3" didn't exactly return Jarre to the peaks of his halcyon days either.

And now we have the corresponding 'vanilla' instalment of my favourite Jarre album "Equinoxe". "Equinoxe Infinity" is clearly a new work that pays very little (if any) reference to the original 1978 album other than in name (and some rain effects). In fact, I can hear more sonic references to "Oxygene" and "Magnetic Fields" in there than anything else. However, the reuse of the "Equinoxe" title does give Jarre and the record label a chance to sell us recordings we already own.

Jarre's studio albums make for a mixed bag. Happily we seem to be recovering from the lows of 10 years ago.

The opening movement "The Watchers" is quite superb with sweeping Yamaha CS80 horns and brooding storm effects reminicent of the "Bladerunner" soundtrack. "Flying Totems" follows and introduces more rhythmical elements whilst "Robots Don't Cry" resurrects the "Oxygene" Minipops to good effect. The previously released "Coachella Opening" is now rebadged and presented as the eighth movement and "Don't Look Back" brings us as close to the source material as we're going to get. The only place the album fails is the cheese of "Infinity" and the less than convincing "If the Wind Could Speak". Overall it's a solid 6 to 7 out of 10.

My ripping victory

I have been downloading and ripping MP3's since about 1998; so I've accumulated quite a few. Looking through my library recently I decided it was time for a clear out and an upgrade. Any file that was below 256 Kbps was deemed unsuitable and a replacement sought. The majority of the time this simply meant re-ripping CDs at 320 Kbps, but I soon found some CDs wouldn't rip. No matter how many times I cleaned the disc, cleaned the laser and screamed at the screen, some CDs just weren't playing ball. In a vain attempt to overcome the situation I even bought another copy of one particularly frustrating disc, a-ha's "Minor Earth Major Sky", but the new copy was even worse than the original.

Nope, it wasn't copy protection, it wasn't scratches, it wasn't bronzing. At first I found this quite mysterious as I had ripped all of these CDs previously. But it soon occurred to me that this was some years ago using different PCs and different operating systems. The majority of my MP3s were created on a desktop machine with an internal optical drive running Windows XP. Windows 10 on a modern laptop just couldn't get the job done.

My old 'copy protection workaround' of using an optical output from a traditional CD player was so laborious that it was impractical for the number of CDs I was looking at. Google searches weren't really turning up any useful information and I became increasingly frustrated. I gave up.

Fast forward about 3 years and I found a solitary forum post that seemed to describe the exact issue I was having. The poster had identified the one thing all of these discs had in common. Three dirty letters: WEA. It seems discs manufactured by WEA are different, and not in a good way. Most solutions for difficult to rip CDs centre around using old optical drives. It seems more recent hardware just can't cope with some discs, and for my laptop, as with many others, this meant WEA discs.

Today, most people seem to have abandoned optical drives and CDs (one colleague recently said: "Who buys CDs in this day and age?"). Not being 'most people' means there are bargains for the rest of us. I was able to find an old Sony USB optical drive on eBay for just a few pounds.

As soon as the new drive arrived I plugged it in, threw in a copy of Madonna's "Music" and watched it spit the disc out like it was poison. Next I tried David Gray's "White Ladder" and Windows Media Player crashed as soon as the drive span up. When I tried my nemesis "Minor Earth Major Sky" the drive disappeared from explorer and Windows crashed without so much as spinning up the disc.

In order to eliminate the laptop as the source of the issue I plugged the drive into my work laptop. As the disc began to spin I noticed the laptop was not only reading the disc, it was actually playing the audio! With lightning speed I hit "Rip CD" and crossed everything. Immediately Windows put up the shutters. My work machine is obviously configured not to allow ripping. Foiled again.

Recently I was working on my laptop whilst simultaneously trying to keep one of my children entertained. In desperation I picked up an old netbook I had lying around the office and gave it to her. It took a minute or to for the light bulb moment to happen but when it did, it triggered intense negotiations to retrieve the netbook and convince a two year old that Peppa Pig wasn't as important as ripping CDs.

In hope rather than expectation I plugged in the optical drive and fired up Media Player. With trembling hands I placed HARD-Fi's "Starts of CCTV" into the drawer and pushed it closed. Yes,it read the disc and started to play it; but I'd been this close before. However, when I clicked "Rip CD" this time... it did. Not only did it rip this CD but it also devoured David Gray, breezed through Madonna, didn't even pause on ripping New Order and Prince was a push over. This just left 'the big one', the most difficult to rip of them all: "Minor Earth Major Sky". At first the CD span but didn't play and then the first track ripped but it then returned an error and the drive dropped off the list of available devices. Damn you Morten Harkett.

Yes, repeating the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is insanity; but I decided to restart, plug the drive back in and try again. I was not going to be beaten by an eighteen year old CD. And I'm pleased to say that I wasn't beaten, second time around the CD ripped without so much as a murmur of protest.

So, I have finally ripped all of the discs that were giving me trouble and am now about half way through ripping my CD collection. So if you will excuse me I'm about to pull box number 12 off the shelf and get stuck in.

Oh, and if you know of anyone who would like to buy a copy of aha's "Minor Earth Major Sky" do let me know.

Cheapo HiFi update

Having failed to acquire a turntable at a reasonable price on eBay, I resolved to blow the remainder of my budget on a brand new one. About 10 years ago I owned a SoundLab SL1200 copy that wasn't too bad, so rather than trust my precious wax to something that might damage them, I decided to buy the same turntable gain.

However, the G056C has been through several iterations over the years and the current version is the G056F.

The first difference I noticed between the G056C and the newer F was a separate power switch rather than it being incorporated in the target light (as it is with a real 1200). Other downgrades seem to include a terrible platter (with totally useless strobe marks), a crappy slip mat, downgraded cartridge and generally poor build quality. The only discernible upgrade in the move from the C to the F designation is the addition of a line output (presumably there is now a pre-amp in there).

The chief commonality between the old C and the new F is that they run slightly too slow at 33 1/3 rpm and far too fast at 45 rpm. A series of tweaks of the potentiometers on the underside now means it turns at the right speed; but why they can't set this correctly at the factory baffles me.

Instant upgrades involved swapping the cartridge and stylus for the one that came with my old G056C (I threw out the faulty turntable but kept the headshell/cartridge purely on a whim) and bought a better slip mat. I have the tracking weight at a smidge over 3g so it's not going to do too much damage. Following these changes the reproduction is reasonable for a machine that only costs £90. Yet I remain disappointed by the G056F. Never has the old adage of "You get what you pay for" rung more clearly in my ears.

But bear in mind this turntable is within easy reach of 2 children under the age of 5 and I am quite sure it will be abused at some stage. A few years of using SL-1200s have raised my expectations of turntables, so this retrograde step was always going to disappoint; but it's better than finding my children have ruined a nice SL-1200.

Incidentally I have looked at the prices of  new, old stock G056C machines on the Internet and they seem to be priced between £110 and £160. The C is definitely better than the F, but if I was spending £160 I would just continue to save up and get a SL1200 from eBay. A reasonable condition SL-1200 may be twice the price, but they are a hundred times better than the Soundlab in every single department.

I have also changed out the amp in the cheapo HiFi set up. I managed to obtain a Sony TA-FE370 for £21. Not only is this amp not damaged but it is contemporary with (and therefore matches the design of) my CDP-XE 370 CD player. The amp has a remote control that also works on the CD player - so the battered TA-F161 that started this whole thing is currently sitting idle.

Over the last couple of weeks I have also acquired a cassette deck for the princely sum of £20. However, the Sony TC-KE200 has proven so useful that it remains in my office set up and I will have to get another unit to go downstairs. If I can get another KE200 for around £20, my total spend will be £140 for a budget separates system. Not bad, not bad at all.

Cheapo Hi-Fi challenge: week 3

This week hasn't seen much activity for the Hi-Fi challenge. A new acquisition is winging its way to me, but it hasn't yet arrived. Unfortunately this new item is being delivered via Royal Fail (sorry Mail), so even if it does manage to get here, it will probably be in pieces.

One change I have made this week is to the RCA cables being used to cobble the separates together. When I first set the system up I used whatever I could find in the loft. However, the cables I used weren't of the best quality and some even had bent plugs. Therefore I resolved to purchase something better.

I decided that the budget could stretch to some Primewire HQ Platinum cables. At £5 they fit the bill perfectly; they are both 'budget' and of good quality. These cables are undoubtedly a step up from the rubbish I had been using and have impressed me so much that I have bought more for my system upstairs. I also have some in reserve for when new separates arrive.