I’ve been running dual-boot systems since December 2005. On both my desktop and laptop, I had a Windows partition and an openSUSE Linux partition. After using that basic setup for the past year and a half, it’s become clear to me that using two dual-boot systems is just not worth the effort. It’s simply too much work to keep four operating systems alive.

To that end, I’ve simplified my setup recently. I’ve gone to single boot setups with Windows XP on my desktop and the 64-bit version (x86-64) of openSUSE 10.2 on my laptop. And I must say it’s been a relief. Rather than needing to decide which operating system I was booting into each time, I can simply turn on the machine and go.

My goal in all of this was to get rid of Windows, but I haven’t quite gotten there. It’s useful occasionally for certain things. But overall, I think this split of duties has made a lot of sense. My laptop is the computer I take with me into the world. I use it for a variety of purposes – ranging from coding websites to doing email and writing. My desktop I use for similar but slightly different purposes. I do more multimedia production type activities on my desktop, and for that I find Windows to be a better solution.

So instead of getting rid of Windows entirely, I think I’ve hit upon a solution that, for me, balances out the different uses I put my desktop and my laptop to. I recently discovered too that the processor in my laptop is capable of running the 64-bit version of Linux. It came pre-installed with a 32-bit version of Windows – obviously not taking advantage of the capabilities of this laptop. At any rate, I installed the x86-64 version of openSUSE, and it’s been working great.

I don’t know why but running Linux seems to fit more in my mind with the “down in the groove” feeling I’ve been having lately in general. I’ve been listening to records a lot more and just feeling a lot more retro around my technology. I’ve always had vinyl, and it just seems natural. Linux I got into back in 1994 in college, and now it just seems natural to run it. My record player now is much more technologically advanced than the turntable I had growing up. And Linux has come a very long way since 1994. But both represent best-of-breed for me. Vinyl sounds awesome, and it’s just fun. I love the cover art of vinyl. And Linux just works plus it’s a technical platform – it takes special knowledge to run, and I have that knowledge.

I did some digging into various music blogs, and certainly there are a lot of blogs out there publishing MP3s of old, strange vinyl finds. But mostly I just wanted to record a couple of interesting links I discovered.

The first is for Turntable Lab of New York and Los Angeles. It’s a retail store that sells a variety of DJ gear and new vinyl, not limited to DJ fare. There’s a whole range of stuff on their site, and it looks like they do e-commerce so you can order and get hooked up with the latest in fashions and music from NY. I didn’t make it out to New York this summer as I had hoped but definitely next year I see the planets aligning for a visit. Turntable Lab will definitely be on my list of places to visit.

Another good link I recently discovered on the vinyl tip is Insound.com. They’ve got a great selection of music in a variety of formats, but their new vinyl selection is superb. They also have a huge range of 45 RPM singles (AKA the 7”). Lots to like there.

I haven’t ordered from either place, but their websites look promising. Couple these sites with MusicDirect, and you’ve got a get tab on the state of vinyl today.

Bonus Link: Rhino Records has a limited selection of vinyl on their label, but it’s definitely an interesting selection.

I’ve talked here before about the loudness of modern CDs. CDs these days are a compressed, fatiguing affair. The difference between CDs mastered fifteen and twenty years ago is striking to today’s CDs. It’s a huge difference, and all of that extra loudness today is coming at the expense of the music.

Slashdot linked to an article in IEEE Spectrum entitled The Future of Music by Suhas Sreedhar. It’s spread over three pages and is an excellent introduction to this topic. Sreedhar looks at music mastering of the past – looking briefly at how record companies tried to make vinyl louder. He thens delves into the current state of music including not only CDs but also formats such as MP3 and Apple’s AAC.

The curious thing and an interesting question that the article raised in my mind is why haven’t the newer digital formats taken off. There are two higher resolution formats out there. One is called SACD, or Super Audio CD, and the other is DVD-A, or DVD Audio. Despite the CD in its name, SACD is actually also written to a DVD-style disc. Both of these formats resolve the issue of loudness as explained in the article, but neither has made much of a dent. They were initially released seven years ago, but finding albums in either format is difficult if not impossible with a poor selection of releases to boot.

Part of the problem is that both formats address the problem of the CD, that is, that you can freely rip a CD to your hard drive. As far as I know, there is no legal way to rip a SACD disc to your hard drive, and SACD especially seems to be tied to the physical media. SACD basically doesn’t exist as a computerized format. So if you purchase a DVD-A or a SACD disc, you’re tied to playing it in a player attached to a home stereo. You won’t be able to play it on your computer, and you won’t be able to play it in the car or wherever else you may want to listen to the music.

Being that tied to the physical medium is, these days, a huge downside. It’s hard to justify an expenditure in those formats with such major limitations. And because they’ve made such a small impact in the marketplace, there’s no guarantee that these formats will be around in a few years or that one would even be able to find players for such formats.

Sreedhar makes a good point that the loudness of modern CDs is also apparent in digital downloads of music. Digital downloads are essentially just compressed versions of the CD songs, so the ills of the CDs have been visited upon the lower quality download market. Apple made a step in the right direction by releasing some albums with 256 Kbit encoding, unlike the crappy 128 Kbit recording they’ve been pushing for years. Unfortunately for digital music you’ll still pay almost as much as for the actual CD, but the quality is much less. I still like finding albums on vinyl when I can. I don’t mind being tied to my turntable to play records. But it just seems natural that a digital format such as SACD should be computer-accessible.

Update: A comment on Slashdot pointed to a Wikipedia entry on the loudness war. I was interested to see that they mentioned Lily Allen’s album Alright, Still in this Guardian article as being mastered too loud. I have a limited pressing of Alright, Still on vinyl, and clearly they did not remaster the recording for vinyl. It is easily the worst sounding LP in my collection. When you put that recent album side-by-side with just about anything else, the difference is hideously clear.

Well, I renewed my Wall Street Journal subscription in July, but issues about Rupert Murdoch aside, I appeared on the local Fox affiliate’s newscast on Friday. Fox 11 WLUK-TV of Green Bay did a segment on their Friday 5 p.m. newscast about the 25th anniversary of the CD. The first CD was released in August 1982. View the video.

I happened to be in the Exclusive Co., a local record shop, around noon or so on Friday. The Fox crew – reporter Evan Perrault and a cameraman – were recording interviews with employees and customers alike. I happened to be in the right spot at the right time. I was looking at the vinyl selection and Evan came over and asked if I preferred vinyl or CDs to digital downloads. I said something about digital downloads being somewhat ephemeral – easy to accidentally delete or lose – compared to the physicality of vinyl and CDs.

Evan used a brief clip of my comments – I didn’t get my name on the screen but still! I was on TV! For a couple of seconds!

For your viewing pleasure, WLUK has placed that segment online. Check it out!

If your musical tastes tend toward the alternative side of the spectrum, then you’re in luck for vinyl. A lot of the hip, young bands that skew towards the alt have a much higher propensity to releasing vinyl releases of their music. This also includes bands on indie labels. I’m sure the record labels make bands pay dearly for the privilege and trouble of releasing an album on vinyl, but for those of us who still regularly listen to vinyl it’s great to see that steady stream of new releases.

The late ‘80 were a turbulent time for vinyl. Beginning in 1985 (and ‘83 for classical), virtually all releases had a CD version. I don’t know the exact crossover point when CD sales eclipsed vinyl, but it was quick and violent. Once the economics dropped out of vinyl the labels stopped releasing it in droves. The ’90s were an increasingly bad time for vinyl. But at some point the downward trend stopped. And in recent years there has been a resurgent vinyl market. Vinyl now gets some of the respect it deserves for sound quality that people were quick to dismiss in the late ’80s. And now with modern CDs being mastered louder and with less dynamic range, the pleasure of listening to vinyl is even more apparent.

One distinct change for the better from the end of vinyl at the end of the ’80s to the resurgence of vinyl in the ’00s is that the vinyl printed today is much higher quality. This quality is readily apparent in the weight of modern discs. Releases etched on heavy 180g vinyl LPs are very common these days. 180 grams of vinyl in the ’80s was pretty much unheard of except for very limited edition audiophile releases, usually of classical recordings.

The record companies have pretty much decided that anyone who listens to vinyl (excluding DJ/techno fare) is an audiophile. If you’re stuck in the ’70s then you’ll have your scratchy old Boston records to listen to, but if you’re willing to listen to great current bands from Kaiser Chiefs to Goldfrapp to Arctic Monkeys, then you’ll be richly rewarded with a great listening experience. In the ’80s there were releases printed on such cheap, lightweight vinyl that you could bend the record from end to end. It’s a pleasure dome of good sounds. Even ordinary run-of-the-mill releases are printed these days on excruciatingly good vinyl. What production facilities still exist for the creation of LPs have made the economics viable for the highest quality vinyl ever.

The most important thing is to find a good source for new vinyl. Whether you buy online from MusicDirect.com or have a local shop that caters to your needs, it doesn’t matter unless supporting a local business is important to you. Don’t have a vinyl shop in your area? Start one! Like the Record Collector in Iowa City, newly on Linn Street, you can keep the new and used CDs in the front, and have a spacious area for vinyl in the back. Or like the Exclusive Co. in Appleton, you can have a wall of new releases on vinyl, just like record shops used to do.

I’m enjoying a series of photographs by J Henry Fair entitled Industrial Scars. It’s engaging work – and amazing too, at the colors and spectrums of industrial work. There’s lots to like here. You can also find his photo essay in the August 2007 issue of Harper’s. His main portfolio site is here.

I recently had the good fortune to enjoy a drink at the Monarch Tavern in Fountain City, Wisconsin. I ordered ‘The Big Fellow’, which, as best as I can recall, was four dashes of Angostura bitters and equal parts (approximately 2 ounces) Michael Collins Blended Irish Whiskey, Club Soda, and 7-Up poured over ice in a rocks glass and stirred. It was quite a tasty and refreshing cocktail.

I wish that I had inquired into its origin. Usually recipes like this come from a spirit’s distributor, but that isn’t so in this case. The Sidney Frank Importing Company lists ‘The Big Fellow’ simply as Michael Collins Single Malt served neat. So I don’t know who created it or what their inspiration was. I suppose it is not too much different from a Mike or Michael Collins, which is a Tom Collins with Irish whiskey instead of gin. Yet, the blended whiskey and 7-Up combination reminded me more of a Seven and Seven, the club soda made me think of a Presbyterian, and the generous dashes of bitters were reminiscent of a Horse Feathers.

I will report back if I uncover anything interesting about The Big Fellow’s genealogy. In the meantime, I encourage imbibers to investigate as many Big Fellows as they can.

I’ve been digging around eBay.com and Half.eBay.com lately, and it’s a veritable treasure trove of obscure but great music for stunningly low prices. I mean, if you want to collect items by the Cure, you’re going to pay more. But seeing as a lot of bands I really liked in the late ’80s and early ’90s were pretty unknown, it suddenly becomes much easier and much less expensive to track them down. I worked in the local mall music store in high school, and in college I worked as music director at the college station. So I got exposed to a lot of music I wouldn’t otherwise have been had I not been in those positions. And the strange and somewhat sad thing about this is that I know of so much good music that was released with little fanfare on independent labels that maybe got some play on college radio stations but never sold many copies. And that’s a damn shame. I’ve been listening to Crushing a Flood by East Ash. I forgot how incredible that CD is. It came out in 1990, and it’s really amazing. I found it for under $5 on Half.eBay.com.

So I’m selling my first item on eBay right now. I thought I’d give it a go. I opted for the search listings thumbnail image and a 10-day auction. I hope somebody bids, and that I don’t lose out the $0.95 it cost me to list the item. But eBay remains a great place to find those rare, obscure albums that tickled my ear back in college. eBay also has a nice selection of used vinyl if you’re going that route. Vinyl can be searched for with a variety of variables, such as size of disc (e.g. 12”) or speed (e.g. 33-1/3 or 45 RPM).

While I’m on the subject of East Ash, one of my favorite record labels of that era was a tiny one-man label out of Louisiana called C’est La Mort. They carried both East Ash albums, Area, Heavenly Bodies, M-1 Alternative, and specialized in dreamy, ethereal stuff, although East Ash are very bass-driven. Anyway, I stumbled across this site that has a pretty complete discography of all the albums and singles that C’est La Mort released over their 9 or 10 year existence. Check out some of the Doctor Death compilations for a sampling of tracks from the various artists on the label. I’m amazed by how many C’est La Mort CDs and vinyl albums I still have in my collection. This is some good music.

One accomplishment I was proud of from my days as music director of KWLC was vastly expanding the number of small independent labels that sent us stuff. I sent many letters and made many phone calls towards that end. Labels want their music heard regardless of whether they are a major label or an independent. Independents didn’t always have the budgets to send stuff out in those days to many radio stations. So a small independent taking you on was a sign of trust and I promoted those discs to the DJs. That work brought a lot of interesting music into that tiny Iowa town, and hopefully it turned on some other people – either listeners or DJs to what was out there beyond major label fare. Of course that whole equation has completely changed with the advent of Internet distribution of music. It definitely levels the playing field for independents. Even bands without contracts are getting notice, but that’s a blog post for another evening.

In some respects, the past 10 or 15 years have been a golden age of vinyl. While the majority of mainstream artists no longer release their albums on vinyl, many of the artists I care about still release vinyl editions of their albums. This ranges from Stereolab to Smashing Pumpkins to Of Montreal to Interpol and many, many others. Also, the vinyl editions being released are lush. Often they are in gatefold sleeves with artwork not found in the CD version. Vinyl has turned into a cost-is-no-object format, and when the graphic designers are asked to produce for the vinyl edition, they go all out.

That said, I’ve got a couple of pet peeves with newly released vinyl. I came of age in the ’80s and early ’90s. It was a time when the CD was just gaining traction. Record labels are reissuing a lot of old albums on vinyl, and I must say I’m pleased as punch when I can go to the local record shop and pick up a bright, shiny, new copy of Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction on vinyl for $10.

The first pet peeve is price. Prices vary widely on new vinyl. There’s a lot of stuff that can be had for $14 or $15, but some record labels seem to think that vinyl being a niche product that they should charge for the privilege. So some new records run $24 or more. The $24+ vinyl doesn’t seem to be of any higher quality than the $15 vinyl, but for some reason they think they can charge more for it.

The other pet peeve about new vinyl is that because of the advent of CDs, recording sessions have lengthened. In the ’80s an album typically came in around 42-45 minutes long. That fit nicely onto two sides of vinyl. Now with CDs going as much as 80 minutes, there’s an opportunity to spread these things out a bit.

Unfortunately, the record companies have dealt with this since the early ’90s by releasing the vinyl edition on four sides of vinyl. There are a few occasions when this makes sense – when a CD nears the 80 minutes mark, it works perfectly to split the album up to two records. But most CDs are only slightly above what a single record will hold. A 50-minute CD split onto 4 sides of vinyl is painstaking. What you have is a record that has only two or three songs on each side. It’s hard to sit back and enjoy the music when you’re flipping records every 8 or 10 minutes.

The solution to this is simple: leave one side of the vinyl unprinted. That is, either split the album equally over three sides of vinyl, or alternatively, fit as much of the album on one record and leave the spillover to the third side. I know that might shake up some people in terms of the ordering of a record, but let’s face it: ordering a CD to fall over four sides of vinyl, when it’s only 50 or 60 minutes long, is an abysmal decision.

So those are my two pet peeves about new albums on vinyl: high pricing on random albums and spreading one album over four sides of two discs.

But I will be the first to admit that these don’t stop me from enjoying the fresh bounty of vinyl out there. Like I said, the vinyl being put out these days puts a lot of the ’80s vinyl to shame. The quality of new vinyl is the highest it’s ever been. These are records that will last decades.

Okay, and as a bonus for those of you still reading, I did have one pet peeve with vinyl in the late ’80s. At the time, record companies were trying to get people switched over from cassettes and records to CDs. So in some cases, they offered a bonus track on the CD that wasn’t available on the LP or cassette. Usually that missing track ended up on a 12” single from the album, so in only a few cases I went without that track because I was a fastidious record collector back in the day. Now it’s come back around the other way – for example, the recent Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? on vinyl came with 4 (four!) extra songs. That was a great use of four sides of vinyl. Awesome!