Andronicus Dragon

I have been listening to Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - Sid n Susie Under The Covers Vol 1. CD .This is such a great reminder of how smart and intelligent pop used to beat at times. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Sid (Matthew Sweet, after his character's name in the Austin Powers band Ming Tea) and Susie (Susanna Hoffs, who joined him and Mike Myers in belting out "BBC" on the soundtrack) are in as fine voice as ever on Under the Covers, Vol. 1, a 15-song collection of tunes first made famous by the likes of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Who. And man, were they born to sing this stuff. Both the Bangles and Sweet discographies are derivative--in the best possible sense--of late-'60s pop-rock, and who didn't love the Merry-Go-Round, Grass Roots, Simon & Garfunkel, and Big Star covers Hoffs and company scattered among their originals? Recorded at Sweet's home studio in the Hollywood Hills, the album opens strong with "I See the Rain," a Marmalade song from 1967 that Jimi Hendrix called the year's best British single but was a hit only in the Netherlands. Maybe Sweet's stinging, ringing fretwork (he plays most of the non-percussion instruments on this disc) and Hoffs's throwback vocals will rectify that, nearly 40 years later. The two proceed to nail the Beatles' "And Your Bird Can Sing," one of the high points on Revolver, and score similarly with Fairport Convention's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" (Hoffs in full ballad mode), the Stone Poneys' "Different Drum," the Who's "The Kids Are Alright," Love's "Alone Again Or," and a pair of Neil Young numbers, "Cinnamon Girl" and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere." Some of the selections do miss the mark--Hoffs's smoky-sweet backing vocals seem a little misplaced on Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and "The Warmth of the Sun" was probably the wrong Beach Boys track for Sweet to attempt (Brian Wilson himself strains at those high notes nowadays). But by and large this is a delightful power-pop excursion. Van Dyke Parks's liner notes, keyboards, and string arrangements make it that much better, as do Sweet collaborator Ric Menck's drums, Ed Fotheringham's illustrations, and Henry Diltz's photographs (Hoffs looks as stunning today as she did when laying down All Over the Place). --Benjamin Lukoff

And you won't find it on Amazon <g>. I am familiar with the pediree of this release and it is a top notch piece. If you can hang in there getting it, it is well worth the time spent.

Its at the top of my NetFlix Que and should have already been shipped but has a small delay tagged to it.....who says they don't throttle <g>

---------------- On 3/15/2005 12:21:35 AM skonopa wrote: Exact Audio Copy (EAC) works pretty good and is completely free. It does take a little bit to setup (in that you also need to download "Lame" to do the MP3 encoding, which is also free), but once you do get it setup, it works quite nicely in both ripping and burning CD's However, it does not play anything, though. For that, I use good'ol Winamp. Been using it for many years, and still find it to be my prefered player. Tried many of the others, but always found myself returning back to the tried-n-true in Winamp. ---------------- Does EAC still burn just in TAO mode? Thats kinda a downer for me as I prefer DAO. Maybe if you are just doing regular cds it isnt a problem, but if you use it to burn DTS cds then every time the track changes your receiver has to lock on the DTS stream again. However, for the purpose it was intended for it cant be beat. I do find myself doing more actual recording than ripping to get past both the DC offset inherent in ripping and to give myself some headroom breathing space because of the massive amounts of compression most recording engineers today seem to love to use.

I just encode with a lossless format using ape or tta encoders. That way it takes up much less room on my hard drives and I can pretty much do what I want with them after I decode them back to wav. With the cost of hard drives being so low it doesnt even pay to burn them off to dvdr anymore, I just pop a new 160 gig drive in the usb2 enclosure and start again. I am rambling tho

thanks bra, all I am worried about now is my sub. I cant test it cause no computers are working yet. This is just sucky, as soon as I get it all stable as hell this bs happens. Hopefully I wont start to see the results of salt water on the stuff I was able to save.

gah, was afraid someone was gonna say that ----the metal part broke on either side of the hole that the connection passed thru. Seems to me to be rather weak there as the material looks like nothing more than pot metal rather than steel. To be honest with you, as much as I love them I was rather disappointed in the weakness there. Oh well, will give me a chance to get a new grill assembly---it was one of the 2 that I bought from Meugge--they one with the small crack in the plastic in the back.

Courtesy of hurricane Ivan a binding post broke off one of my RSX4's. It broke at the thin sides wheere the wire/banana plug went thru. Has anyone had any experiance in repairing or rigging it?. Mt Ultra sub also got a tad wet but so far I havent seen any problems but havent been able to test it as all 4 computers were destroyed also.

Bob, If you will listen closely to those lower bitrate mp3s you will hear artifacts like jangly cymbals. They just dont have the clarity of the higher bitrate encodes. the more you compress with a lossy encoder, the more info that is thrown away never to be retreived again. @Steeler---some of your questions have been answered, but to manually decode from mp3 to wav is very easy http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm get that and install it. Then you can right click on an mp3 file and there is a context menu to convert---convert to wav 44.1 Mhz / 16 bit and it will be cd ready Its easier to have all the mp3s you are going to convert in one directory. Doing it this way takes a load off of your CPU whilst it is burning.

This is what I am looking at ......My initial reason was to clean this rat hole up some. Four PCs in full towers take up alot of desk and floor space, not counting the cabling thats involved. I can get a rack that works with it and stack those puppies. I also thought after I read this post that it may not be too bad as a HTPC case as long as you aren't water-cooling or anything esoteric like that <g>. http://www.chenbro.com.tw/product/product.jsp?p=3&s=303&pid=24 May have to put some rubber feet on it if you use it as a stand-alone

a word of advice, I never burn my audio files any faster than 8x. I actually prefer 4x but this burner wont go that low. I have found that other devices have an easier time playing the disc if its burnt at a slower speed, Whilst 48 or 52x may be OK for data--including storing mp3 files, IMO it produces inferior cd audio discs. The same goes for video files u burn. Also, I kinda do it the old harder way by not letting the burner program decode the mp3s to wav on the fly. I decode my album to wav then burn those. If you can download lossless files (APE, FLAC,etc) you will also be better off as there is no degradation of the music stream that happens when you encode with a losst format like mp3. They are much larger but worth it. A good place to go for burning information is doom9.org. I am gonna have to try Ares out, thanks neomartic for the heads up on that. I am sorta tired of ED although they have damn near everything u can ever want. I fear tho if I get another DMCA letter from my cable company they are gonna de-provision me <g>. Without Cable broadband access I would just be a shell of a man. Good luck and be careful

ya they will----is what I used on mine. May have to finagle the mounting hardware around a bit, but they will mount

Would be great if Jeff Wayne did the soundtrack <g>

Besides just getting just plain old, it the absolute dearth of anything good from the recording industry. They are still too involved with ramming rap music and culture down our throats. The rest of the field gets re-issues and remasters----the remasters part isnt so bad tho. I have found out that as I get older that my base music likes stay the same but it keeps widening out. It runs from Rock to Electronica to Classical to Jazz to Gospel even. Even worse I find myself enthralled by Sarah Brightman who I used to make fun of my ex for listening to (I will never tell her tho). I am listening at the moment to Jackson Browne's Best of that has been repurposed for 5.1 DTS and thinking......What has happened to pop? It used to be semi intelligent anyhow. Now all we get is Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake WTF ?? /grouchy old man mode off

Go here, this is a great place for that type of info. I usually transcode to dts, which has some degradation of quality I know. http://www.dtsac3.com