The Death of Dynamic Range A Chronology of the Compact Disc Loudness Wars

From www.261.gr

Here is the most simplified and revealing article with proofing images
for nowadays nasty “trendy” techniques? :( For mastering CD’s which they call it “Hyper Compressed” or "Radio Like" or whatever else, U may call it "rubbish".

Master minds of music industry think to apply that way of “hyper compressed” processing for all of they CD’s releases with their “new talents?” making it more louder or “radio like” just to impress the music customers especially young peoples with only one traget, just to“sell” as much as possible copies, or maybe they think “Bring back on life” an already “dead” music market. They have wrong, the only they do is to “kill the music” if there is any remains :)

Of course the trick of "louder is better" is not new on music media, all radio stations apply “hyper compressed & clipping” techniques on his broadcasting sound with dedicated expensive processing units, but on analogue radio which is an medium with limited and narrow dynamics max of 40db that “hyper compressed & clipping” way is a must to keep radio stations under the legally of 75khz max, the CD don’t have such limitations, so why they continuous to apply that damn “hyper compressed & clipping” ?

Personally only one reasonable answer I can find “they try to adapt younger peoples to a feckless “deaf and blind” customers” :( Isn’t a sad ascertainment? Yes it is, so do something. Stop now that awfully situation.

Before years they pass on youth people mp3 as the most High Quality source of today make in it a trendy a must to have, I pod etc, now they strikes again with the domination of that loud & distorted sound as a status of High Quality abuses the well known unique benefits of Compact Disc medium :(

That horribly distorted processing method is not applying it only on current CD releases but and older CD’s as well, u must be very suspicious on every old CD which notice it as “Remastered”, an bad example is the “Rumors” by Fleetwood Mac, Is full hyper compressed plus severe clipped, the voice of Steve Nicks on “Dreams” sounds like “donkey's bray :(”.

Fortunately there are some honest audio engineers which refuse on that trend and apply processing with much respect on classic albums without any clipping. Two excellent examples which is real “remastered” and is a reference for audiophile passionate best for sound check of home Hi End sets and for fine tune of any Radio processing unit. That two excellent “remastered” CD’s are “Aja” released at 1999 and “Gaucho” released at 2000 by Steely Dan both are produced by MCA.

People must be aware/inform for that major catastrophic situation, from artists to CD customers or music lovers, to radio program directors, people must learn how music company’s abuses the product just to “sell” more, customers must stop buying any of today CD releases all are mastered with “hyper compressed” way is no matter the format from Jazz to rNb all sounds “distorted” NOT loud, Radio Stations must refuse to play at his on air any “hyper compressed” CD, valuable expensive high tech radio sound processing units sounds “scrap” when play that damn horribly “hyper compressed” CD’s.

The original article has presented at "http://rvcc2.raritanval.edu/ktek9053/cdpage" but is no longer available there (really I wonder why? Guess what! :) is re-presented intact from www.mindspring.com/~mrichter

1983
Bryan Adams - Cuts Like a Knife (A&M CD-3288)
This represents the earliest stage of CD audio mastering techniques. One of the big attractions of the CD format was its very wide dynamic range and absence of surface noise, so the first generation of CDs that were released made full use of this.
The CD's digital audio format is inherently limited to a peak audio amplitude that is referenced as "0 dB" or "100%". Unlike the variability of analog recording techniques, this limit cannot be exceeded. If you try to, you end up with a waveform that is horribly distorted, due to the top and/or bottom of the wave being harshly limited to the maximum level -- or "clipped." Early CDs were mastered with full respect to this loudness limit and did not use any clipping.
In this case, Bryan Adams' breakthrough album -- although full of stereotypically "loud" rock & roll music -- was mastered with a great amount of "headroom"; the highest peak level on the entire disc is only 74.8%, or -2.52 dB. This peak level only occurs a single time on the disc, in Track 9, whose waveform graph is shown here (with the stereo Left channel on top, and Right channel on bottom):



Obviously this peak (which occurs at around 2:16 in the song) is not even close to being clipped, and in fact the loudness of the whole CD could be increased by 2.5 dB without sacrificing any quality or harming the content of the recordings in any way. That single peak would simply be raised up to just below the 100% limit. You can think of this as a short person raising up the height-adjustable driver's seat in their car. They would sit at a higher level, with their head just below the ceiling, but not touching it -- in this case, literal "headroom".

1988
Willie Nelson - What a Wonderful World (Columbia CK 44331)
This is an example of what I was just talking about. With this CD, there is a single peak on the entire disc which does reach the 100% limit, but yet is still not "clipped", and every other track on the album has a lower peak level. Here is the waveform of Track 6, showing the single 100% (0 dB) peak near the beginning:



And here is a highly "zoomed in" view of this peak, to prove that it is not clipped:



This represents the extreme of the most conservative form of CD mastering; where only a single peak, occuring only in a single track, reaches the maximum level, and everything else on the disc is below it. However, as we shall see, as the years went by and CDs became more and more popular, this pristine form of CD audio production became more and more rare!

1987
George Michael - Faith (Columbia CK 40867)
Yes, we are stepping back a year, in this case to show a more contemporary pop music CD. On this particular CD, most of the tracks contain multiple peaks which reach the 100% limit, but are still not clipped. Here is the waveform of the title track "Faith":



So, there are multiple instances in the song where the 100% / 0 dB peak level is reached. But are these peaks clipped? I looked at all of them to check, and none of them were. Here is an example of a few of these 100% peaks in the song, and as you can see, the shape of the waveform is still fully preserved:







By zooming in on one of these peaks, I can illustrate just what I have been talking about:



In this instance, seven samples (or "digital snapshots" of the sound) in a row are shoved up against the limit, and they have nowhere to go, so they just form a flat line -- hence, our old friend known as "clipping". A perfectly flat line like this never occurs in audio recording unless the audio is purposely clipped. What it is doing is generating a very unnatural "square wave", and when you play back this square wave, you get a burst of distorted sound. CD digital audio runs at 44,100 samples per second. In this case, seven of these samples formed a square wave. That's 7/44100th of a second -- far too quick to be directly heard. But when you add many of these clipped samples in each second of the song, the effect becomes more and more noticeable as "clipping distortion" -- a harsh, crackly sound that is very unpleasant to the ear -- as we shall see below.

1995
The Rembrandts - L.P. (EastWest/Atlantic 61752-2)
Everybody loves "I'll Be There For You", the theme song from the TV show "Friends", right? Well, have you ever looked at its waveform graph? Yikes!



Although this particular track only reaches a peak level of 96.2% -- which is below the 100% limit and theoretically should be free from "clipping" -- when you zoom in, you'll see that many of the MANY peaks that are strictly limited to this level (causing the "solid block of sound" effect) are clipped, like this one:



The sad part is that when these peaks are clipped, or "hacked off" as I like to call it, the original content and quality of the sound is lost forever. Although there are techniques to "guess" at the missing part of the waveform and "re-draw" a curved wave out of the part that was formerly a flat line, this is not accurate to the original sound; it is merely an "artist's reconstruction", so to speak. Thus, when aggressive peak clipping is used, the record company is DESTROYINGpart of the music. And if you thought this song was bad enough, hold on and be prepared for a very sickening sight below...

1999
Ricky Martin (C2/Columbia CK 69891)
By now I don't think I have to explain what you see below. And in this case, it probably will help explain why your ears start to hurt after listening to "Livin' La Vida Loca" even for just a short time!



And as we zoom in, the audio carnage is apparent:



The Radio Loudness Fallacy
Okay, so the end result of all this stuff shown above is that CDs have gotten louder and louder over the years. But that also makes them sound louder when played on the radio, right?
WRONG! Every radio station uses "audio processing" to accomodate a wide variety of audio programming and deliver a consistent volume level, so that you're not always reaching for the volume control to turn up quiet songs and turn down loud songs. The goal of this is to make every song come out of your radio at a fairly equal volume level. The station's audio processing does this by carefully compressing, limiting, and yes, even clipping the audio. It also equalizes the bass and treble levels so one song doesn't sound bassy and muffled and the next doesn't sound tinny and shrill.
When properly adjusted, this audio processing can work wonders, and gives radio stations just the type of sound they're looking to provide their listeners with, be it a soft and relaxing Classical music station, or a loud and brash Heavy Metal rock station. But... this audio processing relies on the peaks and valleys of the incoming audio; it raises up the quiet spots and limits down the loud spots.
BUT WHEN EVERYTHING IS CONSISTENTLY LOUD ALL THE TIME, LIKE THIS SENTENCE, the radio station's audio processor has nothing to do but to limit down the volume level, and since the incoming music contains virtually no variations in loudness, then it stays consistently quiet when played on the air. It's like walking along a street and passing a construction zone where they have a jack-hammer going. Due to the consistently loud noise, you have no choice but to cover your ears until it stops.
Compare that example to a fireworks display. You may cover you ears during the explosions, but otherwise, things are much quieter and you could actually amplify the sounds around you and not damage your hearing. This is like the CDs of the 1980s shown above. The high peaks get limited down so that the radio station doesn't exceed the signal level which it can transmit, but otherwise the rest of the audio actually gets raised in level, so that it comes out louder on the air.
And you can get this same effect at home by simply TURNING UP YOUR STEREO'S VOLUME CONTROL. You want your music to be loud? You can make it loud yourself -- and the full quality and dynamic range of the music is preserved. Yes, even the Bryan Adams CD from 1983 can be played louder than Ricky Martin's horribly produced CD -- the choice is up to you. But when all of your CDs are recoreded to be loud right on the discs themselves, you don't have this choice anymore; you no longer have a variety of "loud" music and "quiet" music to choose from and to play at a volume level that suits your musical taste. The record companies are not only filling your CDs with distorted, corrupted audio, they are forcing you to listen to your music in a certain manner -- do you really want that?

Meanwhile, in Europe...
At least for some record companies "across the pond", it took a lot longer for the "loudness wars" to catch up with them than it did in the USA. Take, for example, the original April 1999 CD single release "Swear It Again" by Westlife (RCA/BMG 74321 66206 2) -- which was the first of a record-breaking string of #1 U.K. hits for this Irish pop group:



This is just like the 1988 Willie Nelson CD shown far above on this page. Only a single peak during the entire song reaches maximum level -- in this case, 97.1%, and it is not clipped:



But a funny thing happened to this very same song when it ended up on Westlife's first full album (RCA/BMG 74321 713212) later in the year:



That may look like a drastic increase in loudness, and it is, but notice that as compared to American pop music of the 1990s, it still has a decent amount of "wiggle room" for the peaks and valleys of the sound to occur. And if we zoom in, only five peaks during the entire song occur at the maximum level, and NONE OF THEM ARE CLIPPED, as you can see from these two:



This is pretty much what I would consider to be the limit of RESPONSIBLE CD PRODUCTION. It allows the music to sound "loud" without DESTROYING the audio through the use of peak clipping.
But, alas, the influence of American pop music became too great, and the U.K. record companies felt they had to respond by also resorting to the same tricks for their music. Here is an example from 2000, the first track from Westlife's second album "Coast To Coast" (RCA/BMG 74321 824302):



What I don't get is that this song has its peak level set unnaturally low, to only 88.1% out of the 100% possible -- and yet, even with over 1 dB of "headroom" to work with, the audio is still clipped in numerous places during the song:



You might just write this off as somebody setting the recording level a bit low, but it is interesting to compare it to the same song on the Asian release of this album (RCA/BMG 74321 803772):



The peak level is now much closer to the CD's maximum limit -- in this case 99.3% -- and at least some of the peaks and valleys can still be seen amongst the highly compressed audio. But, unfortunately, when zoomed in, even this dynamically superior Asian release also used clipping on some of the peaks:



Note that in each case above, when clipping is present, I have picked the most clipped example out of the entire song; that is, the instance which has the highest number of "flat-topped" samples. So, while this Asian version still contains clipping, it is less drastically clipped than the U.K. release, while it actually has a higher peak level. Are Asian ears more sensitive to clipping distortion than British ears? Maybe the record company knows something we don't....

Acid Hose

Click on the picture...

Khoomei (Tuvan Throat Singing) DIY

The partials (fundamental and overtones) of a sound wave made by the human voice can be selectively amplified by changing the shape of the resonant cavities of the mouth, larynx and pharynx. This resonant tuning allows the singer to create apparently more than one pitch at the same time (the fundamental and a selected overtone), while in effect still generating a single fundamental frequency with his/her vocal folds.



Khoomei, basic - begin by producing a long, steady note with an open, relaxed mouth and throat. by altering lip and tongue positions to say vowels, ``oooo... ohhh.... ayyy.... ahhh..... eeee....'', you will hear different overtones in ascending pitch. Cupping a hand to your ear may help you to identify these initially. Maintain one tone as you tighten your throat and stomach muscles slightly. If you choke, try a lower fundamental. If you begin coughing, go into this tightening over a period of time to avoid damage to your voice. Hard coughing is punishing to vocal cords.

You should now be making ``electronic'' sounding vowels. If any of these are extended with subtle changes to the tongue, lips, or jaw (changing one element at a time as in any controlled experiment), separate overtones will gain definition. The sounds you create are feedback leading to finer mouth control.



It may be difficult to sort out the overtones created by each position. Discover them as you work out a scale above one steady fundamental. Eventually simple melodies will emerge within a limited range. As you consciously create melody, avoid the temptation to alter the fundamental. This is basic khoomei...

Search for: Khoomei, Tuva, Throat singing or Overtone singing.
Links:
http://www.fotuva.org/music/emory.html
http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/tuva/tuva.html

"Music is frozen architecture", Goethe

The Philips Pavillon, Brussels, Expo 1958.

Philips approached Le Corbusier who replied:
"I will not make a pavilion for you but an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; light, color image, rhythm and sound joined together in an organic synthesis."



At initial meetings, Le Corbusier gave a rough outline of the look and function of the event.

* The interior was to be shaped in a manner similar to the stomach of a cow, with the concept that audience members would enter in groups of 500 at ten-minute intervals.
* For two minutes, as the audience filed in through a curved passageway, they would hear a short transition piece. Then the room would go into darkness, and spectators, who remained standing, would then be subject to the interior music and lights for eight minutes.
* Colored lights, images, and film would be shown all around them. Music (organized sound) would be played over a huge array of speakers, surrounding and traversing the audience. At the close of the eight-minute piece, the spectators would exit, "digested," through another exit while the next group filed in.
* In this way, 20,000 visitors a day would be able to visit the pavilion over the five months of the fair. The project was to be managed by Le Corbusier's protege designer Iannis Xenakis, who would also create the transition music.
* Le Corbusier would provide the images to be projected during a 480 second multi-media event.
* No attempt would be made to synchronize the visuals with the music. Any correspondences that did occur would happy accidents, except for a specified moment of silence six minutes into the work.

More here.

Cinatas?

The Beatles were involved in the spread of backmasking both as a recording technique and as the center of a controversy. The latter has its roots in an event in 1969, when WKNR-FM DJ Russ Gibb received a phone call from a student at Eastern Michigan University who identified himself as "Tom". The caller asked Gibb about a rumor that Beatle Paul McCartney had died, and claimed that the Beatles song "Revolution 9" contained a backward message confirming the rumor. Gibb played the song backwards on his turntable, and heard "Turn me on, dead man … turn me on, dead man … turn me on, dead man…"

Backmasking has also been used to record statements perhaps too critical or explicit to be used forwards. Frank Zappa used backmasking to avoid censorship of the track "Hot Poop", from We're only in it for the Money (1968). The released version contains at the end of its side "A" the backmasked message "Better look around before you say you don't care. / Shut your f...ing mouth 'bout the length of my hair. / How would you survive / If you were alive / shitty little person?" . This profanity-laced verse, originally from the song "Mother People", was censored by Verve Records, so Zappa edited the verse out, reversed it, and inserted it elsewhere in the album as "Hot Poop" (though even in the backward message the word "fucking" is censored). More.
And a backmasking tsil here.

It's not about music

But this is clearly one of the most incredible vehicle ever built... And it's Russian.

Théo Jansen, The Hague, Netherlands, Born 1948.

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."



Inspiring, innovative, mindblowing...





http://www.strandbeest.com
http://www.strandbeestmovie.com/
http://www.cove.org/ape/demo2.htm

Drive Time history

During the last years, we received many emails about the re-releasing of Drive Time, an early root of Firstcask. By then we replied "take it easy you'll get your hands on it for sure". Though we didn't know when that would happen to be honest. As you may know, Drive Time has been first released as a bonus cassette for the "FSK005" album back in the year 2000. Considering the great enthousiasm that raised for both the album and the cassette we wanted to press this one on vinyl and having another bonus cassette next to it. Just to continue offering free stuff with our sales to have the pleasure to give pleasure or something... How comes it didn't happen straight away? Sure we messed up a bit on the schedule. But you know the score with belgian latin boys... You don't? Good! Then when we finally were ready, Andy came up with the second cassette, but distributors told us it wasn't that wise because cassette players disappeared from the market! I heard there is still that flee market round the corner though! You sure? Not handy and expensive to ship but there is some kind of poetry in this. Ok, fair enough, I'm also slave of a banker who has my balls in his palm and squeeze it from time to time a bit like how Chuck Norris does when strengthening his hands. Tough I recall that by the time we shipped our catalogue through lorries carrying vegetables across Europe. We even reached the japanese shore with the diplomatic wallet, and other remote areas thanks to backpackers or friends traveling around with a bunch of records in their bags. They simply were meeting people, having a shared meal while listening to the music and then selling the records. That brought us much satisfaction as we acheived to bring the music straight from the musician's fingers to the ears of any unknown happy ravers. It worked quite well at the time but was more than exhausting to maintain. Especially to collect money. Can you blame one of these wayfarers spending the benefits just made on buying that boat ticket to get out of Taiwan? Or for that slideshow for kids in Senegal were there is no screen but well a white horse to project on to "for not that much". Quite poetic indeed but the financial results remained at sea level. Still it is. And water is rising! But Weme records is there to give a hand. Cheers mate! Then together we are proud to bring you the brew which stayed for 10 years in the cask. This is half an image as the metalworks stayed untouched since 2003 at the pressingplant. We called them every two years to make sure they wouldn't chuck it in the bin. That would have been a shame because it took us multiple sessions and a few lacquers to cut this piece onto acetate. Nearly tirty minutes per side from sparkling water to deep bass. How to describe Drive Time other than being a wayfarer's anthem? First Cask wayfaring arose early 2000 when we first traveled together with Andy and Joy (Andy's girlfriend of the time who appears on the cover) from Hull to the North East of England. We went up to Whitby, where Dracula's coffin ashored. Not that far away from Robin Hood's bay if you're familiar with that beautiful region. We drove for hours by bus and taxi with litterally hundreds of Ceephax unreleased tracks (earliests from 1997 I think) while staring at tortured trees, windy landscapes, ruined abbays, english seagulls and english carpets... TBC

Optophonic piano, Wladimir Baranoff Rossiné, 1916, "L'avant-garde russe"

"Imagine that every key of an organ’s keyboard immobilises in a specific position, or moves a determined element, more or less rapidly, in a group of transparent filters which a beam of white light pierces, and this will give you an idea of the instrument Baranoff-Rossiné invented.

There are various kinds of luminous filters: simply coloured ones optical elements such as prisms, lenses or mirrors; filters containing graphic elements and, finally, filters with coloured shapes and defined outlines. If on the top of this, you can modify the projector’s position, the screen frame, the symmetry or asymmetry of the compositions and their movements and intensity; then, you will be able to reconstitute this optical piano that will play an infinite number of musical compositions. The key word here is interpret, because, for the time being, the aim is not to find a unique rendering of an existing musical composition for which the author did not foresee a version expressed by light. In music, as in any other artistic interpretation, one has to take into account elements such as the talent and sensitivity of the musician in order to fully understand the author’s mind-frame. The day when a composer will compose music using notes that remain to be determined in terms of music and light, the interpreter’s liberty will be curtailed, and that day, the artistic unity we were talking about will probably be closer to perfection..."

More at the Wladimir Baranoff Rossiné's website.

Seventy Years of Broadcasting in Belgium

By Richard E. Wood
This article was originally published in the August 1984 edition of FRENDX, now The Journal of the North American Shortwave Association. It appears here without permission of NASWA.

"Un, deux, trois, quatre .... díx. Allo, allo. Poste radiotélegraphique et radioteléphonique, pres de Bruxelles. Messieurs les amateurs de télégraphie sans fil, nous allons vous faire entendre un concert dédié á Sa Majesté la Reine Elisabeth... " The first selection was the aria from "Tosca" sung by a vocalist whose name is unintelligible in the primitive recording which survives.

More here.

Raymond Scott, New York, 1908-1994

"What can you say about a man who inspired cartoon melodies and bebop, invented Frank Zappa and electronic music, and still found time to work for-Motown?"
- Andy Partridge, songwriter & leader of XTC

"Raymond Scott was like an audio version of Andy Warhol; he preceded Pop-Art sensibilities, and he played with that line between commercial art and fine art, mixing elements of both worlds together. I love and respect Raymond Scott's work, and it influenced me a lot. I'm a big fan.''
- Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO

"Raymond Scott's music gets better as it gets older. When it first appeared, it was so bizarre it could not be categorized. Now, it is no less innovative and comic, but it begins to occupy a serious role in our total music-appreciation."
- Dick Hyman, musician

In 1946 Raymond scott founded the Manhattan research inc., one of the very first studios of electronic music in the world.

He also created The Talking Alarm Clock and fascinating musical instruments like The Orchestra Machine, The Karloff, The Bassline Generator, The Circle Machine, The Clavivox , The Videola, The Rhythm Synthesizer, The Pitch Sequencer, The Juxtaposition Matrix, The Synthesized Gong, The Melody Maker, The Rhythm Guitar Simulator or The Electronium-Scott plus a large number of patents used by the musical industry. That's a boy!

There is numerous websites referencing his work and audio simples are fairly easy to find as well. Just take a plunge!

RCA record manufacturing process 1942 part 1

Direct cut with a Scully lathe, straight onto wax... Beautiful...

RCA record manufacturing process 1942 part 2

The Nature Of Sound - 1948

A must read...

About unusual types of gramophone recordings. Beautiful.

Lee De Forest, 1873-1961

American scientist,

Invents the Audion grid-triode vacuum tube in 1906 used as a detector of radio signals, an audio amplifier and an oscillator for transmitting.

De Forest is credited with the Birth of public radio broadcasting when on January 12, 1910, he conducted experimental broadcast of part of the live performance of Tosca and, the next day, a performance with the participation of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso from the stage of Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.



Caruso, breaks hearts and glass with his voice, also haunting Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

I remember reading in that excellent book from Suzan J. Douglas that De Forest was a meloman but couldn't afford a seat at the opera. He was relentlessly placed behind a column. He then promised himself to use his telegraph apparatus to bring music in people's houses. By doing this, he changed the way wireless telecommunication was used, originally from point to point (eg warship to military base) to omnidirectional broadcast. Fairly good intentions there. Thank you sir!

Here is the book reference:
Suzan J. Douglas,
Inventing american broadcasting 1899 - 1922,
The John Hopkins University Press,
Paperback, Baltimore and London, 1987, 365p.
ISBN 0-8018-3832-0

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, 1866-1932

American physicist, inventor,

Transmits human voice on radiowaves via high-frequency oscillator, December 23rd ,1900.

"One-two-three-four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?"

Mr. Thiessen, one mile distant, confirmed. Such a luck it was snowing. Radio broadcasting was born.

More on the hammond museum of radio website.

Rahul Dev Burman

Last summer, Jamie turned up in Ostend as he was invited to participate to some flemish tv show. After some beers in town, we started to feel starvation then we went at mine with his agent and promoter for some night cooking action. Probably we talked crap for a bit but I remember we talked about India and Jamie said he was totally amazed by a couple of people playing on the roof of his hotel in order to welcome him and his band. It brought him much inspiration that he went to a music store down the street and asked for the craziest indian composer. He came back with R D Burman. We downwloaded some straight away and had a good laugh. It stayed in my player for weeks and I reckon mister Burman deserves to be known by everyone. It sounds like a curry of cha cha, country, exotica, espionage with a touch of musical comedy. All in once. How serious is that! You'll have to find your way in the thousands tracks he made though... Good luck!

Following a heart attack in 1988, R D Burman underwent a bypass surgery abroad the next year. While recuperating he is said to have composed over 2,000 tunes which he kept in his memory bank. He often said that his best tunes came to him in his dreams and that he had to be in happy frame of mind even while composing sad tunes. "When I am down, I end up making a mess of things," he is reported to have said.

Much much more on the interweb...

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 began in the late 1980’s as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements. The idea was to build a time-sharing system out of workstations, but in a novel way. Different computers would handle different tasks: small, cheap machines in people’s offices would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources such as computing servers and file servers. For the central machines, the coming wave of shared-memory multiprocessors seemed obvious candidates. The philosophy is much like that of the Cambridge Distributed System [NeHe82]. The early catch phrase was to build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes.

Full info and download here.

Peter Zinovieff & EMS

It may be difficult for a generation brought up with 32-bit computers and digital signal processors as consumer items to appreciate just how revolutionary Peter Zinovieff's projects were. In the 1960s to have access to a 12-bit computer with 1K of memory outside the academic or military establishment, let alone have two personal ones and then use them for music, was completely unheard of. To have a video screen as well when most people programmed with punched cards was beyond belief. Today there is a huge worldwide market for electronic music equipment, but there is little that was not envisioned by the EMS team before 1970 ten to twenty years ahead of their time.

Full article here.

The Unit Delta Plus Studio

Unit Delta Plus was an organisation set up in 1966 by Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff to create electronic music and also promote its use in television, film and advertising. The Unit Delta Plus studio was based in Peter Zinovieff's townhouse in Deodar Road, Putney, London.

More at: http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/unitdeltaplus.php

H. F. OLSON's MULTI-GROOVE STEREOPHONIC SOUND RECORDING AND REPRODUCING SYSTEM, 1964

Have a look at the patent here.

Bhutan Record stamps

These are postage stamps:
Some kind of a promotional thing… Maybe… Maybe not! You couldn't really play them as they were too small. From one and a half to three inch or so, any automatic turntable would lift up the arm… They are one sided and have five different recordings, some of them are musical.

Never heard of Bhutan before seeing this. Their promotion action must have been working in some way! If you have any audio link for this please let us know. We'll make sure to spin it on the next rave!

Anyway, here is where to get them: http://www.bhutanstamp.com

X-Ray Sound Recordings

In the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1950s underground night spots would play music pirated from the west.

The only media they had were recorders etched into discarded X-ray film, the method became so widespread in Hungary that not only amateurs, but the Hungarian Radio made sound recordings on such recycled X-ray films.
from kevin kelly's: street use archives