LATEST ADDITIONS

<b>WP</b>: You do know tomorrow's his birthday, right?

You gotta hand it to <I>The New York Times<I>; they do try and cover the audio industry. And when it comes to dumbing it down, they truly aren't fucking around. Rather than have to read an article from last week's <B>Circuits</B> section on how MP3's <I>might</I> someday sound better, <B>A Quest for That Warm Sound of Old</B> (June 5, 2007), which was printed just above a piece entitled <B>Making Tunes a Fixture on the Patio</B> (snaring more Jersey readers is obviously an NYT priority) here are the some beauties, salient or otherwise.

"The more you turn it up, the punchier it sounds…"

"…tries to sweeten digital sound by putting back what compression has taken out."

"…what are people really going for, accurate reproduction or pleasing reproduction?"

"Our technology tricks your brain into hearing something that isn’t there."

"When you can't hear the difference anymore, it's overkill."

"The process is never perfect."

"With a good recording, the quality may be improved by tweaking the playback."

"Don’t throw away your records yet."

A beginner's guide.

I don't know about you, but I got a little bit bored with the wall-to-wall coverage of the 40<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of <I>Sgt. Pepper's</I> last week. So why am I linking to Jody Rosen's article on the subject? Because it actually has something to say and says it well.

Keith "tha missile" Bailey played bass for Gong, many years ago. After that, for his sins, he served as Gong's booking agent. He tells the tale of what happened one night in Hamburg when famed drummer Pierre Moerlen went AWOL, Daevid Allen went into a wizardly rage, and Bailey went on as the band's drummer.

In his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/061107compression">primer</A&gt; this week on compression, Wes Phillips mentions the now-ubiquitous use of "louderization" in CD production, which fills in the musical valleys and flattens the expressionistic hills to make a recording sound uniformly loud. <I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson has long railed against this practice, so when Bob Reina asked John to record his new jazz quartet, Attention Screen, John felt that this would be the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He would record the band, which mixes electric instruments&mdash;guitar and bass guitar&mdash;with acoustic&mdash;piano and drums&mdash;as though it was a classical acoustic ensemble, with no equalization and no compression. By doing so, he would demonstrate that even so, the sound would still have dynamics and impact, that making an honest recording does not have to be an obstacle to powerful sound quality.

Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants, called earlier this week to announce what he called big news. "Actually," Bahneman said, "we're not going to issue an official press release&mdash;yet&mdash;but MusicGiants is going to offer Windows Media Audio (WMA) lossless music downloads without DRM.