Mr. Sandman

[Uncle Al]

How many here, remember The Chordettes

These kids sound just like them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvOCwPFhjA

Uncle Al

[Kirbstone]

A real little gem, Uncle Al. Thanks for that.

Tom

[Ray]

Here’s my contribution - Enter Sandman. A classic from 30 years ago. I bought my hifi on how well this song was treated. Okay, I have 5 amplifiers...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384

[moonshadow]

Here’s my contribution - Enter Sandman. A classic from 30 years ago. I bought my hifi on how well this song was treated. Okay, I have 5 amplifiers...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384

Whoooo! Boy that takes me back.... loading trucks on second shift... right out of high school... 96.3 ROV (Rock of Virginia) playing on the radio in the warehouse....

Oh yeah!

[geron]

I may be weird, but I only know the piece from a music festival performance on German television some years ago by Apocalyptica, who play it stunningly on four electric cellos. Unfortunately I can't now find my recording of it, so this may have to do:
https://youtu.be/VwR-_gu77uU

[crfriend]

Here’s my contribution - Enter Sandman. A classic from 30 years ago. I bought my hifi on how well this song was treated. Okay, I have 5 amplifiers...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384

Whoooo! Boy that takes me back.... loading trucks on second shift... right out of high school... 96.3 ROV (Rock of Virginia) playing on the radio in the warehouse....

Oh yeah!

Well, that was a new one for me, I'd been supposing it was "Hey Mr. Sandman Bring Me a Dream" -- and I was flat wrong. Go ahead, call me an "old fart".

I recall drawing up the specs for my "big (stereo) system" in the very early 1980s, and it had to do classical music perfectly with power headroom to spare. Frequency-response targets were to have harpsichords sound like they were in the room with me, and bass-drum hits produce the proper high-frequency harmonics that the attack causes. Synthesizers needed to sound bright, but credible, and voices needed to be clearly intelligible at all frequencies. Bass could not be muddy. And this was pre-Compact Disk. A tall order, indeed. It drove sales-people crazy, but I had the means to indulge my desire.

Into the digital age, it served me well indeed, and the accuracy of reproduction was not only good enough to allow me to tell the difference between an MP-3 stream and a pure digital one but also to be able to identify different MP-3 encoders by ear. In its ultimate configuration in about 2013 or so, it could reproduce a symphony at concert-level volumes in one room and still allow normal conversation in the next so good was its sonic focus.

The only thing to be categorically forbidden to be reproduced by it was anything by Jimmy Hendrix. Categorically.

The last thing I played on it was in 2015, and that was a pure digital recording of an aerodrome starting out with crickets chirping followed by a Concorde takeoff recorded from about 25 metres from the end of the runway. "Bye Bye Birdie". 'Twas a classic "raise the rafters" occasion. The walls rattled, and it was good.

Sadly, no space exists to reconstruct the thing, even if most of it still works.

[Sinned]

Stress and depression gave me diabetes. Diabetes ruined my hearing to the extent that I wear hearing aids. So Carl, your super-duper system would be lost on me. Often I fail to recognise the music on in-store music. I'm glad that you still have sufficiently acute hearing to take advantage.

[crfriend]

Stress and depression gave me diabetes. Diabetes ruined my hearing to the extent that I wear hearing aids. So Carl, your super-duper system would be lost on me. Often I fail to recognise the music on in-store music. I'm glad that you still have sufficiently acute hearing to take advantage.

I am indeed fortunate, for as I close in inexorably on 60 years old my hearing is still quite good, and I am profoundly thankful for that. I was very good friends with several musicians back when I was still in school, and some of them commented that if they were to go either deaf or blind they'd prefer blindness. Such is the power of music.

I accidentally stumbled over a piece of the past the other night in the form of the D-size CADD drawing I used to maintain showing all the interconnects of the system. Given the constrained environment I live in now which is mostly computers, I'm amazed the thing actually worked. I'll see if I can either export the thing into something modern or get a photograph of it. It's a hoot.

I still have very fond memories of doing random musical lash-ups with my late ex- on the thing drawing from sources as diverse as CDs, LPs, LaserDiscs, and the computers to produce some really classic play-lists. Queue it up and fire it off. Memories from another decade...

As far as in-store "music" goes, I usually can't care less. It's background noise at that point. But when I want to listen -- I listen!

[Faldaguy]

by crfriend » Mon Jan 04, 2021 4:54 pm

... I was very good friends with several musicians back when I was still in school, and some of them commented that if they were to go either deaf or blind they'd prefer blindness. Such is the power of music.

I once had a blind partner in a small business; and I was taken aback when I once expressed my fear of blindness (about the worst disability I thought then) and she promptly told me she preferred being a 'blink' to being deaf. We worked with a range of people with disabilities in that enterprise, and I came to appreciate her assessment.