One of the Best Field Trips Ever

Intern Monkey Jeff* and I had a great field trip last week. We went to the lovely and friendly confines of Chicago Mastering Service







where we listened to music in the best listening room I will ever enter.

Really.

The first time I visited last year with Intern Monkey Erin**, I heard things on Abbey Road that I'd never heard before. How is that possible?



We watched and listened to mastering engineer Jason Ward do his thing to the new LPs for KatJonBand and Darling Downs. After EQing them in the control room, we headed off to the lathe room.


I've pressed a decent amount of vinyl, and sold way more, but have never witnessed the magic of turning sound into grooves in a piece of lacquer.



The digitized info is fed into these old computers (with a few modern rack mounts)









where the sound is delayed,

analyzed for volume fluctuations, and then fed into the early 1970's variable speed Neumann cutting lathe that maximized the number of grooves on that side by speeding up on the quietar parts and slowing on the louder ones.



There a helium-cooled sapphire stylus cuts the groove into the vacuum-attached lacquer.



The lacquer goes off overnight to the pressing plant where it is plated and then waits in line for pressing.

It was....really, really cool.

Check out the pages on Loudness and Vinyl at the CMS page.
Also, here's a fun link to a short but enthusiastic 2001 interview with mastering guru George Peckham (hello! Beatles!) at Porky's Mastering that explains a bit more, plus it's all done in a great accent.

All great stuff!

*Name bestowed upon Jeff at lunch on his last day by Hot Doug (and shouted with verve over the din when our order came up).

**Retroactively bestowed upon NTHS version 1.0, Erin.

Somewhere, somebody can make this layout better, but that person is not me!

All photos ©2008 Jeff the Intern Monkey

RIP Robert Rauschenberg

.

Food!

Aside from music, our favorite thing is food.

Next? Talking about food. Really, it's almost all we do when we're not complaining.

Our favorite Chicago restaurant, Hot Doug's, was just named Best Cheap Eats in Time Out Chicago by the reader's poll. We'd put their specialty dogs against the best restaurant in any other category. See if Custom House, Blackbird, May Street Market, Boka, Landmark, Nacional 27 can match this sampling from the recent and ever-changing menu:

The Game of the Week
Bacon and Cheddar Elk Sausage with Guinness Stout Mustard and Cahills Whiskey Cheese

Blue Cheese Pork Sausage with Toasted Walnut Mustard Cream and Fiery Apple Salsa

Whiskey-Fennel Smoked Pork Sausage with Peppery Dijonnaise, Double Cream Champignon Cheese and Sel Gris

Smoked Shrimp and Pork Sausage with Cajun Tartar Sauce and Blue Cheese

And my regular menu standby:
The Dave Kingman
(formerly the Shawon Dunston and the Rick Reuschel)
Chicken Sausage: Classic Italian-style or zesty Sante Fe-style
("Dunston Santa Fe with everything," of course)

And who's that holding the dogs over Doug's dog? Why our erstwhile employee, Metalmonte, of course.

Just don't ask for them to stay open later or desecrate their delicious duck fat fries with cheese!

Long Live Vinyl

Amid the almost daily reports of some venerable music institution falling on harder times, an honest startup with a good idea packing it in, and even a recent Next Big Thing choking on its own overcooked and anemic espresso hubris, there are signs of hope if you choose to look for them.

People are still consuming vast amounts of music and some are even choosing to pay for it with legal tender. Digital music revenue in the US jumped 43% from 2006 to 2007—though not nearly enough to offset diving CD sales.

Much cooler, US ELPEE vinyl sales jumped from 900,000 pieces in 2006 to 1.3 million records in 2007. That's $22.9 million in 2007, up from $15.7 million in 2006. We even recently got a notice from our pressing plant that they aren't taking on any new customers for the foreseeable future and have a record backlog (pun intended) of 500,000 pieces to manufacture! (So of course we piled two new titles onto their heap just this week.)

Clearly tons of people out there still want music, and happily a chunk of them love the look, feel, sound, heft, and smell of vinyl albums. Makes us want to come to work in the morning!

US sales stats courtesy of  The Recording Industry Association of America.

Trying to Compete with Free

Today's missive from Digital Music News points out the new, ultra-cheap "Wal-Mart Exclusive" CDs that are available for $5, with a load of other stuff at $7

In fact, a large percentage of CDs are expected to carry the basement tags in the near term. "I think this will have the most impact on the music industry this year," said David Pakman, chief executive of eMusic, during a discussion at MusEXPO in Los Angeles on Monday. 

Nothing that indies would be carrying anyway, yet, but it will be interesting to keep an eye out. Looks like a faster race to the bottom for the big boys and it remains to be seen how much it will suck the rest of us down with it.

In a completely different vein, Wired links to an MP3 of the scientifically created "Most Annoying Song Ever," which I have to say lives up to its name. It's a 22 minute monster, but worth a listen and a chuckle while you eat lunch.

Looking West Friday March 14, 2008 during SXSW