The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

To Have & To Hold – Taster Tape from Jony Lyle on Vimeo.

Straight from Numero Group’s blog. Beat this for record collecting!

It’s been impossible to avoid the news of the Beatles remasters and much debate has ensued within the office. Primarily, why the mono boxset has less content, no DVD, but costs £30 pounds more than the stereo boxset and which individual albums would we be buying (White Album most popular so far, followed by Abbey Road).

Although you can buy individual albums remastered in stereo, the  mono ones are only available as a set which is clearly aimed at completists. This is a shame as for the most authentic listening experience you would arguably want the albums up to Revolver in mono and the following albums in stereo.

Page after page of glowing, swooning purple prose has already been written by writers who’ve experienced epiphany after epiphany whilst reviewing the complete works of the world’s most famous band. Almost unanimously they feel as if they are hearing the music as if for the first time which is unasailable evidence of how good a job has been done given the ubiquitousness of the music and the usual cyncism with which music jouralists often greet music.

One of the most enjoyable reviews is David Cavanagh’s 3 page epic in this month’s Uncut magazine which at the same time has to be discounted due to his review being based on a 14 hour session at Abbey Road listening to the newly revealed masterpieces  (through our speakers I can only assume) as this sadly won’t be the listening experience of everyone else.

I am not going to attempt a review here, there is no need as Bob Gendron’s  exhaustive review for Tone Audio tells you all you need to know. It’s particularly good on the stereo vs mono debate for the earlier albums (coming clearly down on the side of mono)  and as he says:

“If the Beatles remasters signify the last great hurrah of the compact disc, at least the format is going out in style.”

We’d love to know if any of you have already bought one or both of the boxsets and what your thoughts are…

According to What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision the music industry is getting together to launch another new digital music format. The new downloadable format – currently called CMX – will provide users with more than just music. It will also offer lyrics, artwork and other bonus goodies.

There doesn’t appear to be any mention of sound quality yet – which worries us a little bit.

What do you think? Do we need another format? And if we do, surely it needs to offer high quality sound.

Free Lossless Audio Codec

The 24-bit FLAC files we offer full members of Society of Sound are proving incredibly popular. They are close to being the most popular of the three formats we offer, which is both reassuring, and a little bit surprising. Reassuring because we feel that they offer the best sound quality possible, and we know that like us you care about sound quality. Surprising, because they are a little trickier to handle than the other options – for example, Apple Lossless, which you can just dump them into the massively popular iTunes and listen to them.

So we’d like to ask you a question? How do you play them? On your computer, streamed to your hi-fi, copied to DVD or some other way?

Computer Audiophile symposium

Demonstrating the complete journey from performing through recording to playback, Computer Audiophile have announced their inaugural Computer Audiophile Symposium taking place at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California.

With representatives from Meridian-Sooloos amongst others, the symposium will focus on getting the best high quality playback for your home. There will be demonstrations and discussons around the many new music server technologies now available, film formats and digital music distribution thr0ughout your home.

Stereophile.com are calling the event “the most comprehensive seminar ever devoted to high quality computer-based playback.”

The Symposium is being held in Studos A &D of the legendary Fantasy Studios and is a must for anyone interested in getting the best quality playback for their home.

This month heralds one of the most unlikely anniversaries – the 60th birthday of the 7” single. With focus firmly on the rise of digital sales and fall of CD sales, this much loved vinyl format is making a stealthy comeback.

West London factory Portalspace (previously EMI’s pressing plant) was predicting its death back in 2000 when sales had dropped to below 180,000. Eight years later and they are back over the million mark.

As far as buying music goes, nothing can beat buying a perfectly formed, individually pressed, lustrous black piece of vinyl; the CD’s only advantage over vinyl was that they took up less shelf space. They destroyed the concept of cover art, the disc is shiny and nasty and they lost the warmth you get from a vinyl pressing.

Together with Apple finally announcing DRM free tracks on iTunes and more and more high quality downloads available to buy online, it’s hard to see what the CD has to offer.One of the reasons we started the B&W Music Club was to provide DRM-free, high quality lossless downloads as we knew there was a world of people who cared about how things sounded.

If all releases came on vinyl with a free lossless download I’d never have to buy another CD again.

It’s been known for a while that Neil Young’s long-awaited Archives is going to be released on Blu-ray. But now that Amazon in the US is taking pre-release orders it got us thinking about Blu-ray as an audio format. There’s very little music currently available on the new format, and much of that is surround sound mixes of Jazz and live events.

But Neil is apparently in its for the sound quality, as he told reporters at the launch earlier this year. “I thought DVD would be good enough, but you couldn’t navigate around materials whilst listening to the music, and I thought that that’s what my fans would want to do. Also we were defeated by technology with the sound. Now with Java you can listen in the best possible quality that we have today.

Hi Fi Writer has an interesting take on the Blu-ray question, asking when all those lovely high-resolution DVD-Audio and SACD discs will come out on Blu-ray, where developments such as Dolby True HD are working wonders for surround sound. We want the same for stereo, don’t you?