It's a sound theory...
veryone1
needs a hobby; something to stave off the boredom.
Remember audio? Here's where I own up (during my ongoing quest for [a] listening unsullied by snap, crackle and pop and [b] ever better signal-to-noise ratios) to recording my four Curved Air vinyl LPs:
- On to non-Dolby, mono cassette tapes (1971: a Sony mono radio recorder, <50dB)
- On to non-Dolby, stereo cassette tapes (1973: a Sony stereo2 ditto, <50dB)
- On to Dolby B, stereo tapes (initially [1975] Hitachi deck plus separate Videosonic Dolby B box, <57dB, latterly [1978] Tandberg's tasty TCD330 3-head deck, <60dB)
- On to Dolby C, stereo, tapes (1981: Pioneer CT4, <65dB)
- On to bias-optimised Dolby C HXPro metal tapes (1983 to 1987: no less than three of the superb Aiwa ADF770, dual capstan, 3-head decks, about 70dB)
before finally giving away the tapes in 2000 (the vinyl went West a decade earlier) having long since re-bought all four damned LPs on CD by then. (This is surely what's meant by "paying your dues to the audio industry".)
I shall skip lightly over the brief bout of insanity that was my attempt to build and get working the Wireless World opto-resistor based audio dynamic range compander in 1975 or thereabouts, ...
One of numerous iterations in Old Windsor
... not to mention my equally brief flirtation with a dbx box (a claimed 90dB) while I was for a while a hifi reviewer for the Haymarket Press by moonlight, while freelance assembler programming ICL 1500 Series minicomputers3 in the evenings, after my day job in the ICL Education and Training HQ in Beaumont, Old Windsor, but before the arrival of my son in March 1980...
Sonja Kristina's divine warbling / Darryl Way's violin?
The CDs are now safely up in the loft, with their companded resampled ATRAC3 DSP Type-S bits strewn across one unfeasibly tiny LP4 (Sony) minidisc (>90dB, never even heard of wow and flutter, number r119 in my collection), thanks for asking! Mind you, I burned out three minidisc recorders during the long (real-time) months of this process. Funny how they expire about a fortnight after the one-year warranty, don't you think?
Ripping my CDs was even more boring, but my 20GB Creative MP3 Player did nicely for a couple of years on long trips. (Of course, now that I've lost my wonderful chauffeuse and had to become my own driver, that particular in-car entertainment option is closed off. But then, Creative have discontinued making the rechargeable batteries the player needs, so the option would have closed in any case.) And all my music's now all safely and quickly (two hours, including formatting) housed on a 250GB Freecom MediaPlayer, too, with room to spare. Mind you, that somehow migrated to Junior's flat a year or more back...
Re-ripping all the CDs (this time using variable bit rate and highest quality level) has been an odyssey of discovery, too. Not least the discovery that some of the CDs failed to make their way through the original (128Kbps) ripping process or, in some cases, even into the database. So the use of the word "all" in the previous paragraph is (technically) inappropriate. The somewhat larger MP3 files are now being housed on a 320GB MyBook drive and served, via iTunes on the iMac to the network player downstairs — home of the main audio system. They are also backed up on the newest little HP Media PC downstairs (my only Vista machine), and on another MyBook, and on the latest 1TB (or, at least, 2x500GB) Mac wonder device. But (of course!) they won't now all fit onto the natty little 160GB iPod Classic I acquired right at the end of 2007.
I halted this re-ripping process (with four cartons of CDs still cluttering Junior's room) when we got Christa's terminal cancer diagnosis in July 2007. And I eventually resumed it in May 2008 after a visit from Gill re-sparked my interest in my music collection. I've now finished the job, though I must admit my level of motivation varied from day to day. Still, it made a useful background task. The raw collection is somewhat over the 24,000 track mark, though I've yet to obtain the "round tuit" that will enable me to clean up duplications and minor flaws in the meta tags. (Though the online free databases that will offer you track information are very smart, the quality of the data they contain does vary considerably in terms of spelling, punctuation, consistency.)