Since I have already said pretty much all I have to say about my MaxHemp/DeepHemp combo and the ALNICO drivers, I thought I would start a thread here to discuss another one of my favorite subjects. What would that be? What else? Music!! I know there is a music forum on this site but after spending some time in the "what are you listening to now" thread it is long on album cover art and very short on discussion. So I thought I would try to have a music thread here that would be of particular interest to Omega speaker owners. I'm sure it will possibly be of general interest too. Truth be told, I have come to know a lot of my fellow Omega owners through my participation on this specific forum, and have enjoyed much of the discussion. So I thought it would be nice to have a music thread by Omega speaker owners for Omega speaker owners. Any genre of music is open for discussion and everyone is welcome to post. If you can, please provide cover art and some commentary on the music. One other thing....the music discussed in this thread should be cream-of-the-crop in terms of recording quality. I own a lot of recordings that don't sound all that great, but I have them because I love the artist or the material. I would rather use this thread to discuss the stuff that makes us happy to be audiophiles. The recordings you listen to and then think "Damn! This is exactly why I spend the kind of money I do on this passion of mine. It just doesn't get much better than this." The stuff that sounds so good that you savor every moment as the music plays, and even feel a little sense of loss when it's over -- despite the fact that you can always go back and play it again. Hopefully Louis or the moderators won't have any objection to us running an ongoing music thread here.
I'll get things started...
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres This is the Steve Hoffman remaster on 180 gram HQ vinyl. The only other editions of this album that are worth a damn are the original vinyl issue in 1973 and a reiusse on vinyl in the late 1970s. I know there are a few different CD releases of this out there and I am fairly certain they are both crap. I can tell you for sure that the 1987 remaster gutted the excellent bass track and added a ton of processed echo that made the band sound like they were recording the album in the middle of big and empty gymnasium. Here is a short 45 second clip from the song
Waitin' for the Bus on that CD in MP3 format. This is not streaming media so you will need to download the clip to your hard disk in order to play it. It really stinks and sounds nothing like the record I remember from the 1970s.
Waitin' for the Bus clip from the butchered CD remasterEnter Steve Hoffman, who remastered it for its debut on 180 gram vinyl. He did this album right and gave us the original bass track with none of the sythesized and processed echo. The album sounds just as I remembered it and it compares extremely well with a 1973 first pressing I have of this same title. The 180 gram vinyl has a tad more bass response, with slightly richer sound, and much less noise (not because the noise is filtered, but because the pressing on 180 gram vinyl is very, very good so the noise floor is lower. I love this record and on my setup the house really thumps at any kind of volume. I have a high quality PC recording setup with a M-Audio Firewire 410 and Adobe Audition, so I can make very high quality needledrops in 24-bit digital audio with sampling rates up to 192KHz. Here is the same clip from the Steve Hoffman remaster, originally recorded in 24-bit/96KHz digital audio and then downsampled to a 16-bit/44.1KHz WAV file and then encoded with LAME 3.97 using the same settings as the above clip.
Waitin' for the Bus clip from the Steve Hoffman remasterI was listening to La Grange on a DVD-A that I made last week and my 21 year-old college student daughter was knocking on my door asking if I could turn it down. I said, "No can do."
She had to tough it out for a few more minutes while I basked in the wonderful sound of this album. Highly recommended if you have an analog setup and a good motivator to get one if you don't. Your Omegas will love you for it.
--Jerome