Friday night after finishing off "The Ultimate Gift", a good movie by the way, we sat down for some wine and music. I told Pam to pick out a cd from the 1300+/- we have on hand. After scanning row after row, incredulously she came up empty handed. Hard to imagine but to get things going, I suggested a cd from the Henry Mancini boxed set "The Days of Wine and Roses", a three cd collection covering his output between 1958 and 1977...some 80 songs. The recordings, even the very early ones, are very well done and sounded great on our VSA speakers. Mr. Lucky, Peter Gunn, March of the Cue Balls and the many other songs that got lots of air play back in the "old days" brought back many memories. I also played a couple of cuts off the "Mr. Lucky" album. The was the very first LP I ever purchased. All the music I bought prior to that were 45s. I used to play it on a Dual 1019 TT that my brother brought home from the Navy. It had a small phono amp and I would plug it into the audio jacks on my "high end" Zenith table radio. If you ever have a chance to hear the LP (available on cd now), give a listen to "Floating Pad"--that was the song I remember listening to over and over as a 16 year old. Maybe it was the wine or the company of my wife, but it was, pardon the expression, one of those magical moments. There is a point to this narrative: those cds certainly cannot be classified as audiophile demo quality and I'm sure if I fired them up right now, the magic likely wouldn't be there. But times like Friday night when the mood is right, emotionally and physically, it doesn't make a whit's difference about % THD, signal-to-noise, dynamic range...ad infinitum. It really does become all about the music.
