January 5: A brief detour

January 5, 2022 Paul CervantesAffordable Care Act, Björn Olsson, Detour, elance, Ennio Morricone, Freelancing, Gotebörg, Paralegal, Sergio Leone, Skullcandy Crusher Evo, The 800 pound gorilla, The LObster, UpworkLeave a comment

I know most of you had your hearts set on three or four hundred more words about the future of my music collection but I need to make a brief detour. Today I woke up thinking about what’s next. My promise to myself was to milk every one of 2022’s days to the fullest, and I’m still about that. The problem with thinking about what’s next is that it takes one out of the present and the present is all any of us have. No matter, what’s next is what I was thinking about.

I’ve been a paralegal who moonlights doing marketing and ad copy writing for a long time. I’m Ok with both but supporting myself on the marketing gig alone strikes me as a dubious proposition. Sure, I like macaroni and cheese but not for all three meals. The problem with the paralegal game is twofold. First, I’m old. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of firms being into hiring a 61 plus year old with a boatload of experience. Of course, I’m only in need of one job so a bunch of firms is unnecessary. The other problem is me. I’m only willing to do certain kinds of legal work (read: plaintiff) and I have no interest in ever, ever having another long commute that relies on public transportation or sitting in traffic while the second or third best years of my life slip quietly away.

Then there’s the internet and the idea of a being a freelancer. I’m at least somewhat comfortable with that idea having worked with freelancers quite a bit over the years and even getting some of my writing gigs through elance (now Upwork). That would be workable except for the 800 pound gorilla; medical insurance. Over the last fifteen years my insurance (which has been mercifully and graciously paid for by my employers) has gone from a shade over $200 a month to well over $1000.

We all know that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that kind of increase and we all know there’s not a thing we can do about it. Car insurance? Relatively steady over the same period. Medical? How about double the cost, then triple then $1000, then more. Well, I did get a prescription for my dermatitis. Thank God for the Affordable Care Act. I cannot imagine the slaughter we would all be facing without it.

So, those are the thoughts I had when my sleepy eyes opened this morning. I’d rather have woken up worrying about what to do with my damn LPs.

Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.

By the way, I can write a little about music today: While I’m writing this I’m listening to one of my earlier iTunes purchases from way back in 2006, Björn Olsson’s The Lobster. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to this and it’s cool to be reminded by just how clever and musical it is. It sounds like an otherworldly and unheard soundtrack to an unreleased Sergio Leone film, almost as if Ennio Morricone was born in Gotebörg, Sweden rather than Rome. There’s no flash and dazzle to Olsson’s style though his guitar playing is elemental and beautiful. He’s confident to let his songs bring the message, just the way I like it.

The source, you ask? My iPhone 11 streaming to my Skullcandy Crusher Evo. Damn nice and, yes, I do think I’ll write about these headphones someday soon.

January 4: Storing (my) music

January 4, 2022January 4, 2022 Paul Cervantes16 bit, aptX, Audio, Bandcamp, Bluetooth, CDs, DAC, High End Audio, iTunes, LPs, MusicLeave a comment

It used to be easy, kind of anyway.

In my life I’ve stored music on LP, CDs and cassettes. 8-track? Nope, I never went down that rabbit hole, not even in the bad old days of Madman Muntz. Cassettes are miserable. They suffer from nasty compression (though some like a more compressed sound) but, worse, even commercial cassettes were prone to stretching and print-through. I did have an early fondness for making my own cassettes from radio broadcasts of classical and jazz back in the 70s. Some of them sounded Ok, especially when they were new. I found a cache of them in the basement of my parents house when they died back in 2008. I thought, for a brief moment, about trying to play one of them but quickly thought better of it…another rabbit hole avoided.

Me? I choose bigger and better rabbits holes like LP, CD and now digital music. LPs used to rule my world like dinosaurs. It was very difficult to listen to CDs when you have easy access to a quality LP playback system and good LPs. But, CDs got better and at a fairly rapid rate. Digital music is hurtling forward in quality. Even everyday bluetooth (especially later versions). Technologies like Qualcomm’s aptX will just keep on coming. Now, just as a brief reality check even aptX taps out at the limits of commercial CD (16 bit / 44.1 kHz) which is good but even better is sure to follow. This reality causes my enthusiasm for LPs to hold steady if not lose a little steam. Hey, as luscious as LPs are to hold, play and listen to I don’t like the feeling of emphasizing the medium over the music.

Good LPs, those pressed from virgin vinyl are extremely durable. I have records from the 70s that have been played thousands of times that still sound fantastic. The records themselves will certainly last well over a century (absent another flood). Until recently I’m not sure the same could be said of CD. Some early CDs suffered from fatal de-lamination. I have no doubt that the materials will be stable for the same century plus. The encouraging recent development I referred to earlier was the sudden increase in the availability of new one-box CD players. For a while it was looking like buyers would have to settle for a DVD player (until those went the way of the dinosaur) or a more elaborate and expensive two-box (transport/DAC) solution. I haven’t heard any of the new CD players but I’m sure they’re all good to excellent. Everyone has access to superb chips today and that’s a win for everyone. My suspicion is that most two-box solutions from smaller companies use chip sets that are inferior to those used by the big boys. That’s just how it is when it is comes to digital. If you can’t buy in quantity you have to get by on less.

So, both CDs and LPs are archive quality. But both formats take up space and it’s starting to annoy me. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about where that annoyance is taking me.

By the way, it hit 64 today with 70 on tap for tomorrow. I like the sound (and feel) of that!

January 3: Come on, let’s all think about my music collection!

January 3, 2022January 3, 2022 Paul CervantesAmazon Music, Bandcamp, Brendan Campbell, Burgers and Murder, Digital rights, Google, iTunesLeave a comment

Yesterday, I laid out the raw numbers of my current music collection. There are a few hundred LPs and maybe 500-600 CDs. But wait, I’ve forgotten about the digital music from iTunes, Bandcamp and even a small smattering of music I bought from Amazon. Each purchase has one thing in common; it is as available and reliable as the company that has granted the me use rights to the music.

Like pretty much all rights, iTunes rights are beset by limitations. Hey, .99 cents (now $1.29) only buys you but so much. Let me tell you the story of a handful of songs I purchased by a fairly obscure singer named Brendan Campbell (from his 2008 record, Burgers and Murders). I bought the songs from iTunes quite a while back. But, earlier this year when I tried to play them I found that the songs were MIA (at least on my iPhone).

Well, that’s weird thought I…

Once I was back in my home office I checked my master iTunes library, which resides on the lovely if aged, 1TB drive of my elderly MacMini. There the missing songs were right where they were supposed to be, ready to play.

WTF?

It took me and Mr. Google a couple minutes to solve this minor league tech puzzler. The answer resides not so much with iTunes but rather with the license granted to them by Mr. Campbell. It seems the two had a spat of some sort and the result is that iTunes can no longer sell (or allow access to) Campbell’s music even though I had previously purchased the songs.

The only reason I still have the songs is because a long time ago I downloaded (remember that 1TB drive?) the songs in question. If I had left them to float around the digital ether all this time the songs would be gone forever, or at least until Campbell’s work pops up somewhere else. Going forward who can say whether the rights granted by iTunes, et al are ephemeral or long standing?

I raise this issue because it serves to emphasize how important it is to have a downloaded, nailed-down (read residing on an actual hard drive you own) version of all the music you own. Sure, Campbell’s music comprises a financial investment of exactly $5.94 but the point is that I cannot find that music anywhere else, at least not as of this writing. The loss of those songs would go beyond the mere pittance I originally spent on them.

In the end, a valued music collection has to be archivable.

More on that tomorrow. By the way, it actually warmed up fairly well in the valley today. The mercury made it all the way to 64 today.

Not bad!

January 2: Quality, music & nostalgia

January 2, 2022January 2, 2022 Paul CervantesBandcamp, Bluetooth, CDs, Deep Sea Diver, FLAC, Floods, Headphones, Hearing loss, High End Audio, iTunes, LPs, Music collections, Nostalgia, Paul Simon, Per Madsen, Quality, Steely Dan, Van Halen2 Comments

2020 was a year that I started to try to get a handle on my music collection. Years ago I lost over 2,000 treasured LPs in a flood. The insurance company first offered me $1 per record and ended up paying me $3 each. Still, that pretty much took out my collection save for the few hundred that escaped the hot, ravaging waters of the broken pipe.

A few of the survivors and my beloved Per Madsen Rack.

I would include a photo of my CDs, but they’re just so boring looking. Yesterday I wrote about Paul Simon’s disdain for contemporary music and I alluded to my music collection. I find that the more I write the more music I listen to. The listening is different, for the most part, than when I worked in and wrote about the high end audio industry. It is more of an accompaniment or a soundtrack. I no longer have a system, though I can still play LPs and CDs and hear them in free space. When the music or my brain demands it I listen on headphones, either wired or bluetooth. This is all heading toward how I intend to manage and grow my collection without as much physical mass to manage. The idea of using FLAC and dumping what’s left of my LPs onto a bunch of really big (an well backed up) hard drive is appealing. So is buying most (but not all of my music digitally through either iTunes or Bandcamp. I can’t quite wrest myself from the appeal of the physical so when I bought Deep Sea Diver’s new record I bought the LP from Bandcamp and it arrived signed by Jessica Dobson herself. Plus, Bandcamp tends to pay musicians a high percentage than iTunes.

C’mon, Jessica sent me Xs and Os…How do you pass that up?

It’s cool, but it’s also pretty damn physical. There may come a day where my enjoyment of buying and listening to records goes away altogether but I am not quite there yet. Digital and digital storage is just so convenient and it usually sounds fairly good. There’s a good chance one of the few benefits of aging will be the fact that my ability to discern good sound from bad sound will continue to decline. If I end up being happy to listen to a portable radio that’ll be just fine. My hearing already rolls off above 14kHz so I’m on my way!

Enough preamble. The word of the day is nostalgia. And my question is this: If you like something that happens to be old is your appreciation inherently possessed with nostalgia? What do we say when what’s old is really good let alone possible better than what’s new? Say we’re talking about Van Halen’s 1978 eponymously titled record or Steely Dan’s Katy Lied from 1975. Yup, I grew up with both. Still, each record is still fantastic by any measure. Do I have to admit that some of my appreciation for either work is dripping in nostalgia? Think about it and let me know. More tomorrow. I’m trying to keep the daily posts between 300-400 words. Wish me luck…

January 1, 2022

January 1, 2022January 1, 2022 Paul CervantesAmazon, B.B. King, CDs, Cottonwood, Elvis, Joe Friday, LPs, Music collection, Nostalgia, Paul Simon, Sinatra, WritingLeave a comment

Seriously, I have to write more already?

Overnight I realized that this whole one year journal idea meant writing on something like a schedule, like other writers do. I read that Shelby Foote started each day writing 500 words, using a quill pen no less. I think I realized this in the back of my mind. As some of you might know, I finished my second novel, Cottonwood, a month or so back. I’m now waiting for my faithful formatter and cover artist to be available so I can get the book up on Amazon where it’s sure to make big bucks. I have a handful of ideas for my next book and I figured that writing everyday would keep me sharp in case any of those ideas suddenly grew from acorn to seedling. That fit in nicely with the one-year countdown to the end of my job at the law firm. Anyway, here I am on the first day of the year. To paraphrase Joe Friday, it’s breezy and cool in Los Angeles today. The high is supposed to hit 57…a tad chilly for me.

A while back I heard an interview with Paul Simon. In it, he was asked what music he was listening to these days. He mentioned that he’d been listening to the Elvis station (disappointed), along with B.B. King and Sinatra. He went on to say that he didn’t really listen to any contemporary music. I thought to myself, what the hell and I’m not totally surprised. Paul Simon’s a somewhat prickly old guy but I would emphasize old more the prickly. It struck me that he had either lost the energy he once had to sift through the crap that is most of everything to find the contemporary music that had worth or that he was simply more comfortable with music that was contemporaneous with his early life and what came before it. That gets me to the word nostalgic. I’ve been thinking about the word off and on and I’ll have more to say about it later. Anyway, I’m glad I haven’t thrown in the towel when it comes to contemporary music. There is some very good new music out there. Is it harder to find than it was in days gone by? I suppose that’s possible, but so what? If you love music you have to take the time to seek it out.

Drop by tomorrow if you’d like to hear more about my efforts to simultaneously organize, preserve and grow my music collection.

Time enough, but none to waste: A journal of transition

December 31, 2021January 1, 2022 Paul Cervantes2022, diary, Inspiration, Journal, Optimism, transition, WritingLeave a comment

December 31, 2021

Until I finished my first novel I didn’t think of myself as the kind of writer who would or could write a novel. But, after I finished the first book I started in on the second without even thinking about it, or enduring a moment’s uncertainty about whether I could pull it off. The same may go for memoirs and journals. Outside of a less than half-hearted attempt to keep a journal back in high school this is the first time I’ve tried to write one. I enjoy autobiographies. But the truth is I enjoy autobiographies because I enjoy learning about noteworthy people. Bobby Jones wrote about himself when he was still in his 30s, or maybe even younger. Then again, he was Bobby Jones. I’m 60 now, heading for 61 in April. Things have changed, and a definitive change is coming at the end of 2022. My longtime employers will be closing their law firm. It’s time. Their decision is understandable. One of them is 66 and I think the other is pushing 70. One just lost his wife to cancer and the other’s daughter is battling a form of lymphoma. When the end of the firm finally comes I will only have one emotion…gratitude. Both of my bosses have been more than employers to me. They’ve been friends and will remain friends until that other end. I’ll have more to say about both of them later on, I think. The point is that this journal is about a particular transition, from one job to another, at the time in life where I now find myself. The determinate nature of the transition period allows me to focus and plan for the future but also to experience the days of the coming year in an unusual way. Most big changes hit without notice but this one has announced its impending arrival quite conveniently.

I don’t anticipate this to be a traditional journal. Then again, I don’t know what a traditional journal is like, having never knowingly read one. My anticipation is that it will include more than a few ideas about things I’d like to write. I’m also thinking that it will look back more than I want it to but I’m going to try hard to keep my eyes looking forward. They say a writer has to know the beginning and ending of a novel before sitting down to write it. I agree with that. A journal is a different proposition. No one knows how anyone’s journal will end, even and perhaps especially, their own. There’s a kind of freedom to writing without knowing the ending.

It should be interesting anyway. The year, I mean. No promises about the journal.

Something everyone (no one?) wants to read about: Microphonics in earbud cables…

September 16, 2021September 16, 2021 Paul Cervantes12AU7, 12X7, 6922, Apple, Beats, Cable Microphonics, Duometer, earbud seal, earbud thud, ECC82, Etymotic Research, high gain phono circuit, IEM, IEMs, Lightning connector, Microphonics, SkullcandyLeave a comment

People are always telling me that I should blog about things everyone wants to read about.

So, I thought about it and I came up with the subject of microphonics, so-called cable microphonics specifically. Those of you who read (over and over, I’m sure) Wires, Baby! know I’ve recently slipped the bounds of the 21st century and gone back to wired earbuds because for the most part they simply sound better.

Now, oddly, inexplicably I’ve found that a good number of wired earbuds suffer from what’s been called in many corners microphonics.

When people say this they referring to hearing extraneous bass coming through their earbuds, such as the sound of their own footsteps, as they walk.

It can be damned annoying and some decent buds are let down by this. The problem is that it’s not actually microphonics. As pretty much all of you know, microphonics are when a mechanical/acoustic object generates an unintended electrical signal that’s amplified and heard during playback.

The oldest example of this is in relatively high gain small signal phono tubes. The 12AU7/ECC82 was notorious for this, but any small-signal tube that is part of a circuit with enough gain could suffer from this effect. And, as an aside to you tube guys, the 12AU7 is really not appropriate for use in a phono circuit when there are so many dandy 12X7 and 6922s laying around.

Just saying.

A more recent example is the stylus/cartridge assembly of a turntable being excited by in-room low frequencies that looped those frequencies right back through the system with predictable non-musical results.

In contemporary parlance the word microphonics has been applied to the cables of IEMs and earbuds but that’s not truly what’s going on.

The thud effect is induced by at least these factors:

1 The profile of the cable, with so-called tangle-free cables (often those with a roughly rectangular cross sections) being especially likely to exacerbate the problem.

2) The durometer of the cable’s exterior jacket and to a lesser degree its dielectric (if it’s separate from the jacket, which it usually isn’t). Harder and stiffer make it worse where usually they make things better.

Go figure.

3) The degree of the acoustic seal that the earbud tips create within the ear and/or ear canal.

What this means is that what is heard is a simple drum effect, not actual microphonics. This can be proven quite easily. Simply tap on your earbud’s cables with your device on mute, or even turned off.

Yup, thud, thud, thud.

What’s interesting is that some brands (Apple) figured this out years ago. The cables on their modestly priced buds don’t suffer this kind of annoying drum effect at all. Other brands like Beats (one wonders why didn’t they just ring up their cousins over at Apple for help with this) and Skullcandy can’t be bothered to eliminate such a simple mechanical problem.

I also understand that Etymotic Research is plagued with this in their $300 ER4SR IEMs.

Come on, folks. You have the word research right in your name so go do some!

Look, personal audio has come very far very fast and we’re all loving it. But let’s not be so focused on making the world a better place that we miss fixing easy problems that ruin the music.

I’m 168,000 words into my novel, Cottonwood

September 1, 2021 Paul CervantesCottonwood, Golf, Inspiration, JJM, Novel, Writing1 Comment

I really regret not keeping up with progress reports on Cottonwood over the time I’ve been working on it. The funny thing is that I until I checked I couldn’t even remember how long I’ve been working on the book. Now that I have checked I see it’s been a good long time since my first novel, John J. McDermott & the 1971 U.S. Open came out in April of 2019.

Cottonwood is a sequel of sorts. No, I guess it’s just a plain old sequel. It takes the lives of the two main characters from the early 1970s in Pennsylvania all the way to the desert of California and the late 1970s. I didn’t really have another book with the same characters, or at least some of them, in mind when I was putting the finishing touches on JJM. But suddenly, when I was totally done with it, I realized that I wasn’t totally done with it.

I imagined the book continuing into the future, the future being nearly a decade later. I saw the book continuing into my own time and closer to some of my own places. So much of the first book was an educated guess. Oh sure, I’d been to Pennsylvania when I was a kid but I didn’t have any real memories of it, other than staying with my mom’s cousin in an ancient row house in Reading, Pennsylvania one summer when I was about 12. Worse, I’d never been to Wales or anywhere in Europe for that matter (still haven’t, in fact). That was a huge problem. I spent hours looking at maps, imagining how the sun rose and set in various parts of the country. I read about how much it cost to take a ship from New York to Wales and how long the voyage took. I came to know some of that stuff, as we know facts that are printed on the page, but I couldn’t know them as experiences.

They say to write what you know. It makes a kind of intuitive sense but the need to know breaks down quickly when you start to write. The important thing for me has been to know and understand my characters. From there, my book is only a measure of how well I can bring my imagination and my relationship with my characters together. I think that Cottonwood will be a better book than JJM, or at least I hope it will be. It’s certainly a longer one and it’s not quite done yet. I wanted Cottonwood to have a more leisurely quality than JJM but life over the last two and a half years got in the way, both for me and the main characters. Life up and took away some of the meandering feel that I had hoped for the book and replaced it with something more intense, and I guess that’s Ok. We all write, partly, to make a character come to life. I hope that Cottonwood will do more than keep the characters from JJM alive. I hope it will show them as they change and meet challenges in the world they exist in much as I try to do in my own.

Anyway, it’s been a long effort and I happy to have made as much progress as I have. I can see the end of Cottonwood coming and also the beginning that will follow it close behind.

Looking down on the setting for Cottonwood

Wires, Baby!

May 5, 2021 Paul CervantesApple, Audio, Beats, Find My, Flare Audio, Flare Jet2, iPhone, Jabra, Sennheiser, Skullcandy, urbeats3Leave a comment

I know, it’s been a good long while. The good news is that Cottonwood, the sequel to my first novel now tips the scales at over 150,000 words. The pandemic initially quickened my productivity but in the end slowed it down significantly. Oh well, it’s only time and we all have plenty of that (he writes sardonically).

Even less interesting is the fact that I managed to lose my Apple AirPod Pros. Actually, they weren’t exactly lost. After all, the Find My app showed their last position (laying helpless and pitifull in a parking planter) but they were unable to find their way home. So, I tried other Bluetooth buds from Skullcandy, Sennheiser and Jabra but was disappointed badly each time. The AirPods were disappointing, too, I never did like the way they sounded though their feature set was impressive.

So, I’ve gone wired. I’ve decided that it’s better to battle a wire than it is to have marginal sound. I use a pair of now-discontinued Beats urbeats3 and a pair of Flares Jet2. The Beat’s rather enthusiastic bass is tamed nicely and easily via my iPhone’s EQ while their native midband and treble is surprisingly good out of the box. The Flares are more balanced overall if a little less musical (and less fun) than the Beats. Both of them whip the pants off of any of the expensive Bluetooth buds I’ve tried. I also keep a couple pair of old-school Apple buds for emergencies. Someday I may go wireless but not today. Why switch when you can fight?