Hi-Fi Upgrades - Go Qobuz!

I must have played one too many Spotify playlists. I got tired of Spotify.

I've done Tidal.

So I tried Qobuz.

OMG!

96kHz streaming. 192kH... iPad reboots itself. Set 96kHZ as maximum.

CD-quality streaming.

Why wasn't I listening when various You Tubers talked about it?

Maybe I thought, hey I can barely tell the difference between 320kps vs a CD on my current system, why would I notice the difference between anything more?

Stream CD-quality through the Jitterbug+Black Dragonfly and it just sounds better than 320kps.

As good as my CD player, if not better.

Sources matter.

What I Did In The First Post-Lockdown Week

(aside from the day job, daily walks, cooking food and all that routine stuff)

Monday: the nice man from the AA pumped up my flat tyre and drove with me to the local tyre emporium just before it opened, where I had the whole lot changed over. Later that morning, I stopped by the local Pure Gym. A manager was there to show me around.

Tuesday: early morning shopping at Sainsbury's. Joined the gym online. 50% discount. (Even at the full rate, that gym costs as much in a year as my old one did in a month. And I was happy to pay that money then.) Added Qobuz to my streaming services. I am liking that decision more and more.

Mid-week: lots of hefting of books and building of IKEA shelving. Didn't need to leave the house for that.

Thursday: first visit to the gym. Man those pull-downs felt good.

Friday: a visit to London by train. Haircut at George the Barber's in Bedfordbury; sunbed session at the Tanning Shop, Covent Garden; a visit to the Vodafone and Apple shops; lunch outside at Maxwells; a browse round Foyles; and a visit to Lillywhites for some new trainers.

Saturday: a visit to Sis's new house in a secret location for lunch.

Sunday: second visit to the gym in the morning. That was more tiring than I thought. Snooze in garden sun-trap. Get new iPhone SE2 working, and set the old one up to be another iPod Touch (that's why Apple downplay the iPod Touch).

And all I had to do was wear a mask almost everywhere.

Masks do not counts as "freedom", and sure as hell not as "normal".

This ain't over 'til the masks get burned.

I have my second jab this week.

Two more weeks before I never have to open that work laptop again.

Retirement Countdown

I have to talk about this.

In three weeks' time I will stop working.

I have to fill in some forms, and one reason I haven't already done so is that I did not have a black ink pen in the house, so I had to buy one on Thursday. And some stamps. On Friday I woke up late and did nothing. I should have been filling in pension forms and getting the flat tire on the car fixed. Instead I watched You Tube videos on anything and generally futzed the time away. I got a walk and a few reps in, just so I hadn't had a complete wasted day. Then I went to bed at 22:00, and came back downstairs at 23:30. No sleep Saturday morning. That happens when I feel guilty about leaving things undone. I felt guilty because I'm supposed to be Superman, and never have a bad day.

I spent a lot of time on Saturday dark morning thinking that the sleepless night was about retiring, and not having a job and all those other cliches.

I'm totally down with the I-will-not-have-a-job-to-wake-up-to-do bit. Me? Miss the day job? Have you met me?

Not getting the tyres fixed is about me being indecisive and lazy and maybe it's the pollen. I wake up with a blocked nose, itching and sneezing. At 04:30. I kept dozing until 08:00 Friday, and spent the rest of the day being an hour behind schedule.

If I was going into the office, I would have a countdown of days left commuting. I would be having handover meetings and chats with people. I would have something anchoring me to work in those last days.

But I'm at home. I've been at home for over a year now. My unconscious heard me say I was resigning, took a look around, saw that it was home, and checked out of the job. It thinks I'm done, and it does not like it when I keep opening the work laptop. It gets confused.

I can't concentrate on work because I've almost left it. I can't concentrate on organising things in my life, because I'm still at work.

It's not retirement I can't handle.

It's these last three weeks.

Catching Up: It's Been A Long Time...

...since I published anything. I've written stuff, but held it back.

Vaccine passports. The irrational fear of the insides of pubs and restaurants. Schoolgirl allegations without police charges, blaming boys. The EU threatening to stop vaccine exports. Teenagers burning the Union flag and complaining about 'colonial' history. NFT's in art. Museums turning into social justice institutions. Police breaking up Easter Sunday services.

Never try to understand crazy. There's nothing to understand, that's why it's called crazy. Walk away, have minimum contact if you can't, and never ever try to figure out what's going on. Because crazy makes no sense.

So I have to pass to No Comment.

I put in my retirement a couple of weeks ago. I stop work at the end of April. I have had conversations about pensions, taxes and investments. This stuff I really don't want to discuss, because most of the thoughts I'm having are first drafts, and so are just the cliches and stock responses, that I have to work through to get the real issues.

For the next four weeks I still have to show up at the work laptop four days a week (I've booked every Friday off in April). It wasn't the lockdown that kept me in the house during the week, it was the work laptop.

Retirement doesn't start until work stops. I don't know what I'll feel until the first Monday I never have to show up to work. In the meantime, my motivation to work is... fading.

Writing this, I have realised that I've put my plans on hold for four weeks because of work.

Nope. Don't do that.

I should go ahead and order the things I want, even if I don't unwrap them until the 1st of May.

See? That's what writing a journal entry does for you.

Streaming Economics

If Home Taping was supposed to have killed music (it didn't) then streaming is supposed to be starving artists and performers.

Look at a history of music. Musicians have always been badly paid, not paid at all, relegated to the servant's quarters, screwed over by record companies and mangers, and otherwise as badly treated as actors. Even a Court composer might not get paid for months on end and have to live on credit. Unless they were a celebrity or wrote popular opera. And even Mozart died a pauper.

Music streaming companies are carrying on a long and mildly despicable tradition.

The core of the streaming proposition to the customer is that the marginal cost of a stream is zero, and the average cost decreases as the amount streamed increases. In the UK this is only beaten by BBC Radio, which has zero cost, a decent quality of content but a now fairly lamentable quality of transmission, and is paid for by the people who watch television, so there are no advertisements. Either beat the heck out of buying CDs. Or listening to adverts.

Imagine that the marginal cost of a stream was not zero. That in addition to the monthly fee, we had to pay, say 20p for the first time we streamed a track, and then it was free thereafter. Taylor Swift's 2019 album Lover is £6.88 for 18 tracks at Amazon, or £3.60 under this suggestion. (Keeping a record of a customer's free list and doing the accounting is easy, though making it blindingly fast might be a challenge.) Maybe we get "20 free tracks" a month.

I image that the number of people streaming would fall faster than Disney losing subscribers for firing Gina Carano (that reference isn't going to age). Even at 10p a track. That zero marginal cost gives people the feeling they are getting something for nearly free. Which is a powerful feeling for a marketing department to have working for it.

Hold those thoughts for a moment.

Streamers pay the artists per play. I might play a favourite CD 100 times over four years (say), and at £0.0022 / stream for a 10-track CD, that's £2.20, which is about what an artist with a good lawyer and agent gets from the sale of a CD. But the CD (or downloads) pay the artist's royalties up front, when the money is most useful. Artists would love my suggestion of an up-front charge followed by free repeats, because it matches what happens with CDs, vinyl and downloads. (Except for the bit where I own the CD, but I only have a free repeat as long as the streamer a) stays in business, and b) decides to change its mind because that's what big corporations do. Let's note this ownership issue, and move on.)

What's good for the artists is going to put off the customers, and vice versa.

But then again: what's the point of providing music to people if the artists don't make money from it? Or if the effort it takes might be more profitably used in another medium?

None. Which is why the streamers make it very easy for artists to get their music onto the service. If the streamers charged the artists (as Spotify is rumoured to be thinking of doing), I imagine a lot of the artists would simply vanish. The expected benefit for most of them would be close to zero at best.

Streaming looks like a robust business model. It piggy-backs on fast broadband that is going to be there anyway, on super-capable mobile computers masquerading as phones that everyone has, on the willingness of artists to provide music and accept what amounts to deferred payments for an extended period, and a pricing scheme with a zero marginal cost. What could go wrong?

Well, something is, because music streamers are not making scads of money. It's news when one turns a profit in a year.

What really go wrong is the Regulators enforcing minimum payments to artists. Governments in need of money realised a while ago that digital businesses are not paying enough for the access to the markets those Governments provide. It is taking them some time to figure out how to get the money while not losing the service, but they will get there. Legislation grinds slow, but it grinds fine.

It's also a thought that Amazon or Apple could buy all the major streaming services (except each other) with about half-and-hour's profits, take the savings, and run them as brands. Is that going to be what happens a few years down the line?

Music I Buy, Music I Stream / Taped: Why The Difference?

In the early 1990's a company I was working for offered me a departing colleague's company car. There were tax advantages to company cars then, and it was a 2.0-litre Vauxhall Cavalier with automatic transmission: a world away from the bangers I had driven previously. I said yes please, and learned how to drive an automatic on the way back from the office in Docklands. (Forget about your left foot, is the secret.)

I realised then that there were some things that I would never spend my own money on, but would happily accept if it landed in my lap without too many costs.

And not just costs. Image matters. I have streamed Nine Feet Underground from Caravan's 1971 album In The Land of Grey and Pink a few times now. It's a great piece of music. There is no way I am buying the CD. Because of the songs on the rest of it. I am not Caravan-songs-guy: I'm great-instrumentals-guy. No CD with a twee pink cover will ever be in my collection. (This doesn't have to make sense to you, just to me.)

When cassettes appeared, it became clear that there was music we would buy, first- or second-hand. We wanted the LP. Then there was music we taped from other people's LP's. We wanted to have it available, but not so much that we would pay for it. Other than the cost of the cassette.

Home taping was killing music, we were told. We knew there were some spivs out there taping everything, as there were when downloading appeared. But that wasn't us.

What was it about tape-but-not-buy music?

Sometimes the LP only had a couple of decent tracks on it. In the 1970's the good stuff was amazing, but the bad stuff was dire. Now most CDs are all decent, or all dire, depending on whether you like that kind of music. A lot of 1970's LPs were not worth full retail.

Sometimes I liked the music, but I might go off it. U2's 1983 War, 1984 Unforgettable Fire and 1987 The Joshua Tree were like that. I bought their 1991 Achtung Baby (on cassette), and still have it. I play that much more frequently than I play the earlier albums, even now though I get the awesomeness of the earlier work.

Perhaps because it isn't music that I would want to put on as the result of a lapse of attention. Damn! I put on Unforgettable Fire. Or have someone put it on and then I would have to be polite and listen to it.

There are also artists and music that we pay full price for because a new album from them is an event, it has excitement and charge. That's why there's a new-release premium over the twelve-months-after-release price. There are artists we will pay twelve-months-after-release price. There are artists we would only ever stream, there are artists we would only ever stream once, and I will never knowingly play anything by Metallica.

This discussion makes no sense to full-time streamers, who pay a monthly price, or have Android software to dodge the ads, for everything, and can hear a new release on the day if the artist makes it available. Their equivalent is music they have on their Favourites, and music they don't, but still listen to. Same thing, lower price.

Why Do I Find Some Musicians Collectable , But Not Others?

Diamonds In The Dirt is the second album from Joanne Shaw Taylor, and it's the one I have.



If you have never heard her, try out one of her albums on Spotify. I listened to her 2012 release Almost Always Never on Spotify recently. It was good, but I didn't feel the need to learn how or why to use Favourites so I could add it. Nor did I feel the need to buy it. One of her albums is enough. I feel the same way about Chvrches, whose 2013 CD The Bones of What You Believe still deserves all the fuss it received at the time. And about Tegan and Sara, whose 2013 album Heartthrob was on train-music repeat for a while a few years ago.



You may not have heard of Maya Jane Coles either. I have her 2017 2-CD set Take Flight, the 2013 CD Comfort, her contribution to the 2012 DJ Kicks series, and the 2013 Heatwaves for mixmag magazine.



There are six CDs of Alfred Hill's String Quartets on Naxos. Just before the last lockdown, I bought volume 2. After a few listens, I wondered if there was more on Spotify and found there were, and it had the latest version by the Dominion Quartet. I think I chose volume 6, and very pleased with the result I was. I have a feeling I may buy all the others. Good string quartets are hard to find.



What is it about some artists that one CD is enough, but for others, a hundred are too few?

The essential Seven Dials CD is instrumental, has a narrow dynamic range, does not demand sustained attention, but has enough going on that when I do choose to tune in to it, there's something I can hook onto easily and be drawn in by. A good rhythm helps, as does melody, neat phrasing, strong licks and riffs, and thoughtful solo-ing and scoundscaping. I can take vocals, but neither too bland (Nora Jones) nor too guttural (every metal band ever). And no thump-drum intros. It's a balancing act, and any given artist might do it on one CD and miss it on another. Only a few do it consistently for a run of CD's.

It does explain why my collection includes medieval chant, baroque, Real Jazz (1930 - 1965), flamenco, Mozart, and chunks of trance and progressive house, and I see those as part of one continuum.

I have two more conditions.

I like each artist to have thier own distinctive sound. I should be able to recognise the composer or the artist pretty much by the end of the intro and certainly by the end of the first verse. Like Guerlin perfumes: each one smells different, but they all smell like a Guerlin.

And the musician needs to be changing and developing, in however nuanced a manner within their genre. I think Sohn's 2014 CD Tremours is a masterpiece. The 2017 follow-up Rennen is more of the same. Christopher Hogwood's 2010 release of Mozart's complete symphonies shows how Mozart's composing became more complex and experimental through the years: it's always Wolfie, but it's a Wolfie who is growing and learning all the time.

Needle, meet haystack (aka Amazon CD store, aka Spotify).

There are dozens of records and artists from my past phases of listening I still play now and again, thanks to Spotify. Many of them meet my conditions, but for some reason, they are now from-the-past. But that's something else to write about.