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Your youtube video sucks and doesn't even make any real-world measurements between any albums. Try one that does actual measurements - http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/...

Vinyl can beat the shit out of a CD because of a higher inherent dynamic range due to lack of loudness wars compression. The only real problem is sound degradation due to the way the media is played and affected by vibration. Oh, but wait, we've got lasers now that can read the grooves and act just like an analog needle!

Sorry, but what you guys practice in THEORY rarely holds up to real-world application.

Oh and here's an interesting comparison of different analog and digital masterings OF THE SAME SOURCE MATERIAL done by a professional mastering engineer.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/...

Steve Hoffman compares masterings of cd, vinyl, sacd, open reel to reel to the original master tape.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/...

Because destroying what looks like decorative bamboo to an untrained eye is not anywhere close to what you described.

JFK customs inspectors removed and smashed eleven handmade flutes (or thirteen, according to some stories). That's not the level of destruction that should ever be allowed without multiple sign-offs by supervisors and speaking to the owner of those items to determine whether the items fall into one of the many, many exceptions to U.S. import laws (which they did). Anything less than that level of care clearly crosses the line into gross criminal negligence territory.

Do you really think a clarinet or violin would be seized and destroyed based on one story of decorative bamboo?

This same airport, back in 2006, seized and destroyed a grand piano valued at over two hundred thousand dollars and severely damaged a second one. This is not just a single story. U.S. Customs has a long history of destroying things.

You must visit here a lot. If not, you'd fit right in.

Off to warm up the EL34s...

You get bonus points for playing bass left-handed.

Plastic Ono bonus points if you chew gum while you sing.

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Let me give you an example. Recently, I got a new PC running Vista. One of the first things I tried to do was install my favorite game, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Now, officially, V:tM:B isn't supported on 64 bit Windows OSs. This is due to an easily corrected programming mistake by Troika as it was going out the door (they were under a lot of pressure, I don't blame them). A kindly hacker has fixed it for us: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 64 bit patch

So, the next game I tried to Install was my second favorite System Shock 2. I also had a problem with that due to my Dual Core CPU. So, I had to find another kindly hacker to help me... Game Issues With Multiprocessor/Hyperthreading Systems...

I'm expecting to keep installing old games, because I happen to like them. (Sacrifice is probably up next... well after my Steam games and Dawn of War.)

Now with Wine, you have people dedicated to adding a Windows compatibility layer to Linux. Each individual game you might think of will have an entry in the database, with different levels of success. Wine itself runs in multiple modes, so if one mode doesn't work you can try others. Unfortunately at the moment, it isn't a panacea. Some games work, and some don't. What I'm hoping for in the future is that older games will work better in Wine than the latest Windows, especially games that have a small but loyal fanbase. Because with old games, officialdom doesn't care, we could lose generations of gaming art and they'd just shrug. It's sort of like throwing out all the old books, or trashing all the old movies... (there was a time when that was a problem, a lot of old Ernie Kovacs was recycled for it's silver content... )

Alternatives for a lot of games are also in the works, basically creating Linux native engines to run Windows content. I remember looking for one for Dark Engine games, with no luck, but that was a while back. Of course, maybe I should be following ReactOS's Progress instead, but right now it isn't nearly as desktop ready as Linux and I like Linux better than WinXP, given the choice. Of course, really old games from Infocom and LucasArts tend to have top notch native Linux support, so I have hope.

I haven't found a music forum with activity even close to that of Hoffman's.

The discs he's mastered are great. His "Breath of Life" approach is, to pardon the pun, a breath of fresh air for those born after the age of vinyl. His painstaking approach results in very natural recordings. No fucking around with the tapes, just getting the best, "purest" source, and using it. A great example would be the DCC (Gold Disc) version of The Beach Boy's Pet Sounds. That'll set you back over $100 on eBay. Head-Fi's second podcast has a great interview with him.

I hope the resurgence of vinyl is a sign that ending, the loudness wars, are.

Some CDs are intentionally clipped to heck during mastering because starting in the mid-1990s, record producers have been deluded into thinking that louder is better, and the resulting hypercompression has turned into an arms race.

The hypercompression of Zwan, on the other hand, may have been an artistic choice.