Continuing with CDs?

And I that ESG thing on Soul Jazz, which really stands out, graphically.

Makes me wish I had followed through and bought all of those Todd Rundgren reissues on Sanctuary a decade or so ago, where all the spines formed an elongated portrait of the man, when filed in chronological order.

see also: Asmus Tietchens CD reissue series on Die Stadt

We are all the people who cannot not browse somebody's music library if we visit their house heh

If it helps in identifying discs, everything on the shelves is in pure alphabetical order by artist (though chaos order past that).

that Wilco, which I bought when it came out at a Best Buy of all places

I was explaining to someone recently about how in the '90s you could pick up practically any major label release at a Big Box store, and if you couldn't at your first stop, you could at your second (which was probably across the street/freeway).

I did buy several not used CDs from multiple online retailers last night… consumerism!! grabbed those deluxe reissues of FM’s Mirage and Tango

My favorite big box store back in the day was Media Play, they had locations in Rockford, Erie, and Buffalo. And I'm sure elsewhere. I bought so many CDs at all three locations mentioned above, the one in Rockford was the first location and I went in there and stocked up on so many '90s alt rock CDs. If they didn't have a copy, and they usually did, the Best buy across the street did. They also had a lot of techno cds, I'm pretty sure I bought almost all of my '90s techno albums at one of those. Media play cornered the market on Future sound of London east of the Mississippi iirc.

I used to wonder if Circuit City had some deal with Rykodisc, because my suburban one (opened Fall 1997) had a ton of their stuff: all the Yoko reissues, arcane Zappa stuff like the Francesco Zappa album etc.

I remember seeing the the three (ESP-Disc) Godz albums on CD at Best Buy in like 1998.

A good friend was the manager of a local Barnes & Noble's music and video department back in the late-90s to mid-2000s, and seemingly he was given cart blanche to run it as basically a pretty fantastic independent CD and DVD shop. Got so many crucial albums and films there (with an occasional "family discount"). I remember him saying his B&N media department was like the most profitable in the US or something like that, because he actually made it a legit music geek hub. Then I moved away, and sometime in the mid-2000s it went under centralized corporate control, became unprofitable, and he hated it and quit. Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then.

That's a pretty awesome selection you've pulled Soundslike - should make a lot of people happy! I would keep the Ray Charles box set though, that's supposed to be the best sounding edition of those Atlantic recordings. (It's too bad they spread it out over three CD's, it can actually fit on just two easily, but having a bigger booklet is kind of nice.)

o. nate, if you mean Sundazed's CD release of the mono mix for Safe as Milk, supposedly they botched that up so no big loss. If you want to hear it in mono, the best digital version out there is here. The mono master tapes may very well be lost forever, so we may never get a proper digital mastering of it. (The vinyl rip at that link is pretty great though.)

Love the photo Soundslike, lots of familiar items in there although it does make me rather regretful that I got rid of the David Thomas 'Monster' set years ago. Seems it's worth a bit too.

Oh and what's that small box in front of the This Mortal Coil box set? The one that says 1981

It’s this https://www.discogs.com/release/10096281-Various-1981 which I believe Soundslike compiled some time ago.

o. nate, if you mean Sundazed's CD release of the mono mix for Safe as Milk, supposedly they botched that up so no big loss.

No it wasn’t that, I think it was the early 90s One Way reissue, but not 100% certain. I know it had the bonus tracks from the Brown Wrapper sessions. The sound quality was a bit lo-fi to be honest. But it seemed to suit the music.

XP - Thanks Dan

Birdistheword, I will be happy to see them enrich other lives! And in most cases, it won't be a loss for me since I have duplicates or superceding releases. But re: the Ray Charles set, I later got 'The Complete Atlantic Recordings' that I guess I just assumed covered all the same material with the same remastering. You figure still keep the other?

Maresnest, glad you enjoyed! I like a lot of those Thomas albums better than the Pere Ubu albums aftet their first three, so I'm glad to have it. I thought they'd reissued it with another added disc, but I guess even that is long OOP at this point?

Oh and yep, that's the '1981' box I made (gulp) *20* years ago! I basically introduced myself to ILM with it after lurking. Amazingly, I *still* occasionally get an email asking if I have a copy of it. I didn't even have one of my own for at least a decade till an old friend gave me his.

It can still be heard here:

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/1981-post-punk/

No it wasn’t that, I think it was the early 90s One Way reissue, but not 100% certain. I know it had the bonus tracks from the Brown Wrapper sessions. The sound quality was a bit lo-fi to be honest. But it seemed to suit the music.

If it was the One Way reissue, the Brown Wrapper bonus tracks would sound fine, but they used a poor copy of the stereo mix for Safe as Milk, possibly the same one used for the 1970 LP reissue as they both have clipped intros, dropouts and other defects that weren't found elsewhere. FWIW, there was a UK Castle CD that was in mono, but it wasn't the dedicated mono mix used in the U.S., it's the mono fold-down of the stereo mix which for some reason was originally used in the UK instead of the dedicated mono. Pretty crazy how that album's release history has been so messy.

Soundslike, that 2005 set from Rhino (Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959)) is actually a new mastering. I think it's the same team of Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch, and to be fair, it's a more comprehensive box set. They also correct a mistake they made on The Birth of Soul - there's like two songs where Inglot didn't realize the 45 masters he was using weren't the first-generation masters for those two songs. It's usually the other way around, but for those two songs, the first-generation master was on the LP master for The Genius Sings the Blues - the 45 masters were actually dubs that added some reverb. Anyway, that's just two songs, the rest of the box set is excellent and I prefer it because they left the dynamics intact with none of the limiting or compression added the 2005 set.

I would at least rip The Birth of Soul before you give it away. If you want to make an "upgraded" version of that set with a CD burner, you could always replace the two songs they messed up with the mastering from MFSL's hybrid SACD reissue of The Genius Sings the Blues, and on top of that you can easily fit the contents on to two discs instead of three. (Also note The Birth of Soul uses stereo mixes towards the tail end of the set - I prefer the mono mixes of those songs but the stereo mixes aren't bad.)

Wow, thanks! I'll probably keep it for now and A/B some tracks to see if the 2005 approach bothers me brick-wall-wise. I know I'm an odd one out, but I almost always prefer stereo mixes (even with hard panning) to mono, just because unless I'm listening to voice-and-instrument music (like 20s-30s blues) mono just sounds so small and unatural, as I do 95%+ of my listening with headphones.

I will say the call-and-response can be really fun in stereo! Also forgot that Robert Palmer wrote the liner notes and they're great. He wrote some of the best box set liner notes from that era - besides the Ray Charles set, there's also the Bo Diddley Chess Box and the Ornate Coleman box set of his Atlantic Recordings.

I don’t like Ornate Coleman; his playing is too fancy.

lol

A good friend was the manager of a local Barnes & Noble's music and video department back in the late-90s to mid-2000s, and seemingly he was given cart blanche to run it as basically a pretty fantastic independent CD and DVD shop. Got so many crucial albums and films there (with an occasional "family discount"). I remember him saying his B&N media department was like the most profitable in the US or something like that, because he actually made it a legit music geek hub. Then I moved away, and sometime in the mid-2000s it went under centralized corporate control, became unprofitable, and he hated it and quit. Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then.

― Soundslike, Friday, April 26, 2024

This was my experience! I bought so many Rykodisc reissues at B&N in the late '90s/early '00s: Big Star, Richard Thompson, for example. I could always find a more obscure Dylan album like Planet Waves. Bought some Robert Wyatt too.

"Probably the media sections at Barnes & Nobles didn't exist much past then."

they still have dvd/cd/vinyl sections at B&N.

they all suck unless you are really jonesing for a criterion title and can't wait for the half-price sale that they have every week online. (okay, not every week, but it seems like they have one every week. and you want to ask...maybe make those half price prices your regular prices...???)

They only officially do the half-off Criterion sales twice a year, but they are always doing sales on other labels or doing BOGOs, 3 for 2's, stuff like that.

I actually haven't been in a B&N since the pandemic, but by then the music selection was mostly vinyl, and a small selection of CDs, with a emphasis on budget ($5-7) catalogue titles.

everything seems really expensive when i look. and not just the vinyl. CDs too.

it really seems like criterion does those sales more than twice a year! i feel like i see them on my facebook a ton. but maybe it just feels like it.

Well, there are other retailers doing sales too (including Criterion themselves).

The big problem with B&N is most of their stuff is MSRP because they want to sell memberships to their "Reader's Club" or whatever it is for the built-in small discounts.

It still feels funny to me when I go to Target that the music section is all vinyl. If only they had a cassette section too then I'd really be reliving my youth.

oh that's what i meant that criterion had sales online. not B&N. and they seem fairly frequent. and i can only imagine that anyone wanting criterion DVDs just waits for a sale to buy them. which makes me wish that the actual price was just lower instead of this *SALE* thing that people do. chains like to do it a lot. i don't know why it bugs me. i either buy Rao's sauce or Victoria sauce because every week one of them is half off. they alternate weeks. they could make them each $7.99 as a regular price and i would be happier. but there is arcane business school retail logic behind it.

x-post

the Target near me is basically 50% Taylor Swift vinyl, with some space reserved for Billie Eilish, LDR, Kacey Musgraves, Pink Floyd, some others...plus Legend by Bob Marley.

It's all so boring. No wonder it seems like everyone get hyped over TS, she's one of like a dozen musicians who are pushed in your face all the time. Sure, the variety is there online but out in the wild it's not the case. I remember going to a local random supermarket in Eau Claire in the late '80s and buying up a ton of Iron Maiden and Dio and rap cassettes because they, like many other random places, carried everything.

it feels pretty evident the music industry just wants to lean heavily on a small number of massive artists rather than bothering with anyone else. it feels like they follow the model of movie studios, sure they'll release something prestigious for the end of the year but it's all superheroes and sequels the rest of the time.

Luckily we don't have to follow the industry and we can find things we do like. Otherwise we end up like boomers wishing for a return to ye olde days.

I do wish Criterion titles were on half price sales as often as Scott thinks they are. Over here in the UK its different.

Isn't a lot of stuff that's on Criterion in the US on some other imprint, like Arrow, in the UK?

there's some crossover but it's hard to know, i think Shout Factory and Arrow also share a lot of the same releases, maybe even moreso.

re the CD section at B&N, i think the one nearest to me has about 100 cds, filed away in a corner, with no rhyme or reason to the selection.

Yeah there's a lot of scattered licensing about, I think. (I'm just glad Arrow and Severin et al are now pretty well established over here -- I would have been indulging in all the recent sales but I need to save up money for a trip soon!)

When I was still growing up, several miles away (like a quick and easy 10 minute drive) there was an intersection with a Borders and Barnes & Noble, and if I couldn't find a new album at the library, I'd end up at either of those stores and listened to what I was looking for at one of their listening stations. Totally pointless now but before high-quality music streaming was a reality, it was awesome. Easily my favorite stores to visit, kind of amazing there used to be places like that all over the country and now they're pretty much gone. I think Fopp in the UK and maybe some stores in Japan are comparable, albeit without the books, magazines and the Starbucks inside.

did anybody here ever order from cheap-cds.com (maybe without the dash) in the 90s? great prices, cheap shipping, extremely bare bones fast minimal user interface, black courier font formatted on white background

I might've but can't remember. I remember a lot of CD shops online like that in the '00s. My favorite was one in the UK that was my introduction to imports - it was surprisingly affordable to buy direct from them since the exchange rate was good and shipping rates were much cheaper then. (They eventually got bought out by HMV.)

RIP CDbaby

anecdotally, my local record store has been selling more CDs lately than they have in decades...

as someone who loves buying vinyl, it's really disheartening to walk into almost every record store now and see nothing i want to buy for the money they're asking. it's akin to the baseball card boom circa the late '80s/early '90s, when the new cards for suddenly hot-shit players were going for $50 apiece, and sports card dealers were starting to only deal w/collector scum or price speculating newbies. i'm not saying you won't get more bang for your buck from a Lana Del Rey record vs a David Justice rookie card, but i feel like it's making a lot of people quit the game in the same way, what you get from the hobby isn't worth the cost anymore. and therefore CDs are the cheap and frequently higher quality path to hearing so much music.

however i've got rules, there are some things i'm always and forever buying on vinyl.

used vinyl in many stores isn't worth the trouble, but new stuff from indie labels still falls somewhere from $14 to the low twenties, so that's what I buy (and used CDs, where they have them). I don't touch the (mostly major label) new stuff that's over $30 for a single lp.

I listen to vinyl because I like the way 50s and 60s records sound on vinyl.

The new stuff scares me, though. I saw a Kiss hits record at WalMart for 30 bucks. I wouldn't sit through an entire Kiss record on vinyl, CD or anything. I'm a singles/ mixes person.

I buy a decent number of CDs these days, and it feels funny that the reasons are the exact same ones I started buying some vinyl in the 90s. It's a cheap way to access stuff that's non-available or stupidly expensive on streaming/vinyl. (It'd be cheaper and easier to do a digital archive, I know, but I worry if I started I'd have the urge to stockpile every last thing I'd ever liked, and that's not what I want. I want to patronize stores and find things I care about and have them sitting out reminding me they exist.) Instead of old vinyl in the bottom bin costing 10-20% of what a new CD did, now the old CDs down there cost a tenth of what new vinyl does. Instead of records opening up a world of 60s/70s albums that never really hit any other format (exotica! forgotten funk!), now CDs open up something similar for the 90s/00s (IDM compilations! forgotten experimental!). Even the process of looking through used CDs in a store feels like looking at records used to, where everything's basically just a few dollars and you never know what treasure you'll find -- whereas over in the vinyl bins the excitement of finding something fun tends to be immediately deflated by looking at the price. I still buy both, but if I want something for listening purposes and the record is $50, I would absolutely rather take ten $5 CDs, I'm ... not not an idiot, but still

Just went to give the +/- 180 CDs to the book shop with the vinyl-only music section, but the owner wasn't there at the moment. Will try again tomorrow.

But as a CD nerd, I'm excited that I'm going to roughly double their selection, and instantly giving them a whole quite decent CD selection, preparing for the coming Gen Z music geeks who dig CDs because vinyl has become a stupid expensive gimmick as per posts above...

My Target sells the Swift stuff that omar little mentioned plus a few archival vinyl things like Abbey Road, The Dark Side of the Moon, and, of course, Rumours (maybe the most popular of all).