Mats Peterson’s Weblog

After all these years, most Windows fonts still don’t have a glyph for the U+2010 HYPHEN Unicode character. Heads up, Microsoft!

I recently got the European version of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas CD from a local store here in Sweden, cat. no. MCD 18226. I discovered that this version is different from the US one; the European version seems to be based on a 1963 LP release of Merry Christmas , which is in “simulated stereo” and which has added reverb, while the US version is based on the 1955 release, which is in mono with no reverb.

I’ve done a bit of “reverse engineering” of Winamp 5.63 in order to get the most current list of ID3 genres . The genre names are spelled exactly as in Winamp.

A collection of standard MIDI files of varying quality.

So I bought the 3 CD set The Best of Glenn Miller (1938–1942) from 2008 (part of the RCA Original Masters series), and it actually seems to be nothing more than a repackaging of The Popular Recordings (1938–1942) from 1989 (metal transfers by Bernardo Cosachov). This set has very little noise reduction and equalization applied to it, hence it retains most of the overtones and ambience, and it sounds very natural to me. I already have The Essential Glenn Miller from 2005 (metal transfers by Doug Pomeroy), and while it has the cleanest sound that I’ve heard, it sometimes suffers from overuse of noise reduction and equalization, and it does lack some important songs.

I recently bought the 2003 Steamhammer/SPV remaster (cat. no. SPV 076‐7439A CD) of Saga ’s Heads or Tales album. It exhibits seriously exaggerated treble. It actually sounds like my 1994 Polydor CD (cat. no. 815 410‐2) without de‐emphasis applied to it (one of the very few CDs with pre‐emphasis that I own), only even worse, and with increased loudness. It seems like they’ve been working with pre‐emphasized audio during the remastering without knowing it. I’ve listened to my 1983 Bon Aire vinyl (cat. no. 208 477), and it sounds awfully similar to the remaster, although not quite as bad. Is it possible that they’ve been using pre‐emphasized audio on the vinyl as well? I’ve recorded two samples ( The Flyer , Social Orphan ) from the Bon Aire vinyl, and applied de‐emphasis to them ( The Flyer , Social Orphan ). The de‐emphasized versions sound very similar to the 1994 Polydor CD ( The Flyer , Social Orphan ). I don’t have the best turntable in the world here (it’s a 35 year old ...