Listened to my dad’s copy of Rubber Soul, which sounds *great* after a bit of cleaning. I’d heard that the original mono mixes were superior to the CD re-releases… yep. Definitely true. When the sitar kicks in on “Norweigian Wood”, I audibly gasped. Yep! Vinyl from 1966 demolishes the nice clean CD. I’m also running through “Rapper’s Delight” from Sugarhill Gang, which I found at a antique store for a buck or two. Outstanding…

I also think the people on the Interwebsnets were right about the Ortofon 2M cartridge needing several hours of break-in time. I think the sound is starting to smooth out a bit. (I’m on “Adore” from the Pumpkins now – a mono mix, rare for modern albums. “Ava Adore” is full of new things to listen to that weren’t obvious on the CD mix…)

Going back a few more years, I was pleased to learn that the date of the earliest replayable recorded sound has been pushed back a few decades. Some folks at the Laurence Berkeley National Labs analyzed an image created by a gentleman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention, a device known as a phonautograph, etched sound waves onto paper, coated in lampblack and wrapped around a ceramic cylinder. Scott de Martinville did not conceive of the notion that the squiggles in the fine carbon could be played back – rather, he considered the device strictly for the purpose of converting sound into imagery for later study. Somehow, amazingly, one of his smoke-covered “phonautograms” survived, and was scanned and converted into a usable waveform by the LBNL scientists, resulting in 10 comprehensible seconds of Au Clair de la Lune, sung by a girl in 1860. I find the existence of such a recording simultaneously heartwarming and terrifying.