Somebody Stop Tom Holkenborg
Before he gives us another musical masterpiece, and we all live to regret it. Oops! Too late! Junkie XL is back with RadioJXL. I bought the double CD ($13 at Tower, for the moment); I bought the online extras for $6.99. You should too.
Highlights so far are Broken (vocals by Feeder's Grant Harrison), and Tennis...really fantastic stuff if you're into the Electronica thing.
Just like Merrill Lynch, I'll rate this as a strong buy.
I picked up a pair of M-Audio BX-8 reference monitors for my home studio (Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerhead Reason, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Echo Audio MiaMIDI), and rapidly encountered the terrible low fidelity of your average MP3 files. I have a ton of CDs, and I've carefully encoded using "recommended audiophile settings" with high bitrate MP3s, over the past couple of years. The new speakers have shown me that MP3 is crap.
What is NOT crap is AAC, Apple's format for iTunes and iPod. I've done encodings at the 160k bit rate, and they are dramatically better than the equivalent rate MP3s. Next stop is Ogg Vorbis, for another quality check. I like the ideas behind Ogg, but the fidelity just has to be there...
Readers may not know that our own Johno is a fairly badass bass player. Next time I'm around I think I want to hear the amplified version, instead of the thwacky sounds we should only hear after all the oil is gone and we're living off seal fat in igloos.
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Ross, you're too kind. I'm
Ross, you're too kind. I'm merely a competent bass player, in the vein of Mike Evans, Michael Anthony, or that chick from the cartoon version of Josie and the Pussycats.
(who I know is actually LA-based session musician Carol Kaye, who has played on more recordings than any other bass player ever, and who is one of the towering great masters of the instrument. I don't mean her. I mean the cartoon.)