Neil Robinson's blog

Sigur who?

Today has been a day, totally dominated by music, that's no bad thing of course, I've really enjoyed it, and now at 1.15am the day is pretty much over.

Takk

Sigur Ros

On the way home from work a few days ago I heard a Radio 1 DJ comment that Sigur Rós had been he and his wife's favourite band during his wife's pregnancy. A bit of an unusual comment perhaps, but I made a mental note to listen to the album Takk... which I had downloaded previously, just for the track Hoppipolla which was featured on the trailer to the BBC nature series Planet Earth.

So, this morning my day started normally; wake up too late, rush around to get ready for work, then jump in the car and drive to work. As planned once I'd set off I put on Takk... to listen to on my journey.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but by the time I got to work I knew I had found a real gem of an album, and one that somewhat frustratingly, I had owned all along!

As some of you may know, I am going through my music collection and buying the CDs of anything that I've either copied from people or downloaded. I knew that this album was so good, I was going to have to listen to it properly over the weekend, and that meant I was going to have to take a trip into Slough town centre at lunch time and buy a copy.

Before lunch I did a bit of research on the internet to find out some background information on Sigur Rós, and also to find out if there were any other albums that I should be looking for from them.

According to the press, Takk... is arguably the band's best work, but I don't always believe what I read so I will be listening to the other albums as well.

Heima (Special Edition 116 Page Booklet) [2006]

One recommendation was the new film by Sigur Rós, released earlier this month, called Heima. The film is basically a documentary, which follows the band around as they perform 13 special, free, un-publicised concerts for the public in the small towns and the countryside around Iceland.

I watched the trailer for this film here and was instantly entranced; the combination of the unique landscape of their homeland of Iceland, and the lilting vocals of Jón þor Birgisson was spectacular. I had to buy a copy of this too.

In HMV, there were two versions of the DVD, a standard and a special edition, which came with a 116 page book of photos taken during the making of the film.

I selected the special edition, which was rare for me, but I was enjoying the music so much, I had to have the best copy available. It's a shame there isn't an HD-DVD version of the film, but at least this one does come with a DTS soundtrack.

After work I had already planned to go and watch a performance from the Watoto childrens Choir at Greyfriars church in Reading with a friend of mine. This started at 7.30, so I just had enough time to drop my car off at home and get a lift to the performance.

Watoto is a project set up by an American Christian couple in Uganda to give help and support to orphan children who's parents have died of either AIDS / HIV or in the conflicts taking place in the north of the country. It is estimated that 50 million children are orphans in Africa as a result of the AIDS / HIV epidemic. Although it's just a drop in the ocean, the Watoto project currently gives housing, education, and hope to 7,200 of these children, and their aim is to increase this to 10,000 by the end of this year. More information on the project can be found here.

The performance from the childrens choir was great fun, the enthusiasm that this kids had was fantastic, and made the prim and proper English reserve look all the more ridiculous as the audience was encouraged to dance along with them to a couple of songs.

After the performance, we stopped in at our local pub, the Calleva for a quick drink, then I went back home to watch Heima...

This DVD is just as good as I thought and hoped it would be. I am still amazed at how the live recordings sound so good, the timing that this band have when they play together is like nothing I've ever heard. The talent that all the musicians have is exceptional, effortlessly playing a wide range of instruments, from Electric guitars with a bow, to an organ made from peices of rock collected from a landslide.

Towards the end of the film, the band members describe the way it feels when they're performing as though they're floating, the bassist Georg Holm even said that he got to the end of the concert and he couldn't remember playing, it had just happened.

It's rare that you hear a band so well connected as a group, so unique, and so creative as Sigur Rós. I'm very much looking forward to hearing the other albums.

Late night alumni

OK, a new post for a new day, I'm partly writing this because of the nasty comments I got from people about how boring my last post on FLAC was - I apologise, it was for a select few friends who were interested honest. Please skip past it if you're not interested and don't complain!

I've not done any travel recently so I can't write about that, but I can tell you that over the next few weeks I've got quite a few trips coming up. I don't want to spoil the surprise of the places I'm going, you'll have to keep checking back for my news.

Empty Streets

Late Night Alumni

This evening I've been lounging around preparing for the rest of my week - church course tomorrow night, and Korean lesson on Thursday. I was told off this morning for being continually late to work, so I've also ironed a shirt ready for tomorrow - just the one mind you, I'm not that organised!

Continuing the theme from a couple of posts ago, I'd like to introduce some more music. This time the work of Late Night Alumni and their album empty streets.

This album has been a favorite of mine for some time, it's some of the best chill out music that I've ever heard. It's another one of those albums that I discovered from listening to Chill radio. The first track I heard was the title track empty streets, but the whole album is great, there isn't a weak track on there.

Perfect music for relaxing on a Tuesday evening!

What the FLAC!

OK, so as requested by some friends, I'm going to post so more detail on what I'm doing with my music; besides simply listening to it!

I've always strived to have the best quality music that was possible, quickly moving from tapes to CD when they were introduced all those years ago. Once I started driving, I found I was carrying loads of CDs with me, which was inconvenient, expensive and a lot of them got lost or damaged.

I'd been monitoring the growth of mp3 and the illegal downloading culture as it grew and I had a few issues with it:

• I don't like having just odd songs, I want the whole album.
• I don't want poor quality audio, CD is a known entity, something I can trust.
• There is as I've said before a certain tactile appeal in owning the original discs.
• It's illegal, and I'm not supporting the artists.

These things prevented me for a time, from moving to mp3, but it was in the iPod in the end that did it...

The iPod is a fantastic peice of kit, and it allowed me to carry all of my music everywhere I went, including, with the relevant line in adaptors, in the car.

So I set about ripping all of my music to mp3. I wanted to make sure that all of my CDs were converted to mp3 in the best possible quality onto the iPod so that I wouldn't feel like I was making a compromise for the sake of convenience.

I found a website suggesting the use of Exact Audio Copy, and an mp3 codec called Lame. I followed the instructions on this website and had mp3s that I was very happy with on my iPod, perfect for listening in the car, or on the move.

For home, I still was still using CDs, but I could see that this wasn't the future, I was impressed with the convenience of mp3 on my iPod but still wasn't happy with quality. The iPod is great, but it's not a peice of Hi-Fi equipment after all.

I did some research into audiophile digital music players and came up with the Squeezebox from Slim Devices (Now owned by Logitech). This device has an optical output, and high end DAC chips, so it should make the best of the mp3s that I'd created. Functionally this product is amazing, but I was still disappointed - mp3s just don't sound as involving as a CD, though to be honest, this is only really a problem when you sit down and enjoy listening on a quality Hi-Fi system; but I do like to do that, so I had to find a solution.

What I've settled on now is FLAC. FLAC is an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec. When encoded with Flac, file sizes are smaller than the raw file, but no data is lost at all. The best thing about Flac though, is that the Squeezebox can decompress and play these files in the player itself, again, with no loss of data.

You may not be aware, but a CD player is made of three sections or stages:

1. The transport - which reads data from the disc, and trys to correct for errors as it reads. The transport feeds it's digital output to the next stage...
2. The DAC or digital to audio convertor - which converts the digital signal into an analogue audio signal which is then fed to the next stage...
3. The Audio Stage - which makes sure that the signals are at the correct level to go into your amplifier.

A lot of CD players now have a digital ouput to bypass stages 2 and 3, so that you can use dedicated stage 2 and 3 equipment that potentially could do a better job. This makes the CD player into a transport, a poor quality one will introduce more errors into the digital signal as it can't fix all the read errors as it plays the disc.

The squeezebox recieves the digital audio file as a digital stream, so doesn't have stage 1, it does have stages 2 and 3, but it also has a digital output. It therefore stands to reason that if I use an uncompressed or Flac compressed file into the squeezebox, and use the digital outputs of both devices, the only differences in the audio will be down to the transports used to play the disc (in real time in the CD player, or previously when I ripped the CD in the computer).

The key thing here then is that if I take the time to rip the CD perfectly, using a squeezebox will give me convenience of not having all my discs lying around, as well as the potential audio quality of the best CD transport or player ever made!

I did a little more research into Exact Audio Copy and I now use a very secure way of ripping discs that makes sure that all of the data is read more than once, with checksums for each track compared. If the drive has to do any error correction, it will read the area several times to make sure that a huge majority of the resultant data is the same, before it will accept this as the real data that should have been read.

All of this over the top process results in a rip from the CD which is far superior to a conventional CD player, which can only read in real time, and have to trust the first error correction that they create. To rip each disc does take a long time having said that, around an hour per CD, compared to around 10 mins if I used Media Player or iTunes. 

The raw ripped audio files are then compressed in two ways, Flac for my Squeezebox, and mp3 for my iPod, Media Center Extenders, and XBox.

I now have a system that I am very happy with, It gives me convenience, as well as an increase in audio quality over listening to CDs in the conventional way!

One thing that I didn't mention is that over the last few years, I did start downloading digital audio files, but now I'm going back and righting my wrongs, buying original CDs of everything I've ever downloaded.

If you'd like any more details of how I've set up Exact Audio Copy, please do get in touch, I'm more than happy to help.