And as usual, I pulled up a CD today. Gino Vanelli - Powerful People. That's just a good sounding, well crafted album. This was on the Vandersteens with the Onkyo receiver in the bedroom. A nice shower, fire up the music and relax for the next 45 minutes. I love laying in bed listening to music. I did that a bunch when I was a teenager (with those vinyl records, even!)
Then, just to support the artists, I took a friend of mine to the state fair for the Happy Together tour. Cowsills, Association, Vogues, Jay & the Americans, Turtles and Joey Molland of Badfinger. She loves her oldies and it was a fun night. The Cowsills and Association were really good. The Vogues and Jay & Amrericans had some great harmonies. Joey Molland seemed to struggle with vocals on a couple of the songs. I wonder how long Mark Volman will be with us. He's got Lewy Dementia, the same thing that Robin Williams had. You could see the tremors in his right hand, but he was still out there having fun. Good for him.
BTW, no matter how gently I treated my albums, they always developed that odd click and pop. Once they happen they almost got ingrained in you mind. I had a Kansas album that had 2 clicks at the beginning of Carry on My Wayward Sun. I listened to that album so much that even when I hear the CD version, I hear those clicks in my mind. It's almost like I miss them.
I also have two boxes of records with no jackets. They were on the bottom shelves when my basement flooded years ago. I tossed the wet nasty jackets, but kept the records. I've cleaned quite a few, even came close to buying a VPI or Record Doctor record cleaner but I don't know that they would remove all the crap in the grooves. I would probably take an ultrasonic cleaner to really do it, plus new sleeves and jackets are going to cost as much as many of the records cost me originally. However CDs that got wet were wiped clean and sound the same as they did before the flood. Oh yeah, I tossed out about 20 reels of 1/4" tapes. A few were irreplaceable. Alas, transferring to digital wasn't something that had done, otherwise I would still have copies.
The Interesting thing is that I really don't spend a lot of time listening to music on the JBL monitors that I use for my recordings. I tend to listen mostly on the Vandersteen/Onkyo/Sony system. The Polk 5.1system is almost exclusively TV related. I do like listening to the Vandys.