It's February 11 and we're in the middle of back-to-back snowstorms with more coming this weekend.The USPS was closed on Saturday due to the snowstorm "Nemo" so there was much to ship today.

Just a coincidence, but the Hank Ballard single is called "The Switch-A-Roo"---- the Rock-A-Teens single is called "Woo-Hoo"---- and the sheet music sale for today is "Hi-Diddle-Diddle." It's a real day for baby talk!

The vintage Mentor Paperback is called "Man Makes Himself." That little box with the triangle window is a replacement needle for a record player.

This Louis Armstrong album came out while he was still alive but his popularity was dwindling and few people knew he practically created the art of jazz improvisation. Bessie Smith did not live to see her music revived in this Columbia Records box set of 78 rpms from the 1940s.

It was a light day for "print." Life was a weekly magazine and Horizon was a monthly history journal. Hardcover and paperbacks were also among today's sales.

Just a few of the LP albums that shipped today. The four Jimmie Davis LPs you see were from Gov. Davis's own personal collection. He was a teacher and a professional musician and a politician and a songwriter and performer among other things.

Digital vs. analog for vinyl record buffs

Analog recording-- which is the source of most used vinyl sold at moneyblows books and music-- can be thought to essentially reflect the Victorian scientific imagination, in which sound is mechanically inscribed, rather than digitally encoded.

By contrast, the pitch, tone color, and loudness of a digital playback starts out as binary numbers intelligible to computer circuits. In other words, the presence or absence of an electric pulse (“1” or “0”) is detected and digitially converted in the original reproduction.

The waveform of the sound, as a human might hear it at this point, becomes a representation of the audio frequency, possibly encompassing more than half a million bits per second. For more than a quarter century now, this torrential bit stream has become audible when a digital recording is played back.

It all begins when a musical waveform is "sampled" at least 40,000 times per second. Each sample represents a point in time as the music unfolds. Then, the height of the sound wave at each of these 40,000 sampling points is numerically expressed. Together, these two factors accurately describe the sound wave so that it can be recorded as a series of numbers.

In playback, those numbers are fed into a device called a digital-to-analog converter which produces voltages corresponding to each number at precisely defined points in time. In this way, the digital signal is reconstituted as a waveform.

Once it is digitally encoded, the music’s fidelity is undisturbed—whether it’s on vinyl or CD, or played via a computer's own file or an internet stream, theoretically makes no difference.

A moment of digital silence—or an analogous very faint pianissimo, is preserved without tape or vinyl noise. An explosion of musical loudness needn’t be intentionally (though expertly) distorted for the putative convenience of the end user, or the delicate constitution of a record stylus.

In a digital recording, bass response is extended from 30 to 20 Hz to encompass the very lowest notes of the musical spectrum. Frequency deviation over the entire range from 20 to 20,000 Hz is reduced from ± 2 db to ± 0.5 db, resulting in clarification of tonal timbres and textures thanks to greater linearity in the crucial overtone range.

Dynamic range, i.e. the maximal span between loud and soft, is enlarged to 90 db, closely approximating the natural loudness range of live music. Distortion at maximum loudness shrinks from the traditional norm of 1% to an amount too small to be measured, resulting in the added clarity of loud passages. Finally, flutter and wow - those marginal wobbles of pitch that cause a sense of false vibrato in some conventional recordings - also reduced from the usual 0.050/0 to the point of unmeasurability.

A vinyl record, though, remains the manufactured product of its Victorian heritage—a representation of the musical waveform in inscribed (actually stamped) grooves. It’s necessarily imperfect compared with computer playback, and presents the listener with a Hobson’s choice of whether one should listen with digital ears or analog ears.

Ears are the definitive equipment for listening. The ultimate choice of digital or analog, I think, is cryptically (though oddly appropriately) laid out in the movie “Pulp Fiction,” when (I’m paraphrasing here) Uma Thurman asks John Travolta, “Do you spend your time listening, or waiting to talk?” Travolta hesitates for a moment and says, “I guess I spend most of my time waiting to talk…. But I’m working on listening.”

In listening there invariably is background noise, whether or not it disturbs the foreground intent. A truism of hearing loss is that the two eventually blend, so that the person suffering some auditory loss will say, “I can’t hear you,” particularly in a crowded room.
Using this standard, I don’t mind listening to the background noise in a vinyl record, until it gets so bad I might say to the music, “I can’t hear you.”

Digital techniques can fix that, too. People buy HD TVs so that can get better resolution of a lousy show. The greatest invention of modern culture, television, is about to be bumped off the analog spectrum as of February 2009. You are already being asked to give it up.

I have VHS tapes and records to play. Judge for yourself who is better equipped-- the digital only consumer, or the one the one who admits the imperfections wrought by Thomas Edison when he lit the known world.

Playing Santa is always fun this time of year. When you are selling one-of-a-kind items like we are, you need to make sure they get down the destination chimney, and we thank the U.S. Postal Service for doing what they say they will do. At the same time we've been adding new items from interesting collections, and today I'd like to focus on the once ubiquitous 45 rpm single.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it was quite usual to go into a store and buy 2 songs for 99 cents or less-- cheaper than iTunes? (I wouldn't know, we play records, tapes and CDs around here). The kicker was, they had what was called an "A" side and a "B" side. If the promoters had their ducks in a row, the "A" side would have been heard on the radio, getting you to buy it. And the "B" side was just there because it cost not much more to manufacture 2-sided vinyl records than it did to make them one-sided (which they were back around the turn of the 19th-20th century).
If you really wanted your money's worth, you might actually play the "B" side. It might be horrible, or it might be awesome. There was no telling.
There were also 45 rpms that seem destined for radio stations instead of stores. The radio station might think it was a normal record, and they might be encouraged to play it, but there was no intention of pressing mass quantities unless the record hit big on the radio. Today these can be found in various collections and they are called "promos," or "white label promos" or such (many had white labels instead of the consumer-color coded ones).
If you're familiar with the Charles Manson murders, they occurred at the home of Terry Melcher, who started life as Doris Day's son and became a record producer in his own right. We have acquired some white label promos of some of his rarest psychedelic rock issues, by Glad and Grapefruit (not sure what's with the one-word "G" names).
Psychedelic garage rock was all the rage in 1960s and band names reflected the freewheeling spirit: Crome Syrcus and We Ugly Dogs are 2 great ones.
And, behind ordinary names are some very unusual records. What ever became of Don Thomas, who sang what could only be described as a gringo "corrido" imagining what it is like to die slowly in the jungles of Vietnam.
And, for those of you who think "Dazed and Confused" is a Led Zeppelin song, perhaps you haven't heard the original by Jake Holmes.
Moving on to immortal 45 rpm singles that made history and are still treasured 40+ years later: how about an original Volt white label promo of Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay." Or an original Beatles Yesterday/Act Naturally, one of the most perfect singles of all time, recalling Top 40 radio, a format which could accommodate bland, string-padded pop (Yesterday), and Buck Owens style Bakersfield country (Act Naturally), as long as it was by the Beatles. And conveniently, these tunes were on opposite sides of the original swirl-labeled 45 rpm single. How about a virtually mint copy of Theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes.
There are many more than I can list here, but let's end with a couple of doozies: can you guess who did the original of Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots?
And, as much as I love the A side by Captain Paul and his Seafaring Band, the B side is actually better: I wanna be a life guard.
Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling "yoo-hoo"