President's Message
July 2001

0. Mostly for Boston area members: To ensure reliability comparable (?) to printed postal meeting notices, we decided to set up a dual email meeting notice system. Alvin Foster sends the first; I send the second 2 or 3 days before the meeting with any last minute additions or corrections. If you are receiving one and would like to receive two, email either Alvin (for #1) at amfmail@gis.net or me (for #2) at dbsystems@attglobal.net.

1. Sonic Foundry announces the addition of the Orchestral series to the loops (short sound samples) for ACID family. "We ...traveled to Moscow with our charts and had a full symphony orchestra produce an astounding variety of authentic, original music, presented here as inspiring collections of application-specific, royalty-free sounds...providing you with the loops you need to conduct your own virtual symphony... with your own baton in ACID to maximize the emotional impact of your visual message."

2. When NASA recently supplied DVD players for the International Space Station to entertain astronauts, the players were hacked (for all-region) so they could play discs chosen by crew members who will come from all around the world (what region is outer space?). [BBC Music Jn01].

3. Recent vistors at the Hayden Planetarium noted with some dismay that Pluto has been demoted from the list of planets. Meanwhile English composer Colin Matthews has written a 'Pluto' movement to Holst's suite The Planets (Pluto the Renewer), recorded for Hyperion (CDA 67270).

4. I recently purchased a few CDs from Allegro's budget historic classical series, Classica D'Oro. To my dismay I heard some really obnoxious sounds from the noise reduction system being used. (One's suspicions are aroused when a 60 year old disc recording is completely free from surface noise). The kind of sound I hear is a flutey burbling watery sound on low level passages. Once I started to pick up on it it was impossible to ignore. An example is Thomas Beecham conducting the Franck D minor symphony, the opening bars (CDO1013); another, Stokowski doing Tchaikovsky (CDO1012). No person is credited for the restoration--I certainly wouldn't put my name on it!

5. Walter Stanton, inventor of the easily replaceable stylus, died April 16, 2001 at the age of 86. During World War II he was involved in design of mechanisms for aerospace applications. In 1950 he purchased Pickering, which had been selling his patented stylus, and in 1960 founded Stanton Magnetics. He ran both companies until his retirement in 1998, branching out into headphones and speakers and fostering the resurgence of the disc jockey market for his cartridges. [NYT 21Ap01]


 

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updated 11/11/04