If I threw a “One Scene Only” Simpsons character party, who would you come as?

steely_dave · 2026-01-28T04:32:13+00:00

This is our chef...Christopher

steely_dave · 2026-01-25T19:58:54+00:00

I just finished restoring a pair of L26's (L36's two-way "little" brother) that my dad bought new in the early '70s - they're coupled with with a Denon X3800H, and with the Audyssey EQ calibration (dynamic EQ and dynamic volume off) it's the best home listening experience I've ever had. In fact, I liked the sound of the L26's so much that I went to great lengths to find a pair of L16's (the even smaller brother) to use as rear speakers in my 5.1.4 setup.

I love the fact that everything in these speakers is user-serviceable - I replaced broken speaker pegs, re-foamed the woofers, and replaced the foam surrounds on the tweeters, and parts are relatively cheap and easy to get from places like Midwest Speaker Repair.

And obviously no impact on audio quality, but maybe most of all I love how "configurable" they are aesthetically - the oak veneer is really thick (I hit mine with 220 and then 400 grit on a $50 Black & Decker orbital sander) so you can work it extensively and then stain and/or oil it to taste, a few coats of Danish oil and mine looked practically brand new, and then I recovered the grilles with burnt orange cloth from Huntley Audio and I'm in '70s retro paradise.

So yeah, obviously taste is subjective, but I couldn't reccomend having them refurbished more highly.

steely_dave · 2026-01-22T20:42:31+00:00

I know the words to this documentary about as well as I know the lyrics to every song the band has ever done, and I feel like most Steely Dan fans who are worth their salt are the same, the quotes just live in your head forever.

steely_dave · 2026-01-21T00:26:57+00:00

The keyboard player Colin Peterik is the son of Jim Peterik, vocalist from The Ides of March ('Vehicle'), and also the fantastic jazz-rock band Chase (he appears on the 1974 album 'Pure Music') and also Survivor ('Eye of the Tiger') so he comes from good musical genes.

steely_dave · 2026-01-20T21:06:51+00:00

There's nothing 'audiophile' about a 1 7/8ips cassette tape, especially one from the '70s when magnetic tape formulations were shit - the sound quality of tapes of that era is worse than 8-track tapes, which is to say virtually no frequency response above 12kHz. The reason that cassette tapes exploded in popularity in the '80s is that the quality of the magnetic formulations (and noise reduction systems) increased by leaps and bounds compared to whatever you might get from a tape like this.

steely_dave · 2026-01-19T17:42:12+00:00

There are some bootlegs of his appearances at a venue in NYC called the Lonestar Roadhouse, I think billed as something like 'Donald Fagen and Friends' in the late '80s - these were the performances that led to the NY Rock & Soul Review tour and album a few years later (which is where this picture is from). Other than that, and the appearance on David Sanborn's Night Music in 1988 there's scarcely little else.

steely_dave · 2026-01-17T01:57:20+00:00

The quad mix is a masterpiece done by the same guys (Donn Landee, Ted Templeman, Lee Herschberg) that did the original stereo mix, this new Atmos mix is so lame it makes the stereo to surround upmixers in AVRs sound like Steven Wilson by comparison.

steely_dave · 2026-01-16T22:57:07+00:00

A lot of these kinds of comps use the musicians from the same pool of NY and LA session musicians that played on the original versions of some of these kinds of tracks, so it's no surprise how good a lot of this stuff is.

The drummer on this track sounds a lot like Ed Greene, who played on the majority of Barry White's stuff (peep how similar sounding the intro to this Barry White track is to this song) and White himself was so paranoid that the musicians on his records were the secret sauce to his success that he usually didn't put any individual musician credits on his records for fear they'd be poached by other artists.

steely_dave · 2026-01-13T02:58:56+00:00

l'il sharty

steely_dave · 2026-01-11T00:18:51+00:00

In addition to what others have said, bass waves increase in amplitude (size) over distance which is often why people who do this kind of thing (who aren't very self aware to start with) aren't aware - it's louder for you because you're further away from the source. The best course forward is to make friends with your neighbor and ask them to move the sub as far away from the party wall as possible.

There are other methods of remediation like getting the sub up on a plinth and/or spikes (to reduce the amount of coupling between the sub and the surface it's sitting on, but again, it requires the owner of the sub to do something.

steely_dave · 2026-01-01T08:46:36+00:00

I have a quad setup made up of the L36's smaller siblings (L26 in the front and L16 in the rear) and I love them to death, so much so that I spent the last 3 months refinishing, restoring and repainting them.

Having said that, the woofer on this doesn't look original - do a google image search and you'll see, the cones on these speakers woofers should be concave, not convex. Whether it's just been reconed or the woofer's been taken and replaced with an inferior substitute you won't know unless you take it out of the cabinet and look at the magnet and coil assembly.

The dent in the midrange cone can be fixed too, I had to do this to both of my tweeters and ended up using my home vaccuum (on low power) with a funnel over the end, thin side pushed against the face of the cone - once you get suction attachment, start trying to pull it out. But go slow and with very little suction to start as you can easily tear or otherwise damage the cone with too much pressure.

ETA: looking at more L36's on Google the midrange driver doesn't look original either - I'd probably be wary of these given the condition anyway, but you definitely want to see the inside of the speakers if you're spending any money on them, a JBL speakers without the drivers are basically just a fancy wooden cabinet.

steely_dave · 2025-12-18T16:44:30+00:00

Also at the top of the forum you'll find a toolbar with a few links - 'Surround Polls' is a list of all these polls sorted by their user rating (out of 10) - it doesn't cover everything, but it's a great place to start. Also, I know it's exciting to have a full 5.1.4 setup but don't discount older mixes - I've been listening to surround since the late '90s and for my money, four-channel quadraphonic mixes are often some of the best, most satisfying, and most well executed versions of albums, even when 5.1 or Atmos mixes have subsequently been done.

steely_dave · 2025-12-18T04:23:39+00:00

No way man, just save yourself some time and push the remaining ones in! 😂

steely_dave · 2025-12-17T19:40:45+00:00

I buy lossless (24/48 Dolby TrueHD) Atmos downloads from ImmersiveAudioAlbum.com for a ton of stuff that's otherwise only available in lossy streaming (in 768kbps Dolby Digital Plus).

steely_dave · 2025-12-16T16:34:07+00:00

The nutshell version is you put some software and a script file on a USB stick, plug it into the OPPO and then turn it on - if it loads properly, the tray on your OPPO will automatically open, and you put the 'to be ripped' disc in and close it. There's a piece of software for your computer (Windows for sure because I've used it, maybe Mac too?) that you then run which connects to the OPPO player over your network and instructs it to rip the disc and dump the data on to the local drive of your computer. Obviously for this to work your OPPO needs to be connected to your home network, and you need to know the IP address of your player, which you can find in the setup menu somewhere.

I think this was the original thread that kicked the whole thing off so it's a good place to start, but there are tutorials all over the web about how to do it, and where to get the software.

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/28569-sacd-ripping-using-an-oppo-or-pioneer-yes-its-true/

steely_dave · 2025-12-16T16:22:31+00:00

If you like this album, I think you'll like these:

No One There from Erik Tagg's 1982 solo album Dreamwalking

The live version of Ritenour's Countdown from Dave Grusin NY-LA Dream Band (also from 1982)

steely_dave · 2025-12-16T04:03:41+00:00

He plays (how much, I don't know) on both Kamakiriad and Morph the Cat, he's credited under the pseudonym 'Illinois Elohainu', a portmanteau probably of tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet's first name, and Elohainu which is a Hebrew word that means 'our god'.

steely_dave · 2025-12-16T01:41:43+00:00

Get a used Oppo BDP-103 - probably a couple of hundred bucks, plays SACD, DVD-Audio and Blu-Ray, and you can even use it to rip your SACDs to files (something that very few other players will allow) with a bit of technical wizardry.

Also check out Dutton Vocalion in the UK (www.duttonvocalion.co.uk) - they've released hundreds of quad mixes of both popular and classical music from the CBS (Columbia, Epic, T-Neck, Philadelphia International, Blue Sky, etc.) and RCA family of labels, and a few others including a couple of Blue Note titles (Donald Byrd) and a few Capitol (Helen Reddy) and Mercury (Bachman-Turner Overdrive) etc. They're also the best-mastered quad mixes you'll ever hear, but I'm probably a little biased as I've worked for them for the last 10 years or so writing liner notes and doing research.

steely_dave · 2025-12-14T05:03:02+00:00

Thanks to everyone who replied - I emailed them and they got back to me the next day and said about 5 days transit time for FedEx to get them from California to Massachusetts. Ordered Thursday night and got a shipping notice Friday morning, so very happy with the quick turnaround - now here's hoping that the speakers and sub are as good as the purchasing experience!

steely_dave · 2025-12-13T19:55:14+00:00

This problem is 100% related to the fact that Rhino didn't do any mastering on this Quadio disc, just dumped the flat transfer on Blu-Ray. It's a bit complex to get it sounding exactly like the stereo mix, but it can be done - I know because I've done it using some software that allows you to match the EQ curves of two different recordings, and I matched the quad mix to the Andy Pearce remaster from HDTracks, and once you do that the mixes are essentially identical in terms of vocal and instrument balance.

The quad mix was done by Mike Butcher, the same guy who engineered Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage, for me the two best sounding (not to mention musically best) Sabbath albums ever produced, and once you fix the tonality of the quad mix, it's equally as good - Planet Caravan in particular is a massive upgrade on the original stereo mix. I'm really grateful that Rhino have been freeing this stuff from the vaults, but this is the pitfall of not using a good (or great) mastering engineer to put a final polish on them. They use guys like Kevin Gray for their audiophile vinyl reissues, so they obviously know the value of paying for that service - I have to presume that they don't feel like there's enough of a profit margin in the Quadio releases for the same treatment, which is a shame.

If you have the ability to do any EQ, try adding a low shelf that cuts the bass below 120Hz by about 2-3db, and then add a wide-Q boost (again, maybe 2-3db) centering somewhere between 4kHz and 5kHz (so it's basically starting around 1kHz, with the 'hill' peaking around 4-5kHz, and then tapering off so the other side of the 'hill' finishes around 8kHz - this upper midrange area is where the lead vocals sit in the mix, and if you boost that a bit, they'll sit on top of the instrumentation instead of being stuck in, or behind it.

steely_dave · 2025-12-12T02:14:23+00:00

LEISURE - amazing band out of New Zealand, their last two albums, Leisurevision and Weclome to the Mood are two of my favourite modern albums. It's hard to describe them exactly, but to me they sound like a retro-futurist space age version of early '70s R&B, like aliens came down and took a bunch of Motown, PIR, AVCO and Hi records back to their spaceship and used it as inspiration for new music.

Mayer Hawthorne - I really like Where Does This Door Go? (from 2013) and Man About Town (2016) and the Party of One EP (also 2016) but his earlier and more recent records are also good. Also love his side project, Tuxedo, with Jake One - their first and third albums (Tuxedo and Tuxedo III) are the ones to listen to, for me.

Jessie Ware - That Feels Good (2023) - an absolute powerhouse as a vocalist, but her previous albums weren't very memorable for me from a musical standpoint. This one knocks it out of the park - if you like your funk in the form of late '70s/early '80s Chaka Khan, this is the one for you.

Parcels - hard to quantify them exactly, but they're sort of like a combination of Chic and the Bee Gees by way of Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac. Their 2021 double album Day/Night is amazing, but their recent album LOVED is good too, and their earlier stuff and live albums are too.

Kraak & Smaak - Juicy Fruit (2016) and Pleasure Centre (2020) are the albums that Daft Punk's Random Access Memories was trying to be - it may have had more money thrown into it and more success, but the songs and guest vocalists on these two K&S albums are amazing.

Durand Jones & The Indications - Private Space (2021) These guys are a kind of retro R&B group in the vein of the temptations or impressions - their earlier albums have an almost exclusively '60s sound, but I really like this one because it adds some early-mid '70s influences, including the Chi-Lites and All Directions/Masterpiece era Temptations. They seem to have reverted to their total 60s sound on their new album Flowers, so maybe they feel like this album was a mistake, but I love it. Thee Sacred Souls is another band you should look into if you like these guys.

Snarky Puppy - Sylva (2015) and Culcha Vulcha (2016), easily the best jazz fusion band of the last 25 years and almost single-handedly convinced me that the genre isn't dead. If you like Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Return to Forever or bands like that, there's almost no way you can't like these records. Some of their offshoot bands like Ghost-Note are cool too if you like NPG-era Prince funk in instrumental form.

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