JoBook 2

As mentioned at Furry Story Time, I had been experiencing  computer problems and needed borrow another machine temporarily.
In the beginning there was the JoBook tm that arrived around September 16, 2016 which a kind of replacement for a Netbook that was incredibly slow on busy sites such as Tumblr and in any event had died totally.
That chromebook, a Lenovo N22 that had over the years had the ability  to use Google Apps supplemented by Android ones had been performing well being used to check emails with, use on Tumblr, FA, the IK chat and Lil Jennies story time  seemed to develop a fault that left it with static lines flying across the screen.
Thus I really needed to get a replacement organized for it as it used rather a lot.

This is JoBook 2 a Asus C202sa gj0027 which like the original is a 11.6 inch screen with a unspectacular but adequate 1366 x 768 resolution which is fine for general usage or watching anything from the BBC iPlayer on.
It has 16gb of memory but that's expandable to whatever you want using a SD card and 2gb of RAM which unless you've got absolutely heaps of tabs open is fine with the Chrome Os which is a kind of Linux in a browser system that doesn't suck processing power unlike Windows.
It comes in nice white and silver trim and like practically all of the species has a built in video cam should it be needed.
Hopefully it won't be long before it arrives and be quickly set up plus I have 64gb Sandisk card coming to up the memory to insert.

Resting

In a world where to be honest I have not been feeling too good apart from listening to a bit of music softly while taking tablets my thoughts were on other things.

I have a bit of an fascination for oldish compilations of short stories usually written by the top authors of the day not least for the quality of the stories with believable characters and rich language that is so much the polar opposite of today's obsession with 'accessible language' that rather than stretching your knowledge of words and means actually holds it back.
They also tend to have a clear idea as to who their audience is, tailoring the topics very much to them so a compilation like this is clearly aimed for and around the interests of girls of that era rather than trying to trying to appeal to boys too which never quite worked when it came to set books for school English Lit as almost inevitably we'd be at odds about which ones we wanted to study and discuss as a group.

Teenbeat XXV - The Carpenters

As most people know I do actually like the Carpenters but usually you have to go whistle for any really high quality compact discs by them so I tend to make do with my cd versions of Greatest Hits 69-73 and 74-78 plus "Collected" that I think I wrote something about several years back on here.
Anyway A&M only ever in North America and Europe issued one super audio cd of theirs and that was a twist on a compilation issued in 2000 that covered recordings made when Karen was with us.
The twist was there are a few different tracks and amazingly were at that point able to find the multi-tracks to remix them all into 5.1 surround sound on a separate portion for multichannel players to critical acclaim.
The stereo portions use the regular stereo mixes apart from two songs that are folded from those multichannel remixes to stereo which the regular cd version doesn't use because they were not around at the time. Those two remixes are better than the originals.
Sadly no more remixes will be possible as those multitrack tapes got burned in a big fire at the Universal Studios tape store around 2008 so this is all we have.

Although compilations are arbitrary and this one misses of Jambalaya from the Horizon album that was a British hit, even in stereo super audio cd, this disc just breathes making it desirable to own.
For me this was the greatest soft rock there ever with intelligent songs, great arrangements and Karen's amazing voice.

Classical Music sacd round up part 13 - Mozart Sonatas

This week we're back to music and looking at Sonata's.
What is a Sonata I hear you ask?
A Sonata a composition for an instrumental soloist, often with a piano accompaniment, typically in several movements with one or more in sonata form.
One composer who wrote an awful lot of them was Mozart, who if you're familiar with this blog (and it's bigger companion) you will know is a composer I've always had affinity with to the point of buying over twenty recordings in 1991, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death which included a few sonatas.

Music of this era is very much in the firing line of the battle between traditionalist and those who believe in 'historically informed performances' with replicas of older instruments and looking for clues to how originally they were performed.
The young lady on the left may be familiar to some blog readers as she's the acclaimed baroque violinist Rachel Podger who started a long running survey of Mozart's sonatas in 2004 with the pianist Gary Cooper.
This disc covers four, KV 6, KV 379, KV 547 and KV 378.

This was followed up with KV 303, KV 7, KV 301, KV 30 and KV 481 in 2005

In 2006 they recorded volume three that covered  KV 454, KV 28, KV 402, KV 404, KV 8 and KV 380.

 Volume four came out in 2007 which took in K 302, K 9,K 304, K 29 and K 526

At which point you are probably saying and what's with this "KV" number?
KV happens to be  an abbreviation in German for Köchel Verzeichnis. 
 It is indeed a register for all the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), not only the symphonies. K stands for Köchel, the last name of Austrian publisher and collector Ludwig Alois Ferdinand Ritter von Knöchel (1800-1877).
All Mozart's  music is catalogued in order using this notation which makes things simpler.
These performances and others in the series I'm slowly picking up, are widely regarded as the finest modern ones and the smooth effortless reproduction  the super audio format allows for sounds most natural, as if you were in a room listening to a recital.
Personally I just love the playing.