Charlie and I cycled over to Twickenham yesterday (30 mile round trip) to meet up with some other people taking the London to Paris challenge, as well as talk with people from the Big Issue Foundation about the work they do.
It was really quite useful, and informative.. I didn’t realise the scope of the foundation’s [...]

This summer I’ll be cycling from London to Paris to raise money for the Big Issue Foundation. Trouble is, I don’t think I’ve been fully paying attention to how scary this might be!
It’s not the 250 miles in 3 days that’s worrying me - that’s just 3 days of my life after all. It’s more the [...]

Over xmas I bought myself this rather iconic looking Bang & Olufsen music centre. It’s a Beocenter 7002 from 1980 or thereabouts.. so basically it’s as old as me.
Part of me knows this is silly - vinyl is cumbersome, fragile, and most of the records you can see in the picture don’t exactly sound good. I [...]

I found this set of 78 RPM records in my Grandparent’s old house about 10 years ago.. Beethoven’s 5th in a large spined sleeve on Parlophone.. E10000 series catalogue numbers (with purple labels).
So far I’ve managed to date them to 1930s, but no more specific than that. Any help appreciated! 
Sadly the box is in quite [...]

I’ve been charged with the job of mastering audio recently, which is a job that I’m completely unqualified for but am finding really interesting.
Mastering is the process that recordings go through after leaving the mixing engineer and before arriving at the replication plant. A record might contain a whole bunch of mixes from different sources, at different [...]

It’s timely (me starting this blog again), so I suppose I have to do it. These lists are interesting though, if a little repetitive once you browse around what other people are saying.
Perhaps that’s a sign that only a handful of truly great albums are released each year? Or perhaps it’s a sign that we’re [...]

I never really meant to leave, you understand. It was all a mistake. But I’m back now. Maintain low content quality expectations and all will be well.