A Leslie Wong Blog

In the past couple of months, my headphones have failed. The ear pads on my fifteen year-old Sony MDR-V2 headphones began to deteriorate. The wiring connections at the jack and drivers became intermittent. I soldered on a new jack, but it was difficult to get the insulation off the fine gauge wire. I got tired of fixing them and figured I got my money’s worth. My earbuds started having an intermittent connection too.

It was time for new headphones. I’ve been in a few recording studios in the past 30 years, and I often saw Sony MDR-V6 headphones. These fit my budget (~$70 USD) and all those recording studios can’t be wrong. There’s even a Wikipedia entry for the MDR-V6. The headphones are circumaural – they go over your ears. The sound reproduction is accurate.

When I ride my bike, I use earbuds, but only in one ear, so I’ll be able to hear the SUV, driven by a woman talking on the phone, nearly hit me.

I chose a lower price point for earbuds, since I’m mostly listening to podcasts and the whizzing wind isn’t really conducive to high fidelity. Most of my music is ripped at 192 kbps VBR anyway.

I narrowed it down to the ~$30 USD Sennheiser CX300 earbuds and the ~$33 USD Sony MDR-EX75. I bought the Sennheisers. Hopefully they’re not counterfeit .

The great jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died yesterday in California. Peter Keepnews wrote an obituary at the New York Times.

Wikipedia has Freddie Hubbard’s discography.

Over the past 35 years, I was fortunate to see Freddie Hubbard perform many times. The first was in the early ’70s, when I took this photograph at a concert in San Francisco.

I was always partial to the trumpet, maybe because two of my friends, Bruce Baxley and Eugene Madsen, both played. I took lessons with a rental trumpet when I was a kid, but at Christmas, it came down to a trumpet or a bike, and the bike won.

When I moved to the mecca of jazz, New York City, the first thing I bought when I sold a photograph was a Yamaha Flugelhorn, a YFH-631 (now the 631G). My friend, Tim Luey (I think mistakenly), told me a fluegelhorn was easier to play than a trumpet. One year, while attending Comdex in Las Vegas, I bought a Bach Stradivarius at a pawn shop. Both of them are in the closet.

David Remnick, at The New Yorker, compiled a list of 100 Essential Jazz Albums after doing a profile of jazz broadcaster Phil Schaap.

I used to listen to Phil Schaap and Bird Flight on WKCR, when I was up that early. I also always used to play Charlie Parker’s rendition of Just Friends on the juke box at Bradley’s, which closed in 1998, about the same time my life started going downhill.

read more | digg story

We bought a Samson C01U, a large condensor, USB connected, microphone for direct recording to a computer.

The microphone includes a USB cable and a 2.75″ (69.85 mm) table top tripod stand. I recommend a heavy desktop base like this On Stage DS7200B Adjustable Desk Microphone Stand and the Samson SP01 Shockmount, which cuts down on vibration when that truck drives by, but makes it look really professional.

It’s pretty much plug and play with Windows or Macs, but Sansom has a “software preamp,” SoftPre applet, that has an input level meter, volume control, high-pass filter and phase switch.

Skype will never sound any better.

It’s pianist’s Cedar Walton’s 74th birthday today.

all about jazz has his biography and an interview by Russ Musto.

Google has Cedar Walton’s discographies.

February 12-17, 2008, he’ll be at Yoshi’s in San Francisco and Oakland.

You can get his Underground Memoirs album at Amazon.com

The great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died today. You can read his obituary at the New York Times (free registration required) or the Los Angeles Times.

I only heard him live once, at El Matador on Broadway in San Francisco. Fortunately, we still have his music to remember him.

Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis turned 46 today. I have a faint recollection of complimenting him on his set outside Sweet Basil, (or was it Joanna’s) in the early 80’s. That’s a lot of water under the bridge.

Currently, my favorite work of his is Doin’ (Y)Our Thing, on his album, From The Plantation To The Penitentiary.

I first saw this story on digg.com.

The guys (H3X, bounci.rabbit.123, vettefan, saXas, matthew98, supernatural, and xxDriveNxx) over at iPodwizard.net have re-written the 5G (fifth generation iPod) iPod’s firmware, so it looks like the new iPod Classic’s.

The new iPod Nano and iPod Classic have a new interface. While navigating through the menus, half of the screen is taken up by a floating image of album artwork.

One thing that’s missing on the 5G version of iPodWizard’s hack that the iPod Classic has is Coverflow. Also the images don’t float, like they do on the new iPods, but iPodWizard’s work is very cool, nonetheless.

When I first used the iPod Classic to iPod Video firmware hack, I had the problem of my iPod going into a “Boot Loop” – after the firmware was written, during the reboot, the Apple logo would disappear while the drive clicked and then cycled again.

Putting the iPod into the disk mode by holding select and play allowed me to do a restore to the original (Apple) firmware. Then I downloaded a version of the firmware “without the boot loops.”

From Blue Note Records: “Wynton Marsalis’ moving new album From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, offers a clear-eyed and uncompromising look at the cracks in America’s facade of prosperity and happiness.”

I just downloaded Doin’ (Y)Our Thing, the third track on this album, from Amazon’s new MP3 store. It is very compelling music.

The file format is 256kbps VBR MP3, but I guess because it’s a long track (8:36), it cost $1.94. This track was not offered singly on iTunes, so I’m happy there’s more competition and another source for DRM-free music.