Dundee Lad

Lossless Audio Checker is a free program that can allegedly tell if a FLAC or WAV file is truly lossless or whether it’s transcoded or otherwise adulterated. Yeah Nah. It don’t work, I’m sorry to say. How do I know this? I converted a .MP3 file to a .FLAC file, and L.A.C. told me it was “clean”. Wut??

At least Spek can see the difference.
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Jason Becker

In the mid 80s I was still living in Elizabeth South and one day I was checking out the boxes in a local 2nd hand shop I frequented. Nothing caught my interest until I came across this bizarre album cover. I’d never heard of Cybotron before but one of the tracks was titled Arrakis and that immediately caught my attention because I’d already read Dune cover to cover three times. On top of that, the cover made no mention of vocals but did list synths, and the vinyl was in excellent condition so buying it was a no-brainer for me. I kind of still own the vinyl but it’s not actually in my possession—long, sad, embarrassing-for-me, story—so it had been decades since I heard it, and to be honest I mostly forgot about it. I mean, I have all the Tangerine Dream albums from the 70s, plus a heap of excellent bootleg live recordings by them, plus Klaus Schulze, and other similar artists, so I wasn’t lacking in that department. But imagine my surprise when, on a whim, in 2022 I searched Cybotron on Bandcamp and this appeared…

May 25th, 1989

Jumping ahead a few years from the last chart, and you can see there has been some absolutely massive changes. For a start, it’s down 10 tracks and is just a Top 30 now but more importantly, it is now divided into a Compact Disc chart and an Album/Vinyl chart. A lot of the same releases on each chart but also quite a few differences. Oddly enough, on the surface it appears heavy metal fans were slower to adopt the new medium with only Appetite for Destruction appearing in the CD list but it also appears in the vinyl list along with G’N'R Lies, And Justice For All, and Hysteria. I bought my first CD player in ‘88—a Yamaha that gave me no end of trouble with a disc tray that wouldn’t open properly—and the CD version of Metallica’s, And Justice For All, was one of the first CDs I bought…and I still have it.
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It’s not all bagpipes and kilts in Scotland