But the business wasn't so controlled and devoid of real imagination as it mostly is these days. Anything that sells now just gets imitated over and over again until selling begins to wane.

Sugar Baby Love. Runaway. Everley Brothers. Matt Monroe. Nelson Eddy. Phil Spektor. Nuff said, I think. For as long as there's *been* a music recording business, people have been making money by selling bland imitations of music when they can get away with it. Remember that American pop was right in the toilet until the Beatles and others brought rock back across the Atlantic.

Grab, if Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen make your list of great guitar players, then you and I probably are not going to agree on anything musically.

Fair enough Michael, you might not like what they play, but you can't deny their technical ability. I don't particularly like John Coltrane's music, but I can recognise he was excellent at what he did and that he pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible for his instrument.

And that saturated distortion of Little Richard recordings and the slightly off-key sound of plunky old pianos are part of listening experience for me, I wouldn't give it up for all the digital precision in the world.

Now that I *do* disagree with. If the distortion or the plunky piano is *chosen* to provide a particular effect (as it often is with guitar), then fine. But if the distortion is just an artifact of crap equipment, we're confusing "old" with "good". Maybe you like the way it sounds - fine. But I can guarantee you that if Little Richard and his sound techs had had the option of recording his voice without distortion, they would have done so in a heartbeat.

It's the same reason that I don't object to people saying they think vinyl sounds better - that's fine by me, and there's even technical reasons why it may be the case. But to say "I like the sound of vinyl because of the hisses and crackles and the way the record jumps on the scratches" would be simply incomprehensible.

As far as opinions on live records go, recording from an arena brings a whole lot of reverberation effects which you can't easily duplicate in a recording. You also get the sound of the crowd, which adds to the atmosphere too (for the same reason sitcoms use a laughter track). And the third element is lots more high frequencies, which are usually filtered out of commercial recordings because they damage headphones and hi-fi speakers (or at least drive them out of their normal operating region and make them rattle, which sounds horrible), but are left in live recordings to provide that feature. Together, those three add to the "immediacy" of the recording, which is why live recordings have that particular "feel".

But even here, live recording these days is so vastly improved as to be unrecognisable against what Dylan and co would have been used to. Check out all those live recordings from the 60s and 70s, and see how many of them are absolutely ruined by the microphones and recording gear saturating and distorting, to the extent you can't hear what's being played (live recordings of Hendrix are particularly bad for this). These days, technology allows live CDs like SoH's "Cold Cuts" to be made relatively easily and cheaply. So if the sound of live recordings is your thing, then slating the technology that allows it to be done well today is really biting the hand that feeds you.

Graham.