New Santana Album "Africa Speaks"

millercarbon ...

• "Until and unless someone trustworthy tells me Santana has stopped compressing their music to death ..."

Agreed ... This is the problem with so many recordings recommended on this and other audiophile sites. In my opinion, compression and artificial digital reverb is the ruination of commercially released recordings these days.

I do understand what people like about recordings that are drenched in artificial reverb. It makes the sound stage sound larger, but to me, it sounds as though the music is coming out of a cave. Totally artificial sound. Live music doesn't sound like that.

Frank

I had an interesting conversation with a friend, who is knowledgable in the recording arts. Have you ever noticed that on so many LPs, the first cut has inferior sound to the rest of the record, which may actually be really good? My friend tells me that it is because that first cut is compressed to smithereens because it was intended for radio play. 

Abraxas is amazing.

Frank

Back on track ... I love Latin music. It’s full of soul. I started a thread titled "Do you like Mexican music," and was taken to task by a few small thinkers claiming that I was being "racist." The fact is, I’ve been deep into the Hispanic culture for a long time. My children are Hispanic. The music is fantastic, and I have a lot of it.

On the Arturo O’Farrill albums ... As a result of Wolfie’s above post, I checked them out on Spotify. The ballads on the "In These Shoes" album are really good and the vocalist is quite nice as well. The band kind of reminds me of Willie Bobo’s orchestra. Not my cup of tea really. I much prefer the small Mexican groups. Mariachi is quite nice too.

Check this out ... one of my all-time favorites:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRp5vIJ_-ek

Frank