Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater: mostly sunny, high of forty-four, light winds, 13h 37m of sunlight, 14h 37m of daylight, and a waxing gibbous moon.
It’s National Record Store Day, if you can find one. If you do find one, you may discover that vinyl may not be dead after all:
The LP has re-emerged as the music format of choice among hipsters and audiophiles, with sales soaring by nearly 18% to 4.6 million albums in 2012, according to Nielsen Soundscan. (Just two decades ago, sales were down to 300,000.) But before you join the bandwagon — April 20 is National Record Store Day, after all — you’ll need a turntable.
Continuum, an Australian audio brand, suggests its $160,000 Caliburn model — a record player that it bills as “something beyond the state-of-the-art.” In layman’s terms, that means everything about the turntable is designed with stability in mind — the fewer vibrations, the better the sound. The stand, for instance, is “precision-machined in aircraft-grade aluminum” and incorporates a “floating platform.” Its oddly shaped tonearm promises “infinite stiffness with lowest mass.” And its “platter” — that’s where the LP sits — is 80 pounds, and driven by a specially built motor that makes use of the same technology employed by the U.S. military “for select advanced motion-control systems.”
It is beautiful, but digital is vastly more convenient, however heretical that must sound to an audiophile.
On this day in 1836, Wisconsin’s oldest library:
1836 – Oldest Library in the State Founded
On this date an Act of Congress created the Territory of Wisconsin and in the sixteenth and final section of that Act appropriated funds for the Wisconsin State Library to support the needs of the fledgling government. The library is still functioning but has been renamed as the Wisconsin State Law Library [Source: Wisconsin State Law Library]
From Google, a daily question on geography and air travel: “What active volcano in the U.S. poses a significant threat to air travel between North America and East Asia?”