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Billboard.com had some interesting tidbits of reporting today. Jimmy Page was in Tokyo recently, reportedly to do promotion for the latest Led Zeppelin greatest hits package, Mothership. Of course he was asked about plans for a full Zeppelin tour and his response was optimistic, but not surprisingly he said Robert Plant’s tour this summer in support of Raising Sand, his inspired album with Alison Krauss & T-Bone Burnett, is Plant’s current priority.

But here’s what also caught our eye:

Asked if loyal fans who had bought Led Zeppelin product in various formats over the years should buy “Mothership,” Page replied, “Please don’t — I don’t want you to buy it.”
He explained that “Mothership” was designed to replace the 1999 compilations “Early Days” and “Latter Days,” whose packaging and presentation Page was dissatisfied with.

So the record company had Jimmy go out to Japan only to do negative promotion of the hits package? Maybe Billboard took the quote out of context, but it’s still awkward.

Another story concerned the long-delayed Neil Young boxset archival series. Originally talked about as 9 CD’s, Neil is now saying it will only be available on Blu-ray and DVD due to his thoughts about CD, “a format Young has long despised due to its audio limitations”. Given that most people cannot really play DVDs in their cars and there isn’t a Blu-ray portable on the market yet, it seems like a somewhat tethered set of music at this point. But some art just deserves a museum-like presentation.

On the flip-side of things, I recall getting a demonstration of a technology known as SACD, which was Sony’s answer to a higher-fidelity CD. The theory was that a higher sampling rate would get you closer to the master tape and the experience of being in the studio when the music was recorded. *cough* Vinyl *cough*

So there I was in front of $30,000 speakers, a $15,000 pre-amp and an engineer flown in specifically from Japan to monitor the demo. I was told to sit in a specific chair placed specifically in front of the speakers…. the sweet spot. I was played Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, a classic recording, but one done in the 1950’s with very warm analog technology. At one point, I was asked “can you hear the cars going by the studio and the spit in the trumpet?” At some point, you have to draw the line between what technology can reveal and what should remain buried in the mix.

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