'78 Project' takes musicians back in time

If you thought vinyl LPs were going retro, that's nothing. Adventurous musicians are going back into the dark ages of recording through "The 78 Project," which uses an old Presto machine to record 78 rpm songs direct to vinyl, with the finished product ready for listen minutes later. 

"Soundcheck" captured this in a recent episode and it's a fascinating trip down memory lane, and gives you an idea of the processes music historians like Alan Lomax took in the first half of the 20th century to record old blues, country and calypso in remote locations in North America. 

The videos below capture the magic the musicians experience, but the audio stream of the "Soundcheck" show is illuminating in that you can compare analog vs. digital audio. 

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F1 Rejects delivers hilarious spin on often-pompous sport

Enoch Law and Jamie McGregor, in costume, for a live video preview of the 2011 Indian Grand Prix.Formula 1 is a circus unto itself, full of snobs and imagined drama even as it delivers the most-spectacular motorsports technology and highest-paid teams and drivers. So it's fitting that my favorite audio coverage of the sport comes from the two brilliant fans behind F1Rejects.com.

F1 Rejects is an Australian website devoted to the lesser-qualified but well-financed drivers and sorry teams who have peppered the series for years (who can forget Perry McCarthy, Jean-Marc Gounon and Andrea Moda?).

Other Formula 1 podcasts -- and there are at least a half-dozen professionally produced offerings -- range from the high brow (see Motorsport) to the bloated (Formula1Blog) to the periodically engaging (The Flying Lap). But none come close to the work of two Aussies named Jamie McGregor and Enoch Law (who, oddly,

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Quick review: "In the Garden of Beasts"

Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin" has been on the best-seller lists for good reason. It's a surprising tale of yin and yang set in Germany just as the Nazis were sweeping to power. 

I've been a fan of Larson's since reading "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America," a terrific tale that blended a mass-murder mystery with the behind-the-scenes story of one of mankind's most impressive construction projects. It remains one of my favorite books, and I loved how Larson weaved two separate story lines into a common theme. 

Larson took that same approach with "Thunderstruck," which married a the pursuit of a high-profile murder suspect with Marconi's race to push a wireless radio signal across the Atlantic. "Thunderstruck" was interesting, but not as riveting as "Devil in White City." 

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