Before the site changed their BBS software, many of us were engaged in the problem of deciding upon criteria that we need to be able to have a common reference CD.

For those of you who were not privvy to this discussion, in short, we were in agreement that a common refernce CD would enable us all, in a more tangible manner, to relate to improvemnts which members have discovered, bought or implemented to their systems.

Our first round of discussion led us to settle on Belà Fleck and The Flecktones "Flight Of The Cosmic Hippo" as a tentative step in this direction. I and many others either already had this CD or aquired it.

We kicked the question about a bit and it was decided that this singular CD was not sufficient, in itself, to serve as a reference CD for a number of reasons. It was suggested that, although an excellent CD, it was an "electronic" sound and that what we really needed were different natural accoustic recordings which would reveal the true qualties that we are looking for.

To my recollection, there is no single recording which embraces all of our requirements but, I have not allowed myself to become daunted by this and have given the matter considerable thought.

My conclusions are that we, in fact, require two CDs. One which has a full spectrum of different frequencies which play for a certain duration and at the same amplitude. This would help to form the basis of our reference.

The second CD would need to be a special compilation of different artists, from different recording companies, which are all sound-levelled. This would be the hard part, I feel, because recording companies are in the business of making money out of recording and publishing sound.

My idea is that both of these CDs should be made available as ISO mirror images of the originals and that everyone should dowload their own reference CDs and burn them themselves. Alternatively (for there is quite a lot of prestige in having a recording included in a general reference CD) that the recording companies could cooperate on this project to sell these CDs as a two CD set.

Any input?