Surrealistic

I've just realised this place still exists. Think it must be quite a few years since I was last here!

Both excellent ideas. To Joe Biker-Bar-Guy, probably not so excellent.

Try going into a biker hangout and tell them that they're doing it all wrong and that they should spend more time riding and less time talking and drinking beer. You'll quickly get the point that the "problem" is yours. Personally I'd say a better analogy would be going into a biker hangout and telling them they should be driving nice family hatchbacks and dressing more conservatively. Not that I've done such a thing - well, not twice anyway.

... I come to learn..digging through tens tons of crap to find one little pearl of wisdom. Those pearls have made a difference ... I've learned a lot from this place. I'm one of those odd people who played guitar but didn't really know a lot about them. I knew how to play - at least to a reasonable level - but I really didn't know much about the pros and cons of various types of instruments, frets, pickups, wood varieties, electronics ... I could go on.

Personally I like a lot of things. I like music, I like guitars and I like a lot of people on here. I even like [insert your least favourite poster's name here]!

Agreed - the forum has been a little, hmm, temperamental lately. It'll settle down again. I think. I hope.

Looks like I need to get this DVD. Jimmy Page was one of my first guitar heroes and I really like Jack White. I'm not a U2 fan but I do like some of the things the Edge does with them. From what I've read I guess I'll have a hard time persuading the wife to watch it with me - she is a music fan but she's definitely not into guitars per se.

if your guitar playing experience was anything like mine, it went something like this: bug your parents to buy you a guitar. they get you some cheap POS and say "i'll get you a proper one when you can play something". i started playing on a 70s strat copy with a 3 barrel bridge in the summer of '91. after 2 years, i got my '93 MIJ Ibanez RG. its been heavily modified and beat the crap out of during the past 16 years, but sounds and plays great. My story follows the same lines and ends up with a very similar guitar too It does depend on how you define "good". After my first (bought by parents from Woolworth) unplayable monstrosity I bought a half-decent old Yamaha (1967 SG) which served me well for years, but my first really top-notch guitar was and is my Ibanez RG2550. I'd gone into the shop with a view to buying a Gibson Les Paul or possibly a PRS but I came out with the Ibanez. I wouldn't have bought a black one given the choice - but it was clearance stock and cost me around half the MSRP. It was quite simply the nicest guitar in the shop in terms of both sound and playability.

If you have the right frame of mind, 40 can be the age when you're just hitting your prime. I went through similar feelings to yours when I hit 30 - but, for whatever reason, I felt younger at 40 than I did at 30. My life really kicked off in interesting and exciting directions at 40. I was fortunate in that I could pass for much younger but hey, who says you have to look young?

sample rate has nothing do to with frequency response And the Pope isn't a Catholic. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're getting at in your posts AluminiumNeck. I surely can't be right that you're implying that the final resulting waveform that we're listening to when we hear a playback of a digital recording is actually a sequential set of individual waveforms switching back and forth (kind of like a movie actually consists of a set of stills) can I? If so then ... well, sorry but

I have no axe to grind and no hidden agenda here. I've been reading the thread with interest and IF it turns out there's a benefit to using a higher sample rate then I want to use it. Currently I'm recording at 88/32 because a) I can without stretching the hardware or software resources and b) someone suggested that it would sound better. It seems to sound better to me but it's pretty hard to be sure about that, and even if it does sound better that could be for a lot of reasons not directly related to the sample rate (e.g. different hardware and software subroutines being brought into play etc). I think it's pretty difficult to do a proper double-blind test with all the variables involved (hardware, recording equipment, levels, mic placement, differences in performance etc) which is probably why there aren't many of them out there (yet).

Now I'll refer back to the AB test I carried out with a friend a couple of years back and outlined repeatedly earlier in the thread. The recordings in 96kHz had more depth, spaciousness and definition on playback than the ones in 48kHz, pure and simple. Sorry but you can't keep referring to this test of yours as if it were good evidence for your claim. It is simply anecdotal and is worthless as scientific evidence. If you don't understand why I'm saying that, please google "the scientific method" and "double-blind testing".