Vito and Yamaha saxophone

After playing my rental saxophone for a few weeks, I decided to take the plunge and get one of my own. Many suggested Yamaha YTS (T for Tenor) series as a good starting point so I started looking for used ones on Ebay. Still, they were a bit over my budget. Then I came across discussion about "vintage" Vito's saxophone that were actually made by Yamaha. Those were the days that Japanese manufacturing were deemed inferior. It's the opposite today of course: Yamaha is way more famous than Vito and actually have their horns made else where! The Vito tenor sax I eventually bought was supposed to be the equivalent of a Yamaha YTS-23. Some histories about this brand: according to Wikipedia the name came from one of the founder

Vito is a brand name for Leblanc USA, now part of Conn-Selmer USA. The Vito name was used for student instruments. Leblanc USA was formed in 1946 by Vito Pascucci, and the French woodwind manufacturer, G. Leblanc Cie of France.

The Dark Age

"The Dark Age" was a concert held at the Lingnan University in Hong Kong last month. It stirred up a big controversy because some of the lyrics contain foul language against the police. The pro-establishment groups for sure didn't miss this opportunity to (once again) vilify the student dissidents. Well, shouldn't people be angry and couldn't they sing to condemn the injustice of police violently beating up ordinary citizen which went unpunished? (Here's a statement from the band) I strongly agree with them that the establishment is trying to brainwash the people to blindly subordinate to the power without questioning it.

It's even sadder to see that the president of Lingnan not only didn't stand up for the freedom of speech on his campus (the band members were not students of Lingnan) but actually sided with the establishment. (Here is an open letter from Lingnan students to the president) 

Regardless of the controversy,  the band 血汗攻闖 showed a lot of promises. Check out their video:

New music service owned by artists: Tidal

Tidal is one of the new players in the crowded space of music streaming service. And it made the news recently because of ownership changes. Tidal is now owned by a group of artists led by the financially (and musically?) successful Jay-Z. It claims to pay more royalty to artists than other services. For some reason it is getting quite a few backslashes. For example, one Bob Leftsez complained "We’ve got uber-rich artists complaining they’re just not making enough" which is refuted by this article. Musicians are NOT supposed to be poor, are they? And I just read the criticism mentioned in the Wikipedia about the service being too expensive ($19.99 for hi-resolution streaming. $9.99 for regular. No free option) One Marina and the Diamonds claimed that $240 a year is NOT a positive way for everyone to consume music. Oh well, that's about the price of 16 CDs (or 24 albums in MP3) Is that what artists expect any serious fans of music to spend on new music per year?

I think the biggest challenge for them though is to compete with all these other free or paid services and get enough subscribers to sustain the business. Exclusive content might help but it's just one factor. I have listened to Rhapsody for about 10 years WITHOUT the likes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or Beatles available and I still have plenty of good music to listen to. To be honest, if I cannot afford Rhapsody anymore, I would count on free services offered by all these online radio and Pandora. Their another selling point was hi-res streaming. I read someone conducted test and found that a lot of listener cannot distinguish between hi-res and "regular" files because the latter were usually encoded in bit rates > 160 these days, which is not exactly lo-res.