Icons and avatars

It wasn't so long ago that Nigel Williamson suggested that the grip of nostalgia for the Sixties and Seventies was at last starting to wane. Turns out he was wrong

- Nigel Williamson

A couple of stories over the last few weeks have highlighted just how wrong I was about the power of the old rock gods starting to wane. First came the news that Bob Dylan has re-recorded some of his most famous numbers. Of course, he has been recycling and reworking his old songs for decades on stage, but this is different because for the first time he has: "revisited a personally chosen set of his iconic songs" in pristine new studio recordings.

Dylan has re-recorded his old material to showcase a new ultra-high-fidelity medium called Ionic Originals - a kind of high-class demo record to help sell the new hardware that will be required to play the new aluminum discs, which it is claimed: "advance the art of recorded sound and mark the first breakthrough in analogue sound reproduction in more than 70 years."

The project is helmed by producer T-Bone Burnett and his company, Neo Fidelity Inc. Quite how Burnett's Ionic Originals will exceed the fidelity of vinyl is unclear, but he insists the technology will do nothing less than: "reset the valuation for recorded music." That's some claim.