![you and me flac you and me flac](https://album.designday.fr/images/1/2/tammy-wynette-you-and-me.jpg)
I’ve also twice visited Hard Wax in an official capacity: once as part of my round-up of ten of Berlin’s best destinations for vinyl collectors and once to talk Justin Greenslade, designer of the Isonoe 420 rotary mixer that sits at the end of record counter between two Technics SL-1200 MK3 the very same setup used by Calibre to create his ambient/IDM/dub/drum-n-bass set last Friday night. And it’s the only place you’ll find the Bad/Badder 12″ before its wider release on 12th February. Regular readers will know that Hard Wax is this writer’s local. The occasion? A low-key lockdown launch of a new Calibre & DRS EP ( ‘Bad / Badder’) that features two dubbed-out versions by Hard Wax founder and former Basic Channel member Mark Ernestus: stylistically, they sail closer to Rhythm & Sound’s The Versions. Last Friday night, drum n’ bass (and ambient and house) music producer Calibre (Dominick Martin) took a box of records to play a DJ set to no-one but himself and two PPE-d technicians recording the audio/video stream for YouTube. We should remember this as we move metaphorically to Hard Wax, Berlin’s pre-eminent record store and purveyor of “cutting-edge electronic dance music, such as techno, house, dub and bass music”. Berlin’s extended lockdown means the physical store remains closed to punters like you and me but for Hard Wax’s online store it’s business as usual. mp3 will, all other things being equal, almost always sound better than a poorly-recorded/mastered recording landing on our hard-drive as a lossless FLAC. Which has a greater impact on what we hear through our headphones or loudspeakers: the digital file format or the recording/mastering process that preceded it? The answer continues to surprise newcomers: a well-recorded/mastered recording delivered as a lossy 320kbps.