Pauln I think most people do not want to go thru the hassle of replacing their cd collection. Some may not have heard vinly before and not realize it can sound incredible. My best friend use to dj at parties with vinly and La Scalas that sounded fantastic. But I also remember hearing cds for the first time and the 3 things I remember is no pops, hiss, and the convience of them. That was back in 1982 and the quality of cd players and SACD, DVD Audio, and much better recording capabilities has improved. It was not so much cds sounded better but mainly the convienence is why they replaced vinly.
The majority of people do not spend more than $500 for their whole system and did not hear any real difference in sound quality between vinly and cds. Vinly takes up almost 4 times the space that cds do. You ever try to pop a vinly record into the car record player while driving, it never happened that is why cassettes were so popular and almost replaced vinly they were small, easy to use. After cassettes came out is when you started seeing boom boxes, convienence. Then CDs came out and CDRW on the computer replaced the cassette.
I know people that buy new cds save them to their hard drive and then resell the new cd for a small loss or just borrow a cd and save it to their hard drive. Then they can make cds with whatever songs on it they want. I have many cds that I may only like 2 or 3 songs on it. So I can take 2 or 3 songs from 5 cds and burn them onto a cdrw in the order I want the songs to be in, convienence. It has been almost ten years since I have heard vinly thru La Scalas and you are right vinly can sound incredible. But unless the record players today have gotten rid of the pops and hiss I don't see myself trying vinly again. Sure I would like to hear vinly on your system just to know how much of the negative aspects(negative to my ears) of vinly are still there or not.
Unless vinly today has been reduced to the size of cds and be used in a cd player people will not use them it's all about convienence. I give my nod to the rotel rcd-1072. I can't wait to pair it with separates.
It's a little pricy, and i actually was going to get the rcd-02, but the 1072 is the reference player from rotel and one heck of a machine. Almost 13 lbs. Read absolute sound's review of this player. A good source for hi end hifi.
They pair it with goldmund electronics, which cost from $15000 to like $30000. This $700 cd player performs very well, if not excellent with this equipment which is something because with that expensive of amps and preamps, not every cd player at this price or even ten times the price could be able to perform with outstanding results. Read the review though. Sony CDP-D11 Professional Rackmount CD Player googleadclient = 'pub-707901'; googlealternatecolor = 'FFFFFF'; googleadwidth = 336; googleadheight = 280; googleadformat = '336x280as'; googleadtype = 'text'; googleadchannel ='; googlecolorborder = '000000'; googlecolorbg = '000000'; googlecolorlink = '66CCFF'; googlecolorurl = 'CCCCCC'; googlecolortext = 'FFFFFF'; //- The Sony CDP-D11 is the world's first 1U rackmounting CD player.
It is designed for commercial & professional applications, such as recording studios, theatres and A/V presentations. The up-to-date design features include instant start of tracks, a wired remote, RS-232C & programmable parallel remote control. Audio outputs are both on balanced XLR and phono connectors. Coaxial & optical digital outputs are provided. Superb audio performance is guaranteed thanks to the High Density linear Digital to Analogue converters. A special 'fader play' mode is provided on the parallel interface to automatically play tracks in order as the fader start switch is opened and closed. The slot-in loading mechanism (adapted from the top-of-the-range CDX-880R in-car unit) is designed for high reliability & shock resistance, and a 3 second Advanced ESP anti-shock memory is also standard.
Finally got the Rotel RCD-02 this weekend and got it hooked up yesterday. A review might follow.
That's great. I've heard good things about it although i haven't auditioned one myself.
It would be nice if you got around to doing an A/B to see where the differences really are. My girlfriend had volunteered to turn my A/B tests into a semi blind one, so that I could prove if there really was 'any' difference. Even after my high score, I'd still describe the differences as subtle. Rob PS: funny how you are still getting recommendations after you've actually bought a unit.
Ok well maybe not crap. I just received my cds from Chesky records. They're basically an audiophile recording company. Being curious, I ordered their 20th anniversary disk and ultimate demonstration disk. They also included an extra cd, 2k sampler, for free! So far, I've just listened thru it thru my work computer and Sony MDR-V6 headphones. And I must say they do sound pretty good.
Can't wait to get home and hear them on my speaker rig! While listening, I read the inside of the 20th anniversary cd. What makes Chesky Recordings so special? We produce the purest, most natural recording made today. The music an the acoustics of the recording venue are capture with a single point microphone.
NO compressors in the signal path. No multitracking. NO large mixing consols. Our recording chain is custom buit with audiophile-grade electronics.
What this means to you, the listener: You hear the music the way it was intended to be heard, find yourself in teh front fow of a real live concert, hear ll the nuances, with maximum detail and clarity, experience the music as it was performed live. More details here: So hmmm. The link is very interesting and worth reading IMHO. First 2 paragraphs. Reverberation and Space. Most pop and jazz recording sessions take place in acoustically damped studios, which are, trust me, unsuitable environments for music listening. That's equally true for the musicians themselves: They're frequently put in separate isolation booths, so the only way they can listen to each other is with headphones.
And since they can't hear each other acoustically, they tend to play at one volume, loud. In fact, the studio acoustics are so acoustically dead analog or digital reverberation must be mixed into the recording to create a more lively room sound. The problem is that the added reverberation doesn't sound like a real room. I am perplexed that so many consumers and reviewers enjoy this sound. Perhaps it is just years of living with pop recordings that this artificially created reverb has become the norm, and that some listeners actually prefer it over the natural reverberation of a real space or concert hall. It seems like most mainstream recordings are made to be listened to over $10 computer speakers.
Such is the aesthetic of modern recording, and, perhaps, our whole culture. What do you guys think?
I think it's interesting that so many pay attention to amps, cables, cd players, etc. Yet like they say, the recordings are way too often not on par.
My rig isn't ultra high end (Ascend 340SE, QSC1450 amp, NAD541 cdp and sealed DIY 12 inch sub) but it's still pretty revealing. I'm curious to 'hear' the difference. So what do you guys think about the claims made by Chesky? I'll hopefully be able to give my impressions in a few days. I think they have very valid points for jazz (real jazz, that is, not the predigested funk-inspired pap that oozes through the 'smooth jazz' FM stations), classical, orchestral, etc. There ARE some recordings done 'the old way,' everybody in a room playing together, other than on audiophile labels.
Pick up the soundtrack for The Incredibles, for example (and read the liner notes, and for that matter, watch the 'music' featurette on the DVD). For much of current rock/pop/R&B, who cares? Malayalam serial mazhavil manorama balamani. If there were never real acoustic instruments in an acoustic space in the first place then the very term 'high fidelity' has no referent, as there is no original acoustic sound against which 'fidelity' can be evaluated. I agree with them.
Music has become a commodity and is rarely really listened to anymore. Its become a background noise and has such has to be pumped up with the audio equivilent of steroids so as to pop out of poxy car stereos and pub/bar speakers. There is plenty of room in this world for audiophile equipment and attitudes, and I salute those keeping it real. A lot of blame lies with the 'digital revolution' as applied to sound. I have always maintained that in most cases music is made with analog instruments, transmitted thru an analog medium and listed to with analog ears. So how does convertion to digital at any point and in any way enhance this listening experience? Well, by definition it can't enhance it, because D-A and A-D conversion is always lossy; it's the nature of the beast.
A co-worker of mine and I were lamenting on the state of audio these days. In short, it's shitty.
Back in the 50s, you moved from clay to vinyl, increasing sound quality. The 70s brought us to tape from vinyl, increasing sound fidelity. 80s brought us CDs which while somewhat increased fidelity did more by eliminating hiss and crackle. 90s brought us lossy MP3s. So, while we gained increased portability, it was at a high cost for fidelity. It's a whole new ballgame for consumable technologies and their media, for which I'm not sure what the net loss or benefit has been.
So far, it feels like I've been damned by being a musician and filmmaker at this time, witnessing the passing of analog and historicizing of the days without recording while experiencing the painful birth of a new era that may last my lifetime. Don't get me started on what the shift from film to video did/is doing to both the experience of moving images and their production. I think it's a pretty strong analogy to what's happening to music. That said, the advancements of recording and electronics have allowed for a genuinely new breed of sounds (that I happen to be a fan of) in real electronic music (from guys like Moog to Autechre)-not talking about all 'electronic' music, which is usually 99% mimicry of acoustic music, but rather the stuff that's made with an electronic aesthetic.
Originally posted by aeberbach: Most modern (popular) recording is done to produce the loudest perceived sound with the least dynamic range. I'm not surprised there is a market for recordings that avoid this. You said a mouthful there, A Good Comparison is ' The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium ', The CD is mastered to be LOUD and it's so Compressed, that the dynamics suffer.
I bought the Vinyl Version of this Title and did a Needle Drop, and then compared the Original CD to my Needle Drop. The Difference was Night and Day. The passages in the music that are low in volume,are just that,low, and the louder passages are louder, Yet they contain the transient sounds that are there in real life, eg, a drum hit sounds like a drum hit, instead of sounding clouded and disguised. This one reason I do so many needle drops, there is a Wealth of Music out there on Vinyl, that I haven't heard, but is waiting for me to discover it.
We produce the purest, most natural recording made today. I find this ridiculous; how can music be 'natural'? It's made by humans. It's art(ificial). Yesterday they used wood to make sounds, today they use electronics.
Their taste is wood with lil amplification. My taste is that and thousands of other types of music. Taste cannot be right or wrong. In that aspect anything you hear is 'real'. (what is 'unreal' music?) as for how is digital(or electronics overall) enhancing? It is making music easy to access.
That is something those in 'wooden age' didn't have. In those days music was listened on courts. So in those days i wouldn't be able to listen to jethro tull(they never played on courts.hehe).
And i wouldn't be able to listen to vivaldi today without electronics. Improvement is immense. But is recording with 'a single point microphone' better than the usual recording approach?
Also, how does single point mic works? How do they record stereo from one mic? I remember someone saying that drums usually don't sound too good on older recordings because of the way they were recorded. Now, they use multiple mics per drum kit (like one per drum).
It seems that going by the single mic approach, you can't use the multiple mics. Also there must be advantages to recording in studio, as the mic is closer to the instrument.
Sometimes multiple mics are used also, say for guitar, 2 mics, one left and right (to get stereo). I don't think it's so clear that recording on stage/live is really superior to in studio. studio: Microphone in front of singer's mouth, no echo/reverb. Clear voice recorded. Stage: Two mics have to be used to record stereo. So one on the left, other right. Both are farther from the mouth.
Both are recording room reflections. Seems to me studio should be able to capture more detail and more clarity. Recording in the room records the echo/reverb of the room, but does that really translates to actually being able to hear so clearly 'the room'? The speakers are playing a left and right channel, imaging, soundstage, depth, etc. All come from left right. It's a two point source (each speaker). A lot of records done in studio can give the space (not necessarily room though, not that it's what they/you want reproduced always anyhow.) Anyhow, to answer my own question, it does seem to work pretty well.
The records definitely have an excellent recording quality and truly sound beautiful, even on my somewhat modest system. Really, really great sound. I only wish some of my other cds sounded that good The ultimate demo disk has set of drums to demonstrate dynamics, wow. If every cd could sound that good. I suspect most people have no idea what real music sounds like, so there'd be no reason for them to complain about bad mic technique, compression, etc. They've never heard an acoustic guitar in a living room, much less an Amati violin with gut strings in a chamber setting. My feeling is it really only makes sense to talk about recordings of acoustic instruments.
Electric and electronic instruments rely on the external electronics and loudspeakers so much for their sound that it's kind of pointless to talk about what they 'really' sound like. For instance, you pretty much have to assume that recorded sound of an electric guitar player's fuzz pedal is exactly how it's supposed to sound, as there is no reference for a fuzz pedal in nature. In general, I think all recordings fall into one of two camps - those that attempt to create a sound, and those that attempt to re-create a performance. Electric and electronic instruments rely on the external electronics and loudspeakers so much for their sound that it's kind of pointless to talk about what they 'really' sound like. But then again one can tell the difference in sound from different amplifier cabling.
And from different types of tubes in the amps. And from the session mentioned above, Vaughn had stopped during an earlier warmup to tell his amp tech Caesar Diaz 'hey, that little Gibson upstairs is f.ing up.' Diaz thought he was insane (because there were 20-something amps everywhere) but he went to check and the little Gibson upstairs -was- 'f.ing up'.
The folks at Chesky Recordings don't seem to have any clue as to recording technique and requirements. There are very valid reasons for the isolation of certain instruments. From a producer's point of view, there are also valid reasons for recording instruments 'dry' and applying things like reverb artifically later in the process. About compression and it's overuse. I would say that most people's listening enviornment in the last 5 years introduces compression that isn't present in the original material. Music delivered over broadcast is compressed several times after it's point of origin for many reasons (to make it 'broadcast legal', to free up bandwidth for digital delivery, etc).
Music listened to in live venues is compressed to protect the PA gear and often to make it easier for the operator to 'get a handle' on dynamically challenging instruments (like drums). And of course music delivered in digital formats are compressed to reduce file size. Many times, combinations of these factors come into play as well (like a radio station that plays MP3s, or a broadcast station that is also delivered on a cable system). Anything that bounces off a satellite is also compressed as a part of that process. People have heard this sound so much that they now identify with it and hear it as correct. If you take an average listener and play 2 otherwise identical passages for them, one being dry and the other being compressed 6:1, they will usually pick the compressed audio as the one that sounds better (as long as the engineer compensates for that harsh comression by boosting the highs and high mids slightly).
As long as this is true, producers will continue to compress the shit out of their recordings. As a recording engineer I just want to clear a few things up in this post: 1. Digital audio does not sound 'bad' because it is digital.
All musical material is different, and requires a different recording approach. Most often pop and rock music are recorded with close miking techniques, meaning many microphones are used and placed close to the sound sources. Often times, the instruments are acoustically isolated with baffles or even placed in different recording booths and rooms. This gives the mixing engineer a lot of freedom. He can manipulate sounds individually to create a performance not possible in the real world. That in itself is an art. Remember, duplicating real life is not always the goal.
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There are many good reasons to record this way, but certainly it does not make sense to record every ensemble like this. Most orchestras and many jazz ensembles want a more natural approach. And for these ensembles, a more minimalist miking technique certainly does make sense. But you must understand that the majority of sessions usually fall under both categories and to only view the 'Chesky' point of view is simply foolish.
It is funny how much Chesky stresses obtaining the natural sound of the hall. Often times, the sound of the hall, its inherent reverb, is not desirable. Sure, a certain hall may sound great with a 100 piece choir, but today you are recording a 5 piece brass ensemble and the sound is just not right. That is why there are multi-thousand dollar reverb boxes (the T.C. Electronics S6000 being one of my favorites). Because a recording is 'all natural' does not make it good by any means. Compression (reducing dynamic range) is a tool, it is not inherently 'bad.'
There are many applications where compression is valid and very much required. For instance, a generalization would be recording a bass. Because of many factors, it is almost impossible to get a bass to sound good without a little compression. But is it right to use compression and limiting in the mastering phase to completely smash a stereo mix? No, of course not. Recording and Mastering are very different processes and, on commercial releases, are rarely done by the same engineer(s).
So, if a recording is compressed to the state in which it contains very little dynamic range, that was done by the mastering engineer. Often, the mastering engineer laments this act, but is required to do it by the record companies. Because the labels are scared of their recordings sounding quieter than the competition.
Sorry for the novel. This is also my first post, so, Hello Everyone. In fact, the studio acoustics are so acoustically dead analog or digital reverberation must be mixed into the recording to create a more lively room sound. The problem is that the added reverberation doesn't sound like a real room. And also call me insane, but I don't think I've ever heard live music (at least not live pop/rock music) where the natural acoustics in the room made it sound better. 90% of live music venues have shitty acoustics; give me a well-produced studio version any day if we're talking purely about the sound. The author of that spiel is talking rubbish.
Modern studios and recording techniques do not inherently degrade the listening experience. It all depends on how they are used. If it sounds good to the listener, does anything else really matter? The point of recordings is to reproduce music, hopefully in the way that the artist intended it sound. If this means its from individually recorded instruments mixed and reverb added, thats fine, if its in a hall, thats fine too, live recordings may sound better to one person while the studio recording sounds better to another.
Neither is right, its something that is completely subjective. There are good recordings and bad ones, but the various types of them are not inherently bad, just different. They can and do produce different sounds, but which is better is up to the listener. However there are tricks that either cannot be, or are not easily pulled when comparing hall recorded to studio recorded. Your listening equipment may be a limiting factor but try listening to a high quality recording of classical or other orchestra music.
You can practically tell where every instrument is on the stage both horizontally and vertically. Audio imaging in studio usually isn't as natural sounding, which may be where people are getting the XXX is better thing. Enjoy the music however you like and fuck anyone who tells you different. Chesky is hardly the first or only ones with this ideology. I the golden Audiophile years there were lots of companies like this.
For classical recordings nothing beats 'Mercury Live Prescense'. It's simply astounding, and they stopped recording in the late 50's or maybe early 60's. Fortunatly people have learned from that, and reproduced their recording techniques. Personally I think that synthetic production is best for synthetic sounds, and that having good reproduction for that is also nice. This is also true about live performances of such music. When it comes to acoustic music, then it is best to keep as much natural sound as possible. Look at Peter Gabriels Real World studios for example.
They have one big room with everybody involved in the same room, including mixers. It makes up for some interesting problems, but the end product sounds very natural. Anyone that has heard Real Worlds more exotic acoustic recordings can hear that.
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What is way more disturbing than any modern recording -studios is the way it is popular to master records nowadays. Digital clipping all the way. Absolute dynamic-range killing by clearly audible compressors pumping effects. And not just for high energy music. Troubadour-stuff is mastered this way too, and it's actually disgusting to hear. Best Regards Bo Eriksson.
The Chesky system calibration disk is an amazing CD that EVERYONE who listens to music should have. Using that disk to calibrate placement of my speakers and cure rattling windows made more difference in my listening than bi-amping my speakers. That said, the music selection of Chesky artists borders on Jazz-lite Muzak. Which is not to my taste. The whole HDCD concept was interesting, but like Beta VCR, they never had any decent content. The XRCD encoding concept had much better artists, better production.
But the price was crazy and most XRCD's are out of print now. So long and thanks for the fish!
Sure, but you weren't talking about anything remotely comparable to that. All of the more common methods people hear music now introduce dynamic range compression. Most of them introduce multiple levels of dynamic range compression. I'm not sure I could be more clear than I was in my original post. And I was refering to MP3 compression, which is undoubtedly the most used file comression for music right now.
Yes, compressing the file size using the MP3 codec effects the dynamic range of that file - even if 'convenience options' like normalization aren't used. This isn't some mental masturbation for me, it's something we have to think about when (for instance) we're making a commercial that's going to air on cable versus radio. Or when a show (that is compressing mics live) needs to be edited for re-broadcast. Or a show is being distributed on several different mediums (on Demand, cable, and internet). The overcompression you hear is OFTEN introduced after the mastering process. The only time you're hearing the material as intended is when you're listening to a CD, so you can't always judge audio quality based on what you hear on MTV, or digital radio, or any other broadcast medium.
Originally posted by nem0nic: Sure I was. All of the more common methods people hear music now introduce dynamic range compression. Most of them introduce multiple levels of dynamic range compression. I'm not sure I could be more clear than I was in my original post. Something loseless data compression does not do, which is the point. You tended to imply they all have the same behaviors and are used for the same reasons.
That's not the case at all. You're conflating multiple things by failure to be specific. MP3 compression does reduce the bulk dynamic range of a track, but does so by simply removing isolated peaks which by their nature are at a very high frequency. MP3 compression doesn't just shave off the higher frequencies as you imply.
Research masking and psychoacoustics as they apply to MP3 compression. VBR allows for greater dynamic range (well, let's say instead that it's a better trade off), but isn't commonly used by the larger online music distributors where 128kbps CBR files are the norm. Originally posted by nem0nic: Sure I was. All of the more common methods people hear music now introduce dynamic range compression. Most of them introduce multiple levels of dynamic range compression. I'm not sure I could be more clear than I was in my original post. Something loseless data compression does not do, which is the point.
You tended to imply they all have the same behaviors and are used for the same reasons. That's not the case at all. You're conflating multiple things by failure to be specific. I don't even deal in sound professionally and I could easily tell when nem0nic was switching contexts in his post. Why are you being purposefully obtuse?
Writes 'Adrienne LaFrance reports at the Atlantic that if you've tried listening to any of the old CDs lately from your carefully assembled collection from the 1980's or 1990's. 'While most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. — so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 — isn't just aging; it's dying.
And so is yours.' Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. But it's a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years and even CDs made by the same company in the same year and wrapped in identical packaging might have totally different lifespans. 'We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk,' says France. 'The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information.' There are all kinds of forces that accelerate CD aging in real time.
Eventually, many, which happens as oxygen seeps through a disc's layers. Some CDs begin a, which is corrosion that worsens with exposure to various pollutants. The lasers in devices used to burn or even play a CD can also affect its longevity. 'The ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly,' concludes LaFrance. 'We stop using old formats little by little.
They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they're gone.' ' You can donate CDs to be tested for aging characteristics by emailing the.
I haven't had much trouble ripping discs that were pressed in the 80s (and acquired from used CD stores with who knows how many previous owners), but I'm starting to get nervous about not. One of the effects you can see on older (and newer) CDs is that the plastic itself yellows with age, which of course affects the optical properties of the data layer sandwiched in between. And any disc that is a foil layer printed onto a plastic disc is essentially disposable.
I just finished re-importing my CD collection and getting rid of the originals - despite being in properly stored CD binders (sealed with no-scratch cloth pockets and rarely seeing the light, a few were starting to show signs of aging. When I learn of an older recording I might like, I tend to torrent a FLAC of it right away, and then go off in search of a physical copy because I like having the physical artifact.
I would love to buy more vinyl, because there is so much artistic cover art out there that looks great at full size. However, labels are doing such limited pressings that by the time I discover a recording, the vinyl has all sold out. For example, I've been trying to purchase Belle and Sebastian's discography, and I was able to g. Labels aren't letting us buy what we want. For a lot of music, I'd love to buy MP3s of the studio masters made vor vinyl. I don't believe that vinyl is a superior medium compared to CD or MP3/FLAC, but in many cases there's a huge difference between the masters produced for vinyl and for digital media.
And in a lot of cases, those 'digitally remastered' recordings are crap even compared to the old digital masters, with a lot of 'loudness war' added. Sadly it is hard to come by a digital file produced from a good master. I don't believe that vinyl is a superior medium compared to CD or MP3/FLAC, but in many cases there's a huge difference between the masters produced for vinyl and for digital media. Yeah, I hear you.
S Accelerate and Rush's Clockwork Angels albums a few years back, I bought the CDs to support the artists, but I put them on only to discover that the CDs were compressed to hell. The vinyl, however, had been mastered with the preference of more audiophile-y people in mind. So, I just went to a torrent community and downloaded a high-quality vinyl rip to FLAC, and now I play exclusively this. It's sad that in order to get real dynamic range and avoid the loudness-wars sludge, one has to resort to this workaround.
Even if these vinyl rip uploaders are using the highest-quality rig, some fidelity is inevitably lost in the process. I thought the loudness wars ended over a decade ago? So if the remaster is from the last 5 years, you'd THINK they'd be remastering to reclaim the full dynamic range. Nope, labels are aware that their remasters are going to be listened to in cars and through tiny earbuds while walking down the street. People who are consuming music that way don't want dynamic range, because the noise around the listener would render much of the music inaudible.
So, the levels get pushed up so that classic rock music can compete with the noise of traffic or the subway. Another problem is when the remastering is directed by a bloke who was a great performer in the band decades ago, but is now a middle-aged man who is becoming hard of hearing. Such people push the levels up much more than a younger engineer.
This was a big problem with the Cocteau Twins remasters; Robin Guthrie should have given it to a younger man instead of doing it himself. ' is only available used (so I cannot even support the artist by buying it)' That's like saying you don't buy weed from your local dealer because you'd prefer to support the farmer. Buying used supports the artist. By buying the used disc you're creating an aftermarket for the artist's stuff which ultimately enlarges the primary market because people who buy new in the primary market know they will be able to sell the item if they decide it isn't right for them or they tire of it.
If you buy the disc, used or new, and like it, you're likely to play or at least recommend it to others who may then also decide to buy the artist's stuff. Except for the part where it degrades slightly every time you play it. Kids these days. Back when pretty much everything was on vinyl, everybody already knew about that. Plus the albums were inconvenient because you had to be so careful with the sleeves, the turntable, keeping the needle fresh and clean, etc.
While me and many of my friends settled on was cassette tapes. The first play of the album was used to record the whole thing to a convenient little cassette tape that would play the same hundreds of times, and you could even take it with you to play in the car (or you. Except the act of actually playing it.once. physically destroys the media.
Vinyl is like driving a new car off the lot: the value drops by about 20% the first time you drive it. Then each additional time you drive it, the value drops by an additional amount. If you play vinyl about 15 times, you have lost more than 50% of the original material. The stylus ploughing through (relatively) soft plastic is like a steel plough going through (relatively) soft soil. At some point all you have is a smooth 'shhhhhhhhhh' sound with very faint sounding something that used to be music.
You do make a point though 'Vinyl is still fairly superior for physical archiving'.so long as you never play it. I'm sorry, that's complete hogwash. I don't know if you've ever owned records, but I've been buying them since the mid-sixties.
I'm sure I have many records that are older than you are. Kitni chahat chupaye baitha hoon download. If you only get fifteen plays out of an album, you are doing something seriously wrong.
I'm a little shocked at how many slashdotters seem to believe this nonsense, but I guess many people have now grown up without any exposure to vinyl. Now, if you're not here to cut the grass, please get off my lawn. Semi-agreed, for one reason: it may be because he has a turntable with a cheap or worn-out needle on it (that is, it's either way too dull overall, or way too sharp at the tip.
The former will wear out the sides of the groove, while the latter will slowly gouge out the center of it). That or the armature itself is too damned heavy, the armature spring is bearing down too hard, etc etc etc. Lots of variables to consider when you compare this stuff.:) Mind you, I used to restore vintage record players and radios - as in 1920's-1950's - stuff that was old enough to use tubes.
My biggest problem wasn't the electronics (even tubes aren't too tough to get if you know where to look.) My biggest problem was with needles that were worn way down, and finding a box of replacement needles that fit at a flea market was like finding pure gold. My next biggest problem was in restoring the armature (springs and hinges were usually shot, rusted, or worse). After that it was all the ancillary crap nobody thinks of (speakers, belts, motors, the battered wood finish and grilles, etc). OTOH, even with brand-new turntables, there's a lot of things that have to happen correctly in both design and execution before you get a solid turntable that will play good vinyl over the long term without tearing the crap out of it. That doesn't quite do it. FLAC is great for the individual tracks, but there is also information about inter-track gaps. If you lose that, playing the album won't sound right if any of the tracks are supposed to flow into the next one.
This isn't an issue for probably 90% of the CDs out there, but for the remaining ones, it's important to get them to play correctly. I've noticed the same problem when ripping old vinyl albums and playing them on an MP3 player. When the tracks used to flow, there's now a gap, and it can be really annoying. Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, eve. Wait, was your ass stuffed with a cheap dildo, or a genuine audiophile cock?
A lot of people these days settle for the former, but the acoustic properties of an uncircumcised penis cannot be understated, especially if you're using cheap unbalanced power cables or find yourself in a room without ceramic ambient field conditioning discs, as often happens on business trips. Lesser people may have different opinions, but i find the services of a qualified escort to be indispensable. Unlike the rest of the elite field audiophilia, there is no exact science about this, but in my experience you want to spend in the $200/hr.
Range at least, and always fit for breadth. Don't be afraid to turn down someone inadequate, they'll usually understand. Copyright is still pretty much tied to physical copies. It is, of course, another example of law not keeping up with the technical reality. I've even heard it surmised (possibly here) that putting a computer program in memory for execution is technically a copyright violation. It will never be tried in court as it goes way beyond the idea of common sense (even in today's corporate controlled courts), but it could be true. It's going to take a long time before we have copyright reform that makes sense when.
I've even heard it surmised (possibly here) that putting a computer program in memory for execution is technically a copyright violation. It will never be tried in court as it goes way beyond the idea of common sense (even in today's corporate controlled courts), but it could be true. But it was tried in court (sortof) in the Federal case wikipedia.org. The court ruled that according to the rules of copyright, technically loading a program into RAM for execution does violate copyright, partially because RAM can be easily copyable (Anything that places a program in storage that is trivially copyable is a copyright violation). The US Congress, Orrin Hatch in particular, thought this was silly, and amended the copyright code.
I rip my CD with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC and/or use iTunes and rip to Apple Lossless. I want to mention something with regards to Exact Audio Copy that some/many people here may not know. EAC has a longstanding bug that has never (as far I know) been fixed, despite being known for years.
If you try to rip from a BluRay drive, the ripping slows down to a crawl and can take an hour or more to rip a single CD. Notice that I said 'or more'. This problem does not exist on drives that can't read BluRay discs. Ripping on those drives happens at reasonable speeds. While the article specifically discusses audio CDs, I see the lifespan and preservation of data CDs being an issue too. And unlike audio CDs, many data CDs include copy protection that hinders easy archival. To my understanding, you generally can't strip the copy protection of data CDs the way you can video DVDs.
The copy protection comes along. Either you use a virtual optical drive program like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120 that can emulate the protection or you need a fancy burner that can reproduce the. People with LaserDisc movies started learning about disc rot the hard way about a decade earlier than people with audio CDs. LaserDisc movies store video using an analog PWM scheme, so any defect in the pits and lands of a disc show up as snow in the video.
Audio CDs, being a digital format with error correction, have the benefit of the digital cliff effect to mask minor defects. So it takes more significant rotting of the reflective layer before the player exhibits playback errors. Luckily, audio CDs can be ripped to lossless formats such as FLAC, WavPack, Monkey and the like, so making an exact archival copy is possible.
Ripping tools such as Exact Audio Copy assist in that effort by examining the quality of your rip (drives can mask error when ripping audio CDs) against a database. I'm sure that DVDs will also start to show disc rot in time. Tools such as CloneDVD can make an exact ISO image that you can archive as well. But LaserDiscs don't have that ability. At best, you can capture an exact copy of the PCM digital audio via the SPDIF output, but the video will always be a best effort when captured from composite or Y/C component. And with so many discs showing rot these days, it is probably too late to save them.
I have CDs going back to the 1980s which still play. This article confirmed my suspicion that they will not last forever and I don't want to spend the $$$ to replace my 400+ CDs with another media that the record cartels control like BluRay with the movie cartels. When the mp3 format came along, I found an encoder (RazorLame) that did an excellent job of maintaining the fidelity of my CDs so I proceeded to rip my entire collection. I heard some horrid fidelity mp3s on filesharing sites due to bad encoder. I had a collection of somewhere slightly over 250-260 commercial music CDs (about half of which I sold off last year o various online web-sites who bought used CDs). The sites doing the buying were extremely picky (to the point where they'd refuse to pay for a disc, even if it was the exact album they said they wanted, if its ISBN number didn't match the exact one they were after), and I was billed for replacement jewel cases in several instances, simply because the ones I provided with the CDs had small cracks in them. Not a single disc I sold them was refused or returned for failure to play or for skipping though.
Meanwhile, I've had absolutely no issues playing any of the remaining discs in my collection. (I had to re-rip many of them just a few months ago, when I discovered a lot of the MP3 rips I made years earlier had some issues.) What I can say, though, is, I've been very good about always putting my CDs back in the jewel cases whenever I finished playing one, and they all sit in a big, revolving CD storage tower in the house. I have to wonder if some of these complaints of 'edge rot' and 'bronzing' of the media and so forth are with discs people left sitting in hot cars in the summer, didn't put back in the cases often, etc.? You could have googled it. Yes, it's still a thing. Still works on modern Windows. You'll have infinitely more problems getting the things to run than you will do accessing the original CD's.
But, to be honest, there's a plethora of one-click installs of any game you can mention, legit and dubious, out there - complete with emulation and fixes for modern OS. There's also zero point archiving something that people have ever heard of. DOOM isn't going to drop off the face of the earth but, say, some ancient o. Heh, I like the 'firstworldproblems' tag. You would have to be pretty naive to have gone all this time believing that CDs would last forever. Sure, all the salespeople back in the 80s and 90s told us this, but they only knew what they had heard or been told, and to be fair, they were drawing a comparison to casette tapes.
I don't know anyone who has a CD collection, who has not ripped them to some sort of digital format. True, if they were ripped to mp3s there was some loss, but most people couldn't tell yo. I have about 500 studio pressed CDs dating all the way back to the freebies that came with my first CD player (one of the very first Sony models, a CDP-200) back in 1983. Last year I re-ripped them to flac using dbPoweramp.
A few of the 500 had issues due to physical scratches which I was able to handle by buying replacements off Amazon Marketplace. NONE had problems from general bit rot. The 1980's vintage CDs all ripped bit perfect according to the track checksums. Now maybe you would have a problem due to some of the fungi that are known to attack CDs in tropical climates but I bet if you are like me and kept your CDs in a temperate zone air conditioned home you are fine, and will remain so. By the way, NONE of the other media I have dating back to the 1970's is usable. Even the LPs are no good - worn out long ago.
Good luck trying to maintain bit perfect rips for 30 years. How about we make the copyright holder responsible for providing suitable replacements as part of their copyright renewal process. It would be preferable to require a new stamping off a master every 5-10 years and provide identical media replacements - certainly to the Library of Congress and other designated archives (CD for CD, Book for book, VHS for VHS). I could see some wiggle room where digital downloads of equal or greater quality be made available to consumers. Even if we say fuck the consumers, the copyright holder should certainly be responsible to provide replacements to archives as part of the copyright registration. I would see such as minimal evidence for copyright enforcement.