Went to a party last week in Boston’s North End. Most of the folks there were young people who work for airlines. This is a prime demographic for the music industry. Yet they were not playing CDs. A tiny apartment in Boston costs $2000/month. This has dual effects: (1) young people have no money to buy CDs because it all goes to their landlords, and (2) young people have no space to store CDs because every square inch of their apartments is already devoted to something more essential.
Had these folks given up on music? No! They were paying for digital cable TV, which includes 50 channels of commercial-free music at no extra charge. They’d hooked up their cable box to their stereo and were happily flipping among the stations.
One flight attendant, a vivacious blond Floridian, said that she had a lot of music on MP3. She doesn’t like computers, though, and hadn’t downloaded anything from the Internet. Her brother had a big old music collection that he had ripped onto his computer. Periodically the brother would select some material for his sister and transfer it onto her MP3 player.
The CD celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, having been introduced in Japan in 1982. It is tough to milk $billions in profits from a 21-year-old product that has never been improved, especially in a First World economy where things like digital cable TV are developed and marketed. We really should give the record company executives credit for being grandly ambitious….
I have put most of my CDs in clear vinyl sleeves sold by a company called Jewelsleeve, which reduces the bulk of CDs by 80-90%. The sleeves have a space for the booklet and what is called the tray card (the piece that sits under the place where the CD attaches to the jewel case). After transferring, you are left with a flat piece of vinyl with the booklet in front. I am surprised that this sort of thing hasn’t caught on more.
(Note: I have no relation to the company except as consumer.)
Ah Jewelsleeve – that sounds like the product marketed by Cadence magazine. I currently have my CDs in CaseLogic folders with the sleeves in clear boxes built for index cards. I tend to only buy inexpensive CDs & begrudge paying more than 10p each for storage.
I owned a dozen CD’s before going to college. After a few friends downloaded songs off Napster, I am now the proud owner of 200 compact discs. I won’t buy an album unless I’ve heard MP3s first.
I also pay 85 dollars a month for digital cable. Music at our last party was compliments of Cablevision of Central Jersey.
Oh, come on – you can get a tiny apartment in Boston for well under $2000. True, you still won’t have any room for CDs…
I still buy CDs every now and then, but these get ripped into my mac, transferred into my iPod and then I don’t see the CD for months or maybe years. When the iTunes Music Store came out I bought a full album just to check it out but you still have to burn it to a CD in case your iTunes library gets corrupted (you cannot re-dowload music you paid for unless you pay again). I guess 10 tracks at 99 cents apiece plus a 10-cent CDR are still better than buying the retail CD, since I get to pick the tracks.
Did anyobody notice regression in quality of audio? MP3’s audio fidelity is worse than CD which is worse than LP. I hope this stops before the entire society becomes deaf. I guess the same can be said about the quality of music itself… and I’n not THAT old (~28)
Actually the regression started a long time before CDs. Edison cylinders had less distortion than flat disks but they died because they were impossible to stamp out cheaply. LP records, at 33 RPM, were much worse in quality than the (short-playing) 78 RPM records they replaced (just as a slow-moving cassette recorder is worse in quality than a 30-inches-per-second professional reel-to-reel desk).
Technologies that were more convenient and/or cheaper to produce have always prevailed over high-quality earlier technologies.
8 years working in NOCs pretty much messed up my hearing at certain frequency ranges so I can’t spot much difference between a CD and a 256K MP3. And that is only if wearing studio earphones, if I wear earbuds I can’t spot any difference.
yeah, like interesting. Now tell us what we really want to know – how do you get invited to parties with vivacious, blond Floridians. I’ve been learning lisp as a way to get filthy rich through software development so that I can be invited to parties with hot women. However, everyone tells me lisp is dead so I’m second guessing myself and further from the goal. What do you recommend? Should one keep one’s interest in arcane programming languages a secret from the beautiful people?
Regards
> LP records, at 33 RPM, were much worse in
> quality than the (short-playing) 78 RPM records they replaced
Not true. Due to a lot of reasons frequency range of 78s was limited at about 400Hz at the bottom and 8-9kHz at the top, going +/- 15dB in random parts inbetween. Own noise of the mass used for their pressing was also evenly distributed across pretty much the same frequency range. Vinyl’s own noise is largely above 10kHz and is not that annoying.
It is possible to buy recordings of 1930-40’s performers re-mastered from 78s, early magnetic tape/wire or photosensitive film. Photosensitive film yields by far the best quality. Excellent Rachmaninov/Ormandy recording of 1st and 4th piano concerts was originally done on photo film, and only the characteristic sound of the mikes used betrays its age. Everything remastered from 78s sounds awful.
Alexei: I didn’t mean to imply that a Sheffield Labs LP circa 1980 wasn’t better than a 78 from the 1930s. But the first LPs were quite a bit worse in many ways than the last 78s. I have a friend who has 20,000 78s and the last great players made in the 1950s and he claims that he prefers the sound in many ways to most LPs. What is tough to dispute is the inconvenience of changing disks all the time (though of course he has a stacker turntable).
Diamonis: getting invited to the party by your (male) pilot friends isn’t the same as attracting any interest from the beautiful (female) flight attendants. At my age (turning 40 this month) single women tend to look through me rather than at me. They may occasionally ask if I have grandchildren…
[I have an incredibly cute 9-year-old cousin and I attempted to train her to go about in Manhattan with me, walk up to attractive women, and say “Daddy hasn’t been the same since Mom died. He’s so sensitive that he spends a lot of nights crying.” The experiment has yet to be carried out but I remain hopeful…]
Philip, I think the problem with early LPs was not in recording technology, but rather in players. 78s were definitely a luxury, and someone shelling out a sum equivalent to current US$50 per shellac disc could also buy an expensive and technically advanced player from Thorens or Telefunken. LPs were aimed at the mass market, and players had to be very cheap. Only after appearance of mass-market magnetic cartridges people started to realise how much information is really recorded on an LP, and became ready to pay big money for players.
Philip, I hang out with one group of guys where everyone else is 55 to mid 70s. Those guys get more female attention, especially from the cute 20 year olds, than anyone. My guess is you’re not old enough yet.
On music, how’s the live scene there? I live in a small town, and what’s stopping me from buying CDs is that I can buy a CD for $18.99 that I’ll listen to once, decide I like one or two tracks, and listen to each of those 5 more times each over the life of the disk, or wander down to one of the 3 venues in my town of 13,000 that has live music every night, spend $5 on a beer and toss $5 in the hat and hear an hour or two of kick-ass original music, some of which will probably end up being covered by some inferior front-band with a big advertising budget on an RIAA label in a couple of months.
And no $20k granite turntable ever competes with live, as long as the musicians weren’t depending on the engineers to make their sound later.
diamonis, speaking as a 20-yr-old (though not quite vivacious, but i do have some vivacious, hot friends…) i would suggest that whispering sweet lisp-statements in a girl’s ear will probably work much better at someplace like mit. correct strategy, incorrect environment (unless you are at mit already. hehe).
Alexei is right, The LP was superior to the 78, even if you are talking about the LP as invented in 1948. The background noise levels on an LP were lower and, as Alexei points out, in a much less noticeable frequency range. Also, 78s had a VERY limited play life. Unlike an LP, each play of a 78 did extensive damage to the disk (even with a good player). If I owned a collection of 20,000 78s, I’d probably have them transcribed by a professional and never touch them again.
Many of the early LP recordings were designed to sound just a little bit better than AM radio (that being less expensive to make, but good enough to impress buyers).
-r
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