I think the whole notion of closed formats is long overdue for a well-deserved demise. To my mind the choice of SACD was disgrace, little more than an exercise in forcing hardware licensing on an entire culture industry.
Recently I bought a little Zotac Mag nettop computer and loaded XBMC Live for a total cost of less than I paid for an Oppo. It plays almost anything thrown at it, certainly anything audio without care of sampling rate, bit depth and codec. Digital into a Benchmark DAC it sounds pretty darn good too. This is what the youngest generation of listeners takes for granted and what they demand, the concept of a single format for music locked into a single manufacturer must seem as foreign as home ice deliveries.
In a futuristic movie, video data of people who can see the future is engraved onto wooden balls.
How is an analog audio format going backwards? Since all audio has to end up in an analog format before it can be heard, and most audio is analog when it is created (e.g., vocals, accoustic instruments [including electrically amplified versions of accoustic instruments such as the electric guitar]), then digitizing it is going backwards in that respect, since it puts it in a different domain than where it originated from, and where it needs to go.
An analog audio format is going backwards strictly in a chronological sense, but sometimes chronological progression could be described as "one step forward, two steps back".
I think it was an honest attempt at something better than CD. I read somewhere that there was a need to store (deteriorating) master tapes onto something. Obviously a CD was not good enough. We all know it's not perfect sound forever. SACD would not even be invented today with network music players and storage.
NO MORE discs ever please.
Right now everything is going solid state. (In whatever form) I don't know why anyone would bother even with blu-ray. I only have two formats. Vinyl and digital formats on NAS.
Yeah...... LOL I put my entire CD collection on my computer. SO much easier to point and click.
You need to record analog and digital side by side.
So the digital can be used to calibrate the analog
levels and sanity check the analog pickup for pops
and dropouts.
You use the analog only as long as it agrees with
the digital. And something lights on your console
if they are too often not in agreement, and the
digital backup is having to cover for a problem.
So the digital can be used to calibrate the analog
levels and sanity check the analog pickup for pops
and dropouts.
You use the analog only as long as it agrees with
the digital. And something lights on your console
if they are too often not in agreement, and the
digital backup is having to cover for a problem.
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Phonographic discs do provide random access to a certain extent. And as for the flipping over to hear it in it’s entirity, are you sure that’s an inconvence. It doesn’t feel that way to me. Many albums originally relased on vinyl were created with the side change in mind. Here are some exmalpe of actually taking advantage of the side change:
*Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing it All back home, Side 1 is the electric side and side 2 is the acoustic side, it has maked me woder why the sides were even numbered, rather than just being called the electric and acoustic side.
*Van Morrion’s Asteral Weeks, side 1 is called In The Beginning and side 2 is called Afterwards.
*Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends; side 1 tells a story.
*The Beatles album Yellow Submarine from the same year where side 2 features George Martin’s Orchestrations
*The Doors album Morrsion Hotel, Side 2 has the same name as the album, while side 1 is called Hard Rock Café.
*Bob Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves, one verison of Forever Young ends side 1 and another begins side 2.
Some LPs, especially classical ones, did not have a defined side order at all.
I myself am not a great believer in listening to music while wandering around on the streets.
First of all spinning discs are less prone than tapes, secondly variable delays are possible in the analog domain, voltage variable delay lines were used on Television tape recorders as far back as 1956.
Pitch distortion can also occur in digital recrodings, but at a higher frequecy, and it is called clock jitter. Much of what you are saying is valid for linear recording, but with FM recording, a pilot tone colud be added to the signal to detect and correct timebase errors.
Fact is that closed formats have been sufficient for most of the history of recorded music, and I am surprised at the idea that digtal downloads are outright replacemant for more traditional formats, as opposed to each finding their own neiche.
I know this topic is old but...
If we could make the perfect analog format, what would it look like?
I think that's what this topic should try to answer and would be an interesting exercise to perform.
The resolution that would be possible on a 12" laserdisc with 6 discrete channels encoded using AM would be amazing (given a 1 hr recording time)
If we could make the perfect analog format, what would it look like?
I think that's what this topic should try to answer and would be an interesting exercise to perform.
The resolution that would be possible on a 12" laserdisc with 6 discrete channels encoded using AM would be amazing (given a 1 hr recording time)
Perfection doesn't exist in anything.
I really like this idea of a new analogue format. If laserdisc used pits and lands with varying lengths then perhaps an ssd or hdd could be used to write data using the same method and be decoded the same way meaning a continuous stream of varying 1s or 0s with no word length? Since there is a minimum size being 1 bit. It would still be a hybrid of digital and analogue. But by running two simultaneous write/ read events the minimum resolution could be half a bit and so on...
I really like this idea of a new analogue format. If laserdisc used pits and lands with varying lengths then perhaps an ssd or hdd could be used to write data using the same method and be decoded the same way meaning a continuous stream of varying 1s or 0s with no word length? Since there is a minimum size being 1 bit. It would still be a hybrid of digital and analogue. But by running two simultaneous write/ read events the minimum resolution could be half a bit and so on...
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spinning disc HDD are already no contact magnetic recording/playback devices. you would just need a way of recording and playing back the analogue. think spinning disc tape..
of course the biggest stumbling block is the music industry. do you honestly believe that they would ever let 'master' quality out to the public when they are ever increasing sales of compressed formats like MP3 which they can sell you without the need for a medium.
then you have the public who are not interested in having to store shelves and shelves of medium when they can have an entire collection of 1000's of albums on a tiny portable device.
if you think that maybe 1 out of every 10,000 people is possibly some sort of audiophile and maybe 1 in 1,000,000 is a true audiophile and you can see that its not viable.
the music/film industry is going 'streaming' and everyone will need to use a provider within 20 years if they want to listen/watch newly released music/films.
joe public.. their own worst enemy.
Personally I think parts of the music industry are inept or deliberately mischievous and of course they wont let us have studio quality. An example of their ineptitude is brickwalled remasters that sound like #%@
How can they charge money for that?
If there was "perfect sound forever" there is no need for a remaster. Just buy it once and keep it forever!
Another example of their mischief is saying that master tapes have deteriorated so they cannot use them for cutting new all-analogue vinyl. Well if they are not going to use the analogue tape please give it to someone who will use it. I have reel to reel tapes from the 1960's that play like new. These tapes must have been played over 100 times. So doing an all-analogue dub from an old reel to a new reel is not going to hurt anything. But will allow all analogue pubic release. Instead we are given a record cut from a digital source. So when they made the digital transfer from original tape they couldn't run a Y Split to another reel?
BS!
How can they charge money for that?
If there was "perfect sound forever" there is no need for a remaster. Just buy it once and keep it forever!
Another example of their mischief is saying that master tapes have deteriorated so they cannot use them for cutting new all-analogue vinyl. Well if they are not going to use the analogue tape please give it to someone who will use it. I have reel to reel tapes from the 1960's that play like new. These tapes must have been played over 100 times. So doing an all-analogue dub from an old reel to a new reel is not going to hurt anything. But will allow all analogue pubic release. Instead we are given a record cut from a digital source. So when they made the digital transfer from original tape they couldn't run a Y Split to another reel?
BS!
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Erin - if you're experiencing the same quality today as 40-50 years ago, you are either damned lucky or your ears and memory are playing with you. Long time storage of analog tapes are a science of its own, i terms of temp, humidity and god knows what. It doesn't surprise me a bit that most of these tapes have deteriorated beyond salvage. I addition, tapes that then were concidered of lower value was often reused.
At work, we have shelf meters of analog tapes from the 60s and 70s, no music but scientific data telemetry, Most of them are well beyond salvation, - ad those hve been replayed maybe 2 or 3 times mostly, as customer copies were made immediately. Ufortunately we are under contract to keep them for a undetermined time.......
At work, we have shelf meters of analog tapes from the 60s and 70s, no music but scientific data telemetry, Most of them are well beyond salvation, - ad those hve been replayed maybe 2 or 3 times mostly, as customer copies were made immediately. Ufortunately we are under contract to keep them for a undetermined time.......
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