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March 28, 2008 - 9:29am
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Chain Stores Dumping CDs?
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May I suggest that you read and then reread this thread in it's entirety: My Audiophile Music Server
CDs are like so last year.
I know. I have that thread marked as my favorite. I'll walk that walk when I have to (I've kind of started, as I have a Squeezebox I use frequently, too...)
But I'm kind of concerned for the experience of walking into a store and looking through the physical collections. There's no romance in looking through plastic jewel cases, that's for sure, not like flipping through records. Yet still, there's that experience of "browsing," the tactile experience of it, and seeing something you totally didn't expect & being affected by the pull of it. When I was much younger, that was huge for me. Going into the record store on Sunday mornings with my dad. In a way, I'm still in shock that Tower Records closed down.
I guess one can browse through touchscreens to one's heart's content, but that's not the same. I think an important part of loving music is taking care of it, and it's somehow harder to really care for an invisible FLAC album sitting in the hard drive. I'm afraid my daughters will grow up w/o the experience of walking into a store and seeing aisles of music, palpably & physically represented, right there at their touch.
I'm a huge fan of things that last and can take a beating, work properly,and never take no for an answer.
Another point, is the fact that even software developers these days, don't even know how to open a DOS window in their XP or vista software.
Like an entire society made up of freaking telephone handset washers and hairdressers. It makes me ill, just thinking about it.
Servers, when it comes to physical stability and true, 'bullet to the head-sledgehammer to the face' kind of resilience, reliability, and longevity -are 100% garbage of the wost kind.
So give me my records, the kind that can be left at the bottom of a lake for 100 years..pulled up..washed off..and still work-just fine. To top it off, the quality of the server is not even remotely close to that of the record.
Society today is screwed up enough as it is, when it comes to the basics and stability and truth tied to it.
I won't tolerate it here, in this area.
Pardon the rant, but to anyone who thinks beyond next week, knows that food does not create itself out of thin air, knows what it's like to starve, etc, knows that moving to fluid and baseless systems of existence---is ultimately...sooner or later..a fatal mistake.
We're stepping on to thin ice.
It's only a matter of time.
I hear ya, KBK. Well put.
I understand. There's too much dependence on systems for convenience. When those systems go down, lifestyle goes down badly. Hard disks do crash. = music server lost content. Photographers use HDD and plenty of them, and back ups.
The leaders in digital technology are concerned how to preserve information over the long term. Stuff saved in older formats are unreadable today without the proper hardware. Whereas, books can be read without any hardware. Even CDs and LPs need hardware.
Programmers don't know how to pen a DOS window, why would they want too? we have moved on, I bet Verizon can't work on Rotary phones anymore, they will tell you to upgrade, it's been declared OBSOLETE. Just like DOS, usless, OBSOLETE or those TRS 1/4 plug switchboards, why would they? Why would you think a record could survive for 100 years in water? and then again, the same question, why would it matter? Living in teh past, and thinking it was better, it a bizzare way of thinking, cus it really wan't. Get behind a 1971 Chrysler, smell what we used to think was normal, cough cough. glad things have progressed. Those teletype transmissions for communication was really so much better than e-mail...riiiight. Embrace change, it's eneivitable, and usally an improvment. i don't miss the stuff from 30 years ago on stuff i used to work on, glad it's all mostly scrapped, cus it was dangerous. Modern designs are much more efficient, faster, smaller, and every other quality better. Eeven those great Hafler amps, DH500 P500, made better using modern faster MOSSFETS, driver ckts, just teh heatsinks and transformer is used, since that's basic superb transformer, heavy duty, but I bet new ones are more efficient, but then the idea of rebuiling teh Hafler P500 with modern MOSFETS and faster driver boards is useing some of the stuff and save some money, and get superior products for much less. can't update rotary phones, need new ones. DOS won't run on modern better computers, it's useless. Now why would you want DOS open in XP?
Have you been able to read the acient scriptures, or teh writings on some wall somehwere, nope, took decades to decipher, it was useless. All things become irrelavant useless obsolete, preserving everything just becasue you think it's a good idea, dosn't mean it is, or that it is of any value to someone 400 years from now, they won't care, just like we really don't care what happened in WW1 or the civil war, really don't. Do you really care if you can see some old music on pen and paper from Mozart or Bach, not really who really cares, move on....if things hweren't improved and others made obsolte your home would still be a cave
Now I get you a little better. You can't relate to two of the most monumental episodes of human slaughter and suffering in our fairly recent history- "really don't care- no relevance." Has no meaning, I guess.
correct. What effect does it have on your existence now? Zilch, zero. None of my parents was around then either. Where yours? Did your father serve in WW1 or Civil war? Christ, most don't care about WW2, and most of them involved are dieing off hundreds a day....that seems like current history, yet it ain't. Nothing needs to be preserved forever, everything becomes irrelevant., everything. do you think in 50 years someone is wanting to listen to Madonna or Brittany Spears music? Or 50 Cent crap or anything along those lines...they are irrelavant now.
Doesn't the Library of Congress have like all teh recordings done since it was being done? I bet most of teh stuff is irrelavant crap, do you really care that Thomas Edison Mary had a Little Lamb you can listen to? No. How come even curren tmusicans don't want to do their old stuff that made them popular of lotsa money? When some old groups do live shows, they get insulted that the audience wants to hear stuff that they are known for, even they get sick of their old stuff, they want to try new stuff. In 100 years, nobody will care about Ludicrous or J.Z. something or other. I'm sure you crave some Guy Lombardo right now.
I guess I can see where you're coming from, but b/c of your sweeping generalizations, your comments seem very uninformed at best, and inappropriate, at worst. Sure people don't listen to some of the pop stars. But "everything becomes irrelevant?" That's why some of us clutch to music by Tallis or Monteverdi, huh?
What effect does remembrance and history have on us? I'd say almost everything we have these days is a consequence of our past! Contrary to you, music, history, literature, all these things we care about, not to mention our political climate, are tied to the things that you say are forgotten or are inconsequential!
Some of the war vets are dying off so we should forget about the wars they've fought? DUP, with that kind of blind disregard, you'd have nothing around you. What kind of music do you listen to when you're not listening to gear? That's right: the answer would be NOTHING, if you threw all into the winds.
If you look at teh situations of teh world today, you can see, that obviously all of our "leaders" don't pay attention to teh past debacles. It's obvious they sure don't rember what happened before, and it's outcome, we just do the same stuff over and over. Nothing changes, that's why the world is round, cus' evenutally you are back from whence you started. Vietnam, yeah, that worked out well, now we are doing business with them, wheren't they the most evil people on teh planet in teh 60's and 70's? We got involved, for nothing, now there are IBM and Coke factorys there and Pepsi. So what do we do, go into Iraq the same way, to show them how they should behave...working out well. china, was so evil, now all they do is supply all our stuff. USSR, so evil, poof all gone, now it's Russia, nothing matters, cus sooner or later it all goes away, or is well forgotten. do you really think the Civil war has any impact on your life now? Can you even rember Vietnam or Korean war? How does if affect you, it don't.....Monteverdi? I don't listen to that stuff, it's boooooring, lifeless....
It really is almost futile to debate with someone who relies on using cliches, but I'll try. First of all, let's deal with your ego-centric, America-centric xenophobia. Can I remember Korean War? No, I'm not a vet. But I love this irony, that you mention the Korean War specifically: I grew up in Korea & came here when I was 10. I remember going through the air-raid drills, drawing anti-commie posters & effectually being brainwashed to think the North was evil. So did the past have a bearing on the present for me as a kid? Hell yeah. I have family who were divided from the war, who STILL can't see each other. "How does it affect me?" How do you think, DUP? Do you have enough of a decency or manhood to put yourself in someone's shoes, someone as far removed as a Vietnamese or a Korean person living in Korea? Do you think the divide on the Korean continent does not affect what happens there now, you poor deluded man? As a Korean soldier stares across the 38th parallel into his North Korean counterpart, what do you think he feels? That Korean War didn't matter? What about the US policy there? Why does the US STILL insist on keeping troops there? You don't think the Civil War or other wars have no bearing or consequence on our present situation? If you don't realize that this series of questions is merely rhetorical, then you're pretty retarded.
Let's go to the arts, then. If the WWII didn't matter to us all, why does it keep having significant cultural resonances? Why did SUITES FRANCAISES by Nemerovsky become a huge bestseller, this little book about WWII written by a woman who died so long ago, which could have been forgotten? Why does it still move us now, have resonance? Or just read the April issue of Stereophile, Wes Phillips' great review of excellent disc of Anne Sophie von Otter's Terezin songs, composed by Terezin concentration camp inmates. Why would it move if we weren't moved by the past atrocities. If these references are either too high-brow or "boring" for you, I'm sure you can substitute whatever film/music/book... i.e. "Schindler's List" or something. "It has no impact on our lives now?" What is wrong with you?
You're partly right, though. The problems in the world go round in cycles. But forgetting all of the past in oblivion would only make the matters worse, the problems bigger, don't you see? If the world had forgotten about the Jewish genocide in WWII, the situations in the Slavic region a few years ago w/ Milosevic, or Darfur recently - as bad as they are - would be even more neglected. More people would have died, without the shadow of history to remind us of the consequences.
Fine, you don't have to listen to Monteverdi, don't have to like it. You don't have to listen to Bach, don't have to like it. You don't have to listen to Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, don't have to like it. What do you listen to, DUP? Maybe we can help you connect dots to the past, if you're too blind or stunted to see.
Man oh man, I don't post to a thread in a few days and look what happens. Instead of a reasonable thread on the topic of recorded music storage and delivery methods we get this deep philosophical discussion on the meaning of history. In an effort to get things back on track I'll try and write something deep and profound about the past and future of media. Here goes.
Recorded music has only been with us (meaning mankind) for a little over one hundred years, prior to that there was printed sheet music and live performances and prior to that there was hand written sheet music and live performances. When records first hit the market the sheet music publishers all complained about the negative impact that records would have on the sale of sheet music and boy, were they ever right. It's too bad that the sheet music publishers didn't have a big and powerful Washington lobby otherwise we would be paying for copies of the sheet music that would come with every record and CD we buy.
Then along came radio and the sellers of records complained that having the records played on the radio would mean that no one would feel the need to buy them. So for a time records were not allowed to be played on the radio and only live performances of music were allowed. Luckily things changed and once records were allowed to be played on the radio the sales of records increased rather than deceased.
Then came the tape recorder and more dire predictions about the demise of the sale of recorded music. Didn't happen, instead several other interesting things did occur like the invention of the mix tape and the birth of an underground of tape traders trading everything from rare out of print recordings to bootlegs of live concerts. But everything was somewhat cool with the music industry because all the recordings were analog and when one copies analog there is always a loss in sound quality from generation to generation. Plus copying analog is usually done in real time, in other words, it takes 45 minutes to record a copy of a 45 minute long record or CD onto tape.
Then came digital recording and the shit really hit the fan. With a digital recording one can make as many copies as one likes with no loss in sound quality and no generation loss and the copying is not done in real time. Then came the ability to extract the music on a CD and store it as a file on a computer. Now things were really starting to heat up. With a music file one could not only make copies but by using modern communication technology one could also very easily distribute many copies of a given music file to literately thousands of other people via the internet.
The one constant throughout the entire history of recorded music is that it is the recorded performance never changes, just the format and delivery method. For example, a recording of a Caruso aria may have started out as a 78 rpm shellac record then been made available as a long playing 33-1/3 LP, then as a cassette, then as a CD and finally as a digital file with no "fixed" physical media.
It's that very last statement that has turned everything upside down. Recorded music no longer needs physical media, whether in the form of an LP or a CD, rather a digital file only needs a place to be stored and even that can vary from a CD-ROM to flash memory (aka SD or CF card or a USB thumb drive) to a hard disk or to a centrally located server. The problem that most people have with digital music servers is the concept of recorded music existing as a file rather than as some form of physical media.
There are also other very fundamental reasons why a digital music file residing in cyberspace is quite different from a music file trapped on a CD. The CD version of the music file has the property of being exclusive, i.e. if there are only 100 copies of the CD available then only 100 people can own that CD (discounting illegal copies). However, a digital file living in cyberspace does not have this property, i.e. it is nonexclusive, someone can now own a copy of the file and that ownership does not prevent others from owning a copy of the same file - the number of copies is, in effect, infinite.
Once one stops thinking of recorded music in terms of physical media and starts thinking about recorded music as a simple "digital file" with no "fixed" media then one can being to understand some of the directions that the future of media may or not take. I know that I have greatly simplified many of these important concepts but I think that the basic points are well founded and easily understood.
So basically what we now have (or will have in a few years time) is a system where the internet is acting like a giant radio station capable of broadcasting almost any music one can think of but with one major difference from traditional radio: the ability to save any given recording (think "digital file") obtained from the internet on one's computer for one's own private use. Please note that nostalgia has nothing to do with any of this.
"And then digital came along and the shit hit the fan..and no matter how many perfect copies were made, there was suddenly no chance of recovering any signal quality."
LOL - and not because I believe in the superiority of digital but rather because I love analog and find that the sound quality of analog is usually superior to that of digital. My whole take on the whole digital versus analog debate is pretty well summed up by these two complimentary statements:
Analog - excellent recording method but rather limited as a storage medium.
Digital - excellent storage medium but rather limited as a recording method.
Well, with all due respect, jazzfan, this thread wasn't started to debate the nature of recorded media per se, if you go back to the original post, about which medium is superior etc. I think you wanted to see it that way, but that wasn't quite the point. (Although your summary was great to read.) I do agree that it's weird that it's turned into this debate into whether the past matters or not, but when I wrote the original post in this thread, it was about the nature of "browsing," the prospect of its disappearance from music stores along w/ the disappearance of physical media. Just to clarify.
Hard drives or USB memory sticks are heard media, when information/data can be stored in ether, then you will have the elimination of "media"....anything recorded whether it's data, music or bank info, still needs something to store it on. The location of it could be in a remote location, but it's still media. Recorded music, or voice is still just data, it just wasn't called that in the early years. Now it's back to the ongoing nonsense about how music "data" on a CD is somehow different than other data. Stored in 1's and 0's. that is bank data.
The first physical CD was produced in Hamburg Germany, by Philips, at it's PolyGram div, CD has to be the SUPERIOR medium. Speaking of historical rhetoric!!!! See, you guys don't pay attention to history, and how it's relavant......SUPERIOR mediums, will conquer the world.
DUP, I must say, it's very amusing to engage in a conversation with you. It's really surreal. It's like talking to someone who either refuses to follow his own train of thought, doesn't recognize the contradictions w/in his own statements... or who has Tourette's Syndrome or something. I really like it.
2 of teh most monumental slaughters? See, you already forgot all teh Roman and Greek debacles, it's so long ago, it's irrelavant, you are living in the so close present, compared to stuff that happened 1000 or so years ago. You made my point, wait long enough and it don't matter. I'm sure you are concerned about the Aztecs or Incas....riiiiight. I'm sure you dwell on how many Indians where slaughtered, etc. WW2 is like current history compared to stuff that happened way back, that you only know about cus' you read about it, and then how do you know what's really factual or embellished? Wait long enough, and it don't matter. Are you still trying to find where you put your PET ROCK? I bet not, cus' it don't matter.
Wow. Thank you for writing something which I consider to be the most ignorant and inconsiderate statement I've read this year. I know you were addressing rvance, but I just couldn't let this pass. You seem to have something against the Native Indians. I'm just going to give you the benefit of the doubt and only consider you dumb, and not racist.
Greek/Roman wars? Why do you think people still read Homer, dude? I'm no scholar but I still read Thucydides again and again. Sure those battles are long faded in the real memories of people, but they're lasting enough that they left indelible marks culturally. Why do you think HBO had the show "Rome" on? Or those gladiator films, as miserable as some of them are? Because of literature, history, music: that part of the distant past never really goes away forgotten.
As for the Aztecs & Incas: you can talk to my friend Sev, who spends a bulk of the year in Guatemala, studying & preserving the Mayan culture. I'm sure he does that b/c the past about the Native Indians don't matter to him. Why don't you also ask the many natives in Guatemala or Peru who have cultural/blood ties to the people you just dismissed with your comments? I'm sure they'll be happy to kick your ass. It's also clear that you still don't get it about WWII; why are you sounding like a Holocaust denier all of a sudden? Are you Mel Gibson's dad?
At least when you're ranting about teh power & MOSFETS, you manage to sound like someone who's just drunk a few too many Red Bulls & is lonely and annoying enough to care so much about so much power, single-mindedly. People might almost mistake it as a legitimate passion. But when you talk about these things, about consequential matters of history? Dude. It's just plain ugly. You should just stop before you start betraying even nastier parts of your soul.
I couldn't agree with you more. The problem with a generation/society that has become accustomed to instant gratification is that they don't think ahead...they'll worry about tomorrow when it get's here. (A problem I believe started with previous generations; ex., Social Security & the national dept.)
Back to the subject at hand. We are a throw away society. Remeber when a person would replace the tubes in their TV or radio or the battery in the transistor radio? No more! If the device stops working just throw it away and buy a new one. Not only because it is cost effective but so many electronic gadgets are "grown in a test tube" and literally cannot be taken apart to be repaired.
Hold on to your records and open reels. Stock pile any tubes, drive belts, etc. because they wont be available forever.
And here I was considering the purchase of a second, even better stereo set-up. Maybe I should give this idea a second thought. But then again, I'll be long gone buy the time our passion is no longer...so a second system it is!
I didn't think we'd be getting into basic Time/Space theory and the linearity of history but...
First off: Ditto Selfdivider's points that not only are you pretty wrong about the whole topic, you cross the line to truly tasteless in your discussion of our own country's role in the Native American genocide and displacement.
In case you missed the way things work Sir DUP, EVERYTHING that happened in the past directly affects, no CREATED, what we are living in the present. For Pete's sake, our entire country is founded on Greek and Roman principles. Every rise and fall of civilizations are not only very real (obviously) to the people who lived and died them, but the very reason we find ourselves where and who we are today. One guy, a series of seemingly random events, and history is changed. All history, up the this very day, is just like that.
If ONE more person died in one of those "insignificant" wars, YOU might not be here to save us all from tubes, analogue and under-powered amps! Chew on that for a spell.
Dupster, it would be nice if you could remember your own words from one ridiculous post to the next. I was commenting on the 2 wars YOU cited and remarked they were "recent." So how could you possibly...oh, never mind.
As for the Indian question- I live in Yurok/Tolowa/Karuk country, where the wounds of Manifest Destiny are still quite raw. White settlers and the military routinely slaughtered these peaceful river and coastal dwellers. There are elders living here who were moved off the reservation and sent to live with white families for "re-education." These people are my neighbors and friends and while most of them don't hold my generation responsible, they are working hard to instill traditional values in their children. I work for the school district and spent nine years as a custodian at Margaret Keating School in Klamath- on the rez, as they say. As usual, you have absolutely no concept of which you speak.
selfdivider and dbowker, I appreciate your balanced and thoughtful comments.
DUP, I'll ask the obvious question. If you don't listen to Monteverdi, how do you know his music is boring? Hey, just turn up the volume. Air moved is air moved, right?
Nooo, if one more person LIVED in that war, then maybe I wouldn't be here...what if......a person that died, was in the place say my mother or father where, and instead of either of them spawned me, it was someone else, now the entire world is tilted........remember, everything becomes irrelavant, just give it enough time. Do you even remember or care that rotary dial phones where all the rage, a mere 50 or so years ago.......that GM dominated the auto industry in the U.S.? Or that the Dutch settled Manhattan Island in the 1600's......it don't seem to be of any concern, nor does it influence your life..it really don't. If that wasn't done years ago, something else whoulda' been. Remember when the first PC was marketed? Now, who cares what that did, it's moved on past it all. Just like music media, recording etc. Do you reall care about the first carbon mic, how it sounded, or didn't? Nope..