The tech endangered list: are these devices and formats the next to go?

[What Hi-Fi?]

What will be this generation's Betamax and 3D? We gaze into our crystal ball to find out.

The tech endangered list: are these devices and formats the next to go? : Read more

 

[Mr. C Nation]

It's a regrettable fact that the streamers of sound and vision are now in a position to compel the customer to rent content, not own it.

For those who are happy to have all and every new release playing on their devices in an endless, rolling stream, maybe this is acceptable. Who wants to own something that is of no interest a few days later?

But there is a core of content which maintains its artistic value over decades and continues to maintain its listener/watcher base as new people encounter and discover the music and the films [and the old ones die off ...]

One might say that the entire catalogue of 'classical' music is unquestionably a large part of this. A great deal of the jazz catalogue also forms a part of this core content.

It is a well known fact of 'record shop' life, in the jazz section, that there are always several copies of 'Kind Of Blue' behind the counter for those customers who say "My grandson has become intereseted in jazz. What should I buy him?" Will there come a day when a physical copy of KoB is no longer available? That would be iniquitous.

When I sold a flat in London for a tidy profit I sat down with the Penguin Guide to Classical Music and the same .....Guide to Jazz, went thru' both volumes, composer by composer, musician by musician and complied a library of both genres.

I then spent several days at the two megastores on London's Oxford St, Virgin and HMV, buying this library of CDs. There are holes in both sets. I have only recently become really aware of the supreme talent of the band 'Return to Forever' and of Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke in paticular. The same goes for Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour.

These artists have catalogues going back decades. The likelihood of having access to them on a streaming service is as likely as having access on Netflix to films by directors such as Kurasawa, Michael Powell, Pedro Almodovar and many other 'art cinema' directors. I know because I took out a Netflix trial sub, went looking for the films of these directors and found not one by any of them. This was confirmed by a search by the Netflix sales agent I had to call to cancel my sub.

I realise that a core of the rock catalogue is available on Spotify, for example, when I go to a friend's house and he shows off his "Alexa, play 'Blabber and Smoke' by Captain Beefheart." trick.

But the core extends far wider than the best of rock since 1965. There must be some provision for a physical copy of it. You will recall that the debate among the record companies about the maximum amount of content on a CD was settled by the boss of Sony, who declared "Beethoven's 9th Symphony, on one side."

 

[manicm]

From what I see CDs are in rude health - if the number of remasters/re-releases are any indication:

1. Metallica - The Black Album
2. Genesis - The Last Domino (the first decent compilation in the band's entire history, discounting the box sets).
3. The new Abba album, dreadful or not, will surely sell on CD by the shipload.
4. and on and on and on

It's clear there is a market for physical medium collectors. If one reads inversely - CDs have taken over SACD!

And to me all these rather good re-releases are another nail in the coffin for hires.

 

[Mr. C Nation]

From what I see CDs are in rude health - if the number of remasters/re-releases are any indication:

1. Metallica - The Black Album
2. Genesis - The Last Domino (the first decent compilation in the band's entire history, discounting the box sets).
3. The new Abba album, dreadful or not, will surely sell on CD by the shipload.
4. and on and on and on

It's clear there is a market for physical medium collectors. If one reads inversely - CDs have taken over SACD!

And to me all these rather good re-releases are another nail in the coffin for hires.

If you call "a yearly drop in revenue of about 20% and in 2020 accounted for less than 2.3% of the total industry, being overtaken by vinyl for the first time since 1986 [eh!?. Let's bring back typewriters!] " rude health, I hate to think what you would classify as being a bit tom-and-****.

By the way, this forum has a censorship system that puts **** where the word for the short form of the name 'Richard' should be.

The Abba release will be an interesting benchmark. We'll see how the figures stack up.

You are cherry-picking. There will be no "4. and on and on and on". Record companies will produce CDs that have long paid off their initial investment and probably as a result of the number of times an album has been downloaded or streamed.

SACD was always only a niche medium. It was never mainstream in the way CDs have been.

"another nail in the coffin for hires". You are dreaming. Adobe used to sell Photoshop and Lightroom on disc. Now, you cannot buy either of these programmes. You must subscribe to something called the Adobe Creative Cloud. You get the software via download and depending which package you take, you are also allocated a limited storage capacity - in the cloud, not on your physical system. It's called "Gotcha!"

 

[manicm]

If you call "a yearly drop in revenue of about 20% and in 2020 accounted for less than 2.3% of the total industry, being overtaken by vinyl for the first time since 1986 [eh!?. Let's bring back typewriters!] " rude health, I hate to think what you would classify as being a bit tom-and-****.

By the way, this forum has a censorship system that puts **** where the word for the short form of the name 'Richard' should be.

The Abba release will be an interesting benchmark. We'll see how the figures stack up.

You are cherry-picking. There will be no "4. and on and on and on". Record companies will produce CDs that have long paid off their initial investment and probably as a result of the number of times an album has been downloaded or streamed.

SACD was always only a niche medium. It was never mainstream in the way CDs have been.

"another nail in the coffin for hires". You are dreaming. Adobe used to sell Photoshop and Lightroom on disc. Now, you cannot buy either of these programmes. You must subscribe to something called the Adobe Creative Cloud. You get the software via download and depending which package you take, you are also allocated a limited storage capacity - in the cloud, not on your physical system. It's called "Gotcha!"

CD sales in revenue may be falling, but in actual unit sales they still surpassed vinyl in the US at least.

I will repeat, 💿 sales are in rude health.

Also where does Adobe lightroom enter the equation???

 

[no-name-123]

Any streaming service is a risk like a local authority library dose not guarantee to keep every book indefinatly

 

[manicm]

Any streaming service is a risk like a local authority library dose not guarantee to keep every book indefinatly

And in some basic respects Spotify doesn’t get its user interface right. There are major annoyances.

 

[djh1697]

It is not regrettable to see the demise of MQA (Mediocre Audio Quality), too little, too late! MQA might have being suitable in the 1990's, but, reducing memory, storage, and increases in CPU power have killed it before it caught on. Still happy to be a vinyl user with my 1980's Pink Triangle, looked after by #cymbioisis

 

[cobraBLACK]

I use Spotify simply because it's the only streaming app on PS4 but I also keep MP3s of everything I like on a NAS. Firstly Spotify is missing plenty of stuff I like (for example it'll probably never see De La Soul's best albums for licensing reasons). Secondly their metadata is often iffy - sometimes there's more than one profile for the same artist with their albums split across them, which can make it difficult to find content. I reported several of these issues months ago. They acknowledged but never corrected.

 

[djh1697]

but I also keep MP3s of everything I like on a NAS.

It might seem sensible at the moment to do that, however, ripping your CD's to MP3 degrades the quality, I would store them in FLAC, at the resolution they are recorded in, i.e. CD 44/16, then if you upgrade your HiFi in the future you will appreciate the difference.

 

[cobraBLACK]

Most of it comes from downloads rather than rips and I'm at about 85% capacity of the 1 TB disk. Most of it isn't available as FLAC anyway. In an ideal world that would be the answer though.