Posted on 07/09/2022 10:14:03 PM PDT by DallasBiff
They were SO smart, to get you to spend $19.99 to buy digital music you already owned on vinyl for $5.99, that they forgot to copy protect the medium.
That may have been where I heard a CD for the first time. It was on Channel 2 news, and the song they played for the demo was “Fame” by Irene Cara.
Actually vinyl is having a resurgence and presumably most of the buyers are young people. Walk into any Walmart or Target and you'll see a surprisingly large selection of LPs for sale in the music section. You'll see the old mega-selling classics but you'll also see albums by new artists as well. The younger generation might end up with the best of both worlds -- digital streaming for browsing and for portability, and then a small collection of their most treasured recordings on vinyl to listen to at home and to truly own as a physical possession. If the trend continues, it seems plausible that record stores could become a thing again. Wouldn't that be wild! There are also rumblings in the music industry that a new physical format may be on the way.
Record companies were in such a hurry to crank out their entire catalogues onto CD that they didn't bother remastering anything. CDs were printed from 4th or 5th generation audio tapes. After 15 years or so when the remastered versions started hitting the shelves, the sound quality was noticeably improved. I never knew there was a rhythm acoustic guitar strumming in the background of the Rolling Stone's Satisfaction until I heard the remastered audio.
Of course, consumers were a little peeved, having bought the same album on LP, 8-track, or cassette and then again on compact disk and were now being told there was a new remastered version.
**Walk into any Walmart or Target and you’ll see a surprisingly large selection of LPs for sale in the music section.**
Kinda pricey.
https://www.walmart.com/browse/music/music-and-vinyl-records/4104_1205481
Bluetooth may be the way to go. Small MP3 player and speaker and you're off to the races.
Vinyl has more depth. CDs WERE hollow and tinny until the engineers figured out you had to mix slightly differently. It’s all about experience. I know a guy who mixes for indie records now. There’s the LP mix, the CD mix, the iTunes mix, the Spotify mix... everybody is a little different and your engineer needs to know what he’s doing, just to get them to all sound the same.
Yep, they’re not cheap. OTOH a $25 record nowadays is equal to about $7 in 1980.
For music and stuff, CDs were the bomb. Early ones were pretty well made. I still have the very first CD I ever bought (Dark Side of the Moon). Still works fine. I've tested it, and it is still error-free. More modern disks are a bit more iffy. Like everything else, cheapness of manufacure = crap.
Sound quality of CDs is excellent. I'm not one of those guys with 'golden ears', so I really don't care about the differences between analogue media, i.e., vinyl LPs. A touch of tinnitus doesn't help that much. I rip all of my music and generally use high-quality mp3s (384bps+) rather than a lossless format like flac, because mp3s are pretty much guaranteed to work in any device. Back when you could still get a car with a CD player, most of them actually would play mp3s on a data CD. At the time, I was ripping at about 128-256bps, so I could fit almost 11 hours of music on a CD! When on a trip, I'd have a few disks with different types of music on them. It was excellent.
That's true. The engineers have to understand the underlying capabilities to get the most out of it. There are other issues as well. Many sound engineers working on major labels and stuff are more likely to be in their 40s-50s, rather than being young whippersnappers, so they are going to be affected by hearing issues that inevitably come with age. That is going to effect the mix to a degree.
Piker.:-) I have 19377 tunes, the vast majority I've ripped from CDs. That's 52 days 11 hours 33 minutes of continuous music, without repeating a tune. Granted, a few of them were albums ripped as one track. DSOTM is one example. I think it's amazing that we can have all this available instantly.
I don't trust online music. It's too easy for the companies to suddenly say, sorry, your stuff isn't available. I've had that happen with books and stuff as well. Screw them.
Yeah, that's an issue. On the other hand, a 'remaster' is more art than science. A lot depends upon the engineer and various assumptions he might make.
I love the fact that if I don't want to, I never have to buy another copy of most of my music, since I never use the original media other than to rip it. I did the same thing with my LP albums back in the day. Most of them were played exactly once on a turntable, and copied to cassette, which was then played to death and beyond. Now, when I get a new disk, I rip it and copy the files across 3 or 4 devices, so I have access to it where ever I want. Absolutely love it.
Was fortunate enough to grow up near NYC. Seven TV stations and a gazillion really good radio stations. Late at night, one radio program would alert listeners that the new album, without interruption, would be played in 5, 4, 3... Get those reel-to-reels warmed up!
With the exception of computers I am always late to the party when it comes to new tech. Didn’t get my first CD player until 1005, and my first smart phone until 2022.
Bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer in 1983 and programmed some work calculations in basic.
Could sorta get Philadelphia as well. Good for a few Flyers games.
My very first CD was Tschaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The back of the jewel case had a big red sticker that warned that the disc contained a DIGITAL RECORDING OF REAL CANNONS that could DAMAGE YOUR SPEAKERS if played too loudly.
The warnings were silly of course, but it did help hype the new technology.
But do you have any ABBA tunes?..... : )
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.