Posted on 08/16/2007 3:06:06 PM PDT by abt87
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. ADVERTISEMENT
An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday — and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Did your equipment apply the RIAA equalization? LPs are recorded with weak bass and strong treble. Amplifiers are supposed to reverse this on their LP input (but newer ones may not have that anymore). If you just ran the LP to the computer, you probably didn't correct for this unless your software was expecting input from vinyl.
Back when everone and their mother were downoading ‘free’ music off of Napster, I heard some transfers from vinyl that sounded absolutely terrible. It pretty much ended my thoughts about investing in the equipment to convert my 800 + LP’s to a digital format.
A bottle of Windex and soft towel do wonders for those older LP’s that are found in the bargain bin and have alot of surface grime and dust. Even with a few scratches, some of these gems sound wonderful if you have a semi-decent turntable hooked up to a semi-decent sound system.
(Sorry, I love the sound of vinyl!)
It is a 78rpm record, it is molded in pink, it has a picture of a woman in a big flowing skirt from that period of dress.
No, Phono to amp then RCA to computer. It’s sounds like the LP when you listen for awhile but becomes tiring after awhile, it’s hard to explain.
I didn’t invest any money except for some software. That may be the problem, my sound card may not have had good AD hardware.
Anyway, my newer music is on CD which sounds fine to me and when I want to listen to the older stuff, I pull out the turntable. I have a spare turntable and stylus just in case.
I now have a stack of CD’s that I made that I never listen to.
Well, I’m just too old and set in my ways to understand what all this talk means, and I’ve got my fingers in my ears and my eyes shut and yammering gibberish, for anyone who would like to enlighten me any futher...What I’d just like to know how is you deal with scratched CD’s. Should I throw them out? I might learn IPOD however, my daughter has one. She thinks I’m hilariously hopeless though
I dimly recall encountering a vending machine that would cut a 78 rpm (or was it 45?) disc. It was a booth with a microphone. You put in some change, and it started up and recorded what you said on the disc and then spit it out, along with a mailing envelope. Voice mail, 1950's vintage.
Where I worked, we did our own keypunching.
We started with the IBM 029 Printing Card Punch. Hit a key, and the machine punched the character code and advanced to the next column. Wrong key, and you hit 'eject' and grabbed the defective card out of the output stack.
Then we upgraded to the IBM 129. It had a buffer that could store a card's worth of characters. As you keyed, your keystrokes went into the buffer, and a two-digit column number display advanced. There was no character display, however, so you had to remember what your fingers keyed. But it was still a great advance over the 029, because if you made an error and realized it (the more common case), you could backspace in the buffer. When you were done, you pressed the 'eject' key, and the machine punched out the contents of the buffer onto the card and transferred it to the output stack.
IBM 129. Input on the right, card transport from right to left, output stack on the left. That drawer below the keyboard is where the chads landed. I can vouch that the 129 had no problem with hanging chads.
Oh please.
I recieved my first CD player as a Christmas gift in 1985. I carried it onboard a flight from TN to AZ. The screeners did not know what it was (nor did I), as it was still gift-wrapped, and it stayed that way until Christmas morning. LOL
Tape was still king back then. The bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 in December 1988 was concealed in a Toshiba radio-cassette player.
I remember seeing them in concert in Columbus, Ohio on Super Bowl night 1990. I wore my Flyers sweatshirt and then high 5'ed me.
1) Setting up a record player is a very finicky proposition. Do people remember about aligning cartridges, adjusting tracking force and adjusting anti-skate force?
2) Because playing LP's involve actual physical contact, both the record and phonograph needle will wear out.
That's why Compact Discs are such a huge leap forward, by not having to deal with setting up the player and with no physical contact to wear out the playback medium. Pity that we have a split between SACD and DVD-Audio, because a unified audio format based on DVD technology would eventually have replaced CD's (if you've heard an SACD or DVD-Audio disc, the vastly higher sampling rate compared to Compact Discs meant that musical instruments such as cymbals and violins play back with astonishing clarity).
I have a record player that can transfer audio directly to a computer to encode in either .WAV, .MP3 or .OGG audio formats. I found out that the best balance between sound quality and file size is 256 kbps data rate when encoding in .MP3 format with the LAME MP3 encoder.
I used to use Aunt Jemima, but they use DRM and a low bit rate. Log Cabin is much better.
I used to use Aunt Jemima, but they use DRM and a low bit rate. Log Cabin is much better.
1) If some people are uncomfortable setting up a turntable or unsure of the process, it can be done for them either as part of the sale of a new TT or for a reasonable fee afterward, and many turntables today are virtually plug’n’play systems that don’t require skilled set-up. Once it’s set up, it’s generally no more finicky to use than a toaster; and
2) In a modern system, the wear to vinyl is minimal even over hundreds of plays (or are you still thinking of a cheap plastic turntable with a penny on the headshell? We’re WAY beyond that today) — and what would you rather have, mediocre digital sound forever (or until CD rot sets in), or great analogue that wears, after many plays, to merely excellent and still simply beats the pants off digital?
As for SACD and DVD-A, the former has problems with frequency-dependent distortion (much of that supposed added “clarity” is distortion, especially on cymbals and violins; Robert E. Greene has written extensively about this), while the latter is a dead in the water format; neither appear to have the legs to achieve consumer acceptance in the marketplace, particularly in their multichannel iterations, and Sony has all but abandoned their own SACD format. Decades hence SACDs and DVD-As will be, at best, drinks coasters, while LPs will still be playing beautiful tunes....
Whatever form it takes...enjoy the music...there’s tons of it out there!
I was recording wave files. Full data rate for CD, no compression. I think combining the weakness of vinyl, my player, the AD chip on my computer, and CD sample and bit rate lead to poor results, My conclusion, either listen to the vinyl or replace it with a professionaly created CD.
YMMV
By the way, I think DVD-A will continue to survive because unlike SACD, DVD-A's can be played back on many computers with DVD burner drives if you have the right sound card and software. My computer can play back DVD-A's and the recent Beatles Love album on DVD-A sounds really good.
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