You say "The point is that, for the vast majority of music listeners, CD quality is the best they're going to get, unless they invest in a whole new system and replace their entire music library. That doesn't sound very tempting to most listeners."
We aren't talking about most listeners, please understand that, the original question was to the ability of the ipod as an audiophile device. Audiophiles are not "most listeners" They ALREADY have the dream system, they actually CARE about audio quality, they WANT high resolution audio wherever they can get it. The original question was NOT "Will joe blow like the ipod?" The answer is hell yes. The point I made in my original post was that the crowd of people who consider themselves audiophiles would typically not call anything "audiophile quality" that is at or below the sound quality of a Discman.
If you wish to make backups of your DVD-A or SACD you could patch the 5.1 outputs from your DVD-A or SACD player into any recording device you wish, there is no copy protection on those outputs. Is it possible to rip or copy one of these formats in the digital realm? Don't honestly know, I've never had to make one. Hopefully by the time I need to make a copy of a disc I own, someone will have cracked the copy protection, just as they did with DVD.
You said "If not, it's just another attempt for the industry to make more money while not offering much in return, as well as trying to lock-in more customers with their crap formats."
I'm sure many people said the same exact thing about DVD in its infancy. It's hard to say what the future for high res audio is, but any kind of progress to the aging CD Audio is very welcome in my book, just as an update to DVD in the form of HD-DVD is highly anticipated by many.
I actually don't listen to too much indy music. I don't listen to top 40 either. When at home, we will listen to Jazz, blues, some cheesy 80s new wave stuff.
I can agree with you that hopefully there will be a portable player that lets me play DVD-A and SACD. I know that the ipod plays music now at the highest resolution available to the majority, but AGAIN..we are not here to discuss the majority, we are speaking of audiophiles and their taste for quality. The audiophile community is far from "the majority of music listeners"
Yes I own an ipod, 10gig, luckily never had any battery flat out
die but the battery life is much shorter than a Discman for obvious reasons, this is to be expected. I really enjoy my ipod for what it is, I even like using it as a portable hard drive, but when it comes to audio quality, I will take a CD player ANY DAY.
You said "It would be great if you would answer the questions I posed.. Would you mind?"
What question is that? If you mean the backup question, I offered some comment to that but don't have a more definitive answer.
About the web site, there's no need to get personal now and I would appreciate it if we would keep things focused here, but since you brought it up...
The company I work for just absorbed another studio and changed names, the old website is gone and there is a placeholder obviously. We recently posted several job listings on industry message boards. Many applicants wanted to see the type of work we do so I put a link to the reel on there for the time being. Our site does not get any traffic other than the job applicants I referred there. I was not really thinking of the general public when I added the link, I will go ahead and change that.
