Re:Wow, lots of lead ears! & SACD DVD-A? (Score 1)

I agree. I am one of many who never really embraced the sound of CDs. And believe me I am no audiofile snob. Unfortunately unless you are under the age of 35 you may have never owned a vinyl LP. Yes, the record industry put out some really crapping cheap vinyl records in the early eighties due to high oil prices. The vinyl was brittle, scratched really easy and collected dust quickly due to static increasing the needle distortion and sound loss. However, I know some will think I am crazy but distortion aside, I always felt that LP's offered a noticably richer sound even on "MID-FI" equipment than CDs. Honestly, try concentrating on the sound of the bass on most CDs, can you really pick it out as a separate instrument? When the CD format first debuted back in the mid-eighties, The New Republic ran a great in depth cover article predicting the potential impact of the CD. If anyone can find a reprint of the article it would make a great post. The article's opinion was that CD was a highly compromised format rushed into the market place due in part to the the massive losses Sony was taking on the Beta-Max, forcing them to pressure their partner Phillips to roll out the format before it was truely perfected. Because the CD format carried far less Audio information than any analog LP, what was produced was a cleaner yet less rich, less realistic/interesting sound due to sampling. This was true for Jazz, Classical or any complex Rock/Pop recording. There was political oppostion at the time to the CD at the time. Complaints that the Record & Electronics Industry was forcing a new format on the public. The recording industry countered that the CD format was going to be a better product for the masses, in part because over time the CDs were going to be cheaper to produce than vinyl resulting in better prices for the public. Yeah, what a joke. Overnight, the Recording industry rushed the CD into the market. Does anyone remember how bad some early CD's sounded becaused they were not remixed to compensate for the reduced digital sampling rate of CDs? Years ago here in Chicago, WXRT would play some of really poorly mastered CD's and compare them to their LPs. It was pathetic to hear how bad a job the record industry did transfering the sound to CDs. But the record industry did not care because years later they would pony up the money and have a Jimmy Page or George Martin remaster the sound for CDs and make another fortune. Face it if you are under 30 have you ever heard any Classic Rock/Pop on anything other than CD or MP3???? Likewise I bet much SACD/DVD audio will not sound any better initially unless the music is once again remastered for the new format. So watch out for the Record industry to pull the same hustle. The New Republic article predicted that Jazz and Classical fans would never really embrace the CD format. That was simply because there was vastly more musical information per second then what could be fitted on to a 700 megabyte CD. Likewise, they predicted that Rock/Pop would increasingly be dominated by digitally sampled sounds and the would become a lot less interesting. Sure enough out went rock/pop recording that featured great musicians and singers in came Puff Daddy and Britney. If the SACD format works I would buy it if it is priced at or below current CD prices. And Congress should demand this because the Record industry is going the make another fortune reharvesting their back catalogs. Also, since Record industry was just found guilty of price fixing and is now mostly a Horzontal/Vertical monoply (Think SONY). Congress needs to be really tough this time. Congress should protect both fair use rights and file sharing so one can make copies to be play on legacy audio & portable equipment. The introduction of SACD/DVD Audio should be an oportunity for reaching of a compromise to the benefit of all. Now the theory that the true music fan is the one who downloads samples and is only trying out an inferior version of the music they love would be surely true because they now for the first time they would have the option of buying the clearly superior SACD version. The fair weather fan who was happy with a crappy MP3 probably was not going to buy the SACD version anyway. Since it would be years before anyone has the bandwidth or disk space to download the gigs of data to approximate true SACD quality, peer to peer should not be an issue again for years to come. Better, yet by actually incouraging file sharing Congress could get Broadband Industry jump started again which would really help the economy. I agree with much that is said here in oppostion to the RIAA. It would be tragic if the RIAA was able to kill off Peer to Peer file sharing now. Because RIAA realizes the potential of the Internet for marketing their product they want to control distribution of Music Samples (MP3, Ogg Vorbis or whatever) and turn it into their own big business monoploy. The RIAA and Clear Channel have already killed Local/Internet Radio now they want to control what could be their biggest competitor. As always Slashdot is the place the learn/discuss about these issues.