It's 1970 and Columbia Records is beginning to feel the pressure

Cassette was not a great medium for sound. Reel-to-reel, now that was Hi-Fi, baby!

Personally, I'm one of those purists who still think nothing compares to a good quality vinyl record. And I see I'm not alone. Vinyl is making a come-back.

Even the best quality cassettes wore out way too fast and the 8 track format was a joke.

Contrary to what Columbia claimed in that ad, vinyl wore out too, but it took a orders of magnitude more plays to degrade their sound. CDs certainly did away with the shortcomings of cassettes and LPs (wearability and noise), but it took a while for CDs to even come close to capturing the full fidelity of vinyl. The first generation of CDs were sterile, lifeless things.

And now we have mp3 files with 'compressed' fidelity, much like jpg files 'compress' images and lose something in the translation, and an entire generation has no idea what recorded music is really supposed to sound like.

*sigh* For those of us viewing on a laptop screen, that ad is way too wide.

But yes, whenever you have to remind your customers that your product is a good deal, you're probably headed down a slippery slope.

And in the bad old days, my son would not be in the basement, working on mastering his compositions. Although even he will admit that you still need a real-life recording studio for optimum quality, so he's not going to use these recordings for selling, just for attracting interest on MySpace. But when I was his age, I couldn't even dream of producing the quality that he can with a standard computer and a MIDI keyboard.

No, I'm not really trying to make a point. Just musing. So much has changed since I was 20.

You're right, Judg, it is incredible what you can do nowadays. There are a number of high quality 'lossless' file formats for saving your music on a computer that sound amazing. But the filesizes are enormous. Hence the mp3 format for digital music, making it practical to transfer an album's worth of music over the Internet, or store so many tunes on an iPod. So, what has happened is that the average person today is listening to music in a format that is sonically inferior to the old vinyl records of yesteryear ... a 'lossy' file format played over tiny earphones.

The upside is the ability to carry unbelievable amounts of great music with you in a device the size of a cigarette lighter. What I have loaded in my iPod is equivalent to a couple of milk crates full of LPs. Amazing. My current bandmates and I swap mp3s of tunes we're learning with an ease that was impossible when I first started playing in a band. Before we'd have to dub cassettes in real-time, one for each member, then make arrangements to physically pass them on. Now we just upload them to a FTP server we have set up and everyone has access within seconds. Uber-amazing.

As for recording, as you mentioned with regards to your son, it is the most amazing change of all. My band rented a 24 track hard disk recorder this past summer and recorded a gig of ours, then dumped the raw tracks onto a computer. Now I can sit in my room at home and mix the songs with free software that lets me add such ridiculous things as 124 band parametric eq, not to mention dozens of compressors and delays and reverbs and on and on. I can do stuff that used to require a recording studio with tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear, up to and including the ability to change the pitch of a track to adjust for a sour note.

Mind boggling.

LOL. Tell me about it. He just cleared 9 gigs of files off the basement computer... Oy.

How big was the hard disk on our first computer? One meg? And I remember my brother being so proud of his Commodore 64...

Judg said:

LOL. Tell me about it. He just cleared 9 gigs of files off the basement computer... Oy.

How big was the hard disk on our first computer? One meg? And I remember my brother being so proud of his Commodore 64...

Click to expand...

Nine gigs is less than a dollar's worth of hard disk space. You can get a terabyte drive for under $100. That'll hold about 2000 CD's of uncompressed audio. Multiply by 10 for 128k mp3's, or a year and a half of music.

My first hard drive was 20 megabytes, I paid $300 for it and I liked it.

One iron-y (pun intended) of the OP is that every one of those LP's was first recorded on tape, and then transferred to LP.

Yes indeed! Mind you, the reels studio tape came on could almost have done double-duty as a spare wheel for a volkswagen, they were so big. And they ran at a speed that blurred the spokes of the reel. Columbia still had a point that vinyl captured the original recording more accurately than cassettes.

benbradley said:

Nine gigs is less than a dollar's worth of hard disk space. You can get a terabyte drive for under $100. That'll hold about 2000 CD's of uncompressed audio. Multiply by 10 for 128k mp3's, or a year and a half of music.

Click to expand...

I'll have to tell him... If he doesn't already know.