The future of music and/or hi-fi enthusiasts

What do people think the future is for music enthusiasts that appreciate quality of recording?

In a world where compressing your music smaller and smaller is all the rage, and neither SACD nor DVD-A seem to be able to get a sensible chunk of the market, will we all just continue to play redbook 16/44.1 CDs?

Your thoughts please!

 

I personaly think so and of course don't forget vinyl which is still quite common. The only real format that is dying is the cassete but lets face it there is no real advantages for the cassete format now.

I think most people still want to own an album rather than a digital file but perhaps the new generation of 12 year olds coming through will buy music online in a compressed format because it may be the norm.

I do believe however in 10 years time if you go into the record shops it will be mainly CDs and DVDs.

I remember people saying 10 years ago Vinyl is dead why is I have a lot of modern vinyl albums and singles?

 

Most systems can't retrieve much of what's stored on CD so why bother adding even more? Seems to me SACD & DVD-A are ploys by the record companies to encourage us to rebuy old stock.

No the determining factor for the future will be how we access our music. PC or dedicated system?

 

I think it would be great if CD and its derivatives died. I could get on with listening to what I already own and prowling junk shops for what I don't. And then I have 1500 pieces of vinyl to rediscover. Although we've already discovered that the baby is fascinated watching the turntable at work. None of her peers have anything so novel at home.

Paul

 

Paul are you not interested in new music?

 

If the current music sales and stats are to be believed mp3 buying and file sharing makes up about 0.01% of the music market. Apparently consumers are aware that mp3s are not as good a quality as a CD and consumers do actually like to have something tangible for their cash.

If we are lucky it could all be seen as a fad a few years from now.

My entire music collection stored on a hard disc...mmmm how cool that WONT look!

 

The mass market will continue to buy CDs and serious audiophiles will continue to buy vinyl. SACD and DVD-A seem to add little functionality for the mass market and still don't seem to have the magic that good vinyl does, so fails in both markets. I'd love to see a day where there is a decent digital medium for a couple of hundred quid that will see analogue off, but I can't see it anytime soon.

Mp3s are IMHO a good thing as I get the impression that those who don't pay for them never would buy the music anyway, yet those who do buy music get a chance to hear stuff they wouldn't otherwise and later buy it.

Tony.

 

Any hint of so called 'progress' and it's always the bloody dope smokers that suffer.

The introduction of the CD case saw a serious decline in both the size and quality of spliffs. How the hell is anyone going to roll up on a hard disk?

 

But surely as processing power, storage and internet connections get ever better and faster, downloading uncompressed music will become more popular. I suspect this will usurp all other formats in time, even vinyl (after all most old vinyl junkies will die out over time!)

 

why do people always assume that compression has to mean reduced quality? with lossless codecs like alc and flac you are getting the wav with less bandwidth. as memory and processor power drop in price there is the facility to use even better 'offline' compression for each song so the current song is played from ram whilst the next one is decompressed and uploaded to the player. thatway you'll get the quality of wav (because it will be one once decompressed) with the file size of a 128 bit mp3.
cheers


julian

 

Whoops, I meant lossless!

 

It remains for me to be convinced Julian. Certainly Apple Lossless sucks - give me a WAV anytime.

 

:MILD:

 

Well why use compression at all? Storage isnt a problem now really. When 64mb of ram cost over £100 a few years ago I could understand it but now its not really worth it and certainly in a couple of years it will be a waste of time. COmpression only helps those with crappy 56k modems to file share with.

The real issue I have with most of the computer based audio systems is that the hardware was never really designed for audio in the first place. To me its a convenient fudge.

 

Why not....

Maybe if you have unlimited funds

RAM has very little to do with what you are saying.

I have broadband and a typical MPC album is around 100 Mb, which even at 60K per second would take around 30 minutes to download. A FLAC album can be anywhere up to 500 Mb and therefore could take as long as 2 hours 30 minutes to download at 60 K per second. Rarely is anyone fortunate enough to get 60 K per second. And if you can tell apart an MPC Q6+ album apart from FLAC (or WAV) then you have better hearing than 99.9% of the population, and as such, the differences are not worth bothering with/getting upset over.

By your reckoning, we should not bother at all with compression even if it does not impact the sound in any way. So lets increase the album to 700 Mb and watch as it takes at least 4 hours to download, if you are lucky.

Lets go back to the storage thing for a moment.

Say you have a 200 Gb hard disk. Fairly cheap yes? About £80 or less these days. Now, say you have your operating system and programs on and that leaves around 150 Gb for music. That is 1,500 CD's stored in MPC format, and I reckon many people on here have far more CD's than that. In FLAC, potentially you reduce that capacity to around 300 CD's. So to store music in lossless, and have the luxury of 1,500 CD's then you will need 5 200 Gb hard disks. That is not only a LOT more expensive but also a lot more noisy. Store them uncompressed, and then you end up with about 200 CD's capacity.

I dont know how many here will agree with their huge disposal incomes, but for mere mortals, storing uncompressed, or even losslessly, is very much a waste of disk space IMHO, especially given the absolutely tiny differences between MPC and WAV, of the nature that very, very few people can detect. So far, on my visits around the internet, I have not yet found any evidence that ANYONE at all can tell them apart (given a reasonable enough quality setting like 6 or 7 like I refer here), but I await to be proved wrong.

Resistance is futile. One day, you will all be assimilated

 

In which case it is not lossless, it does not do what it says on the tin, etc etc

 

Joints suck!

This is progress....

 

Paul,

I'd rather choose from 20 decent albums stored intact than 20,000 savaged by some crappy compression format. With the former, at least I have a chance to still become involved with the music. Heavily compressed Mp3 seems to remove all the stuff the tech boffins beleive we do not need. Sadly that includes the soul of music from my experience.

 

So would I, but I dont use "crappy" MP3's as you put it

Well actually I do, but they are the stuff I download, and most of it is very decent. My own encodings are always done with the musepack codec.

http://www.musepack.net/

With badly encoded music, I agree, but I never fail to be involved with any of my music, and if it is as bad as you state here, then it invariably ends up in a nice folder called "Recycle Bin"

 

merlin,
the stuff you heard at my place was effectively wav. the flacs are decompressed on the fly by the server and then transfered as wav's wirelessly to the squeezebox where they are buffered dac 64 style (mainly to stop network latency issues really) before being clocked out to the dac. so you are effectively listening to wav's with the space saving of flac. you know it makes sense - ditch that firewire botch job and get a squeezebox and decent dac.
cheers


julian