Music Media Poll

I love vinyl. Yes, i realize that CDs are smaller and tend to have better sound quality, but there's nothing like the sound and feel of a good old vinyl album. Its just something about feeling the actual record in your hand and knowing thats its the real, authentic thing. Somehow I feel so much more satisfied when I play, oh, Trick of the Tail on my turntable as opposed to my cd player in my car. I love the crackle, I love watch the needle ride along the record, slowly making its way to the center. Its nice to know how the actual technology of a vinyl record works too... well I understand it better than CDs anyway, and you can see it working right in front of you. Being a 17 year old in 2004, i always see my age-group peers with burnt copies of their favorite musicians, who tend to suck. Where's the authenticity, where's the RESPECT!? 

It is just such a pity that digital formats came along to dominate the market place , around the time when plastics scientists could have replaced such an inferior material as vinyl chloride/acetate copolymer for 12" micro-grooved LPs. Relatively soft, creeps, heat distorts, poor scratch resistance haunt vinyl, and provide the weak point between deck and styllus - btw anybody afford the laser reading equipment for micro-groove records now on the marketplace for what seems at least 3500 quid?

Nothing beats that warm tone produced from a vinyl.  If vinyls were portable I sure would have a lot more. That doesn't stop me from collecting though. 

 Just picked up the first Utopia album yesterday on vinyl for a buck

You asked for my favorite so I put Vinyl. I use CD's much more often and they are more convienient. Vinyl is my favorite though.

I can't stand the hiss and crackle that vinyl produces, although I miss the cover art.

What I want is completely solid state media that is the size of these little cards for digital cameras, that can store an entire album in 6-channel sound, each channel recorded at 24-bits or more, plus high resolution cover art, articles, perhaps even videos of the band and interviews, which can be displayed or projected onto a very large screen.

 

I love vinyl, it's my listening choice when I have a lot of time to indulge in listening to music. It's sweeter warmer and is less prone to causing fatigue in the listener, which CDs definitely do.

However, having said that to do my vinyl justice I have had to invest many thousands of euro on expensive hi-fi equipment. My pre and powers, separate phone stage, lp12 and floorstanders are  not transportable, were expensive, vinyl is awkward and prone to damage.

For a minimal reduction in listening pleasure, I can play CDs on relatively cheap equipment (my cd player cost €400 my turntable three or four times that) and it sounds as good as listening to vinyl on equipment many times the price. I can play cds in the car on a walkman, anywhere.

Vinyl is gorgeous (not least for the accompanying artwork) but I'm sorry to say convenience alone means that CD is the one.

I am, however, looking forward to the future ... don't know if it will be DVD-A, SACD (doubt it) or this new Blue Ray thing, but it should mean digital media begin to approach the warmth of vinyl.

 

Sweetnighter,

Yes, I too think the lifespan of the CD concept is limited. But I don't think MP3 technology will replace them. MP3 is a lossy compression method. The way technology is going, memory devices are becoming smaller and able to store more data, so it will not be necessary to compress the data anymore. Look at DVDs vs CDs for example: DVD-Audio can store 6 tracks of 24-bit audio on something the same size as a 2-track 16-bit Audio CD. Perhaps the next stage will be solid state devices the size of a postage stamp that can be put into an MP3-like player and PCs, with better characteristics than the current DVD-Audio 6-channel 24-bit technology. With high resolution images on it too. It would be nice to display in ultra hires on a 48-inch display the cover art from "Brain Salad Surgery" or "Greenslade" for example. That's the way I hope things develop. In the long term, perhaps music media per se will no longer exist, as everyone's PC will be hooked up to a massive-bandwidth grandson-of-Internet where we can download 64-bit digitised music and images/video at the click of a finger. Would be nice, wouldn't it?

 

Next step?

DVD-A/SACD versus this, which is going to ship, apparently, as the format on next year's Playstation 3 platform and will spearhead Sony's (and others) championing of the format as the next gen stroage medium. Eventually they believe they can expand the storage capacity to 55Gb and potentially to 500Gb! Not sure whether music will feature in thise format but it's possible I guess.

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of leading consumer electronics and PC companies (including Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. A single-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold 25GB, which can be used to record over 2 hours of HDTV or more than 13 hours of standard-definition TV. There are also dual-layer versions of the discs that can hold 50GB.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM use a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup and allow playback of CDs and DVDs. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

With the rapid growth of HDTV, the consumer demand for recording HD programming is quickly rising. Blu-ray was designed with this application in mind and supports direct recording of the MPEG-2 TS (Transport Stream) used by digital broadcasts, which makes it highly compatible with global standards for digital TV. This means that HDTV broadcasts can be recorded directly to the disc without any quality loss or extra processing. To handle the increased amount of data required for HD, Blu-ray employs a 36Mbps data transfer rate, which is more than enough to record and playback HDTV while maintaining the original picture quality. In addition, by fully utilizing an optical disc's random accessing features, it's possible to playback video on a disc while simultaneously recording HD video.

Blu-ray is expected to replace VCRs and DVD recorders over the coming years, with the transition to HDTV. The format is also likely to become a standard for PC data storage and HD movies in the future.