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Topic: In an iTunes age, do we need the record store?
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-02-2011 12:13 AM
quote: Tom Petrov
I agree with you Bobby, and I also don't agree with you. While it is easy to tell the difference, we did have super audio cd and we also had DTS music for a while there in the late 90s. While super audio cd did ok and still is offered I believe (maybe you can confirm?) the dts music cds were a flop.
You're talking about consumer buying trends rather than what is technical fact: lossy compressed music sucks compared to uncompressed or lossless compressed music.
It's pretty damned contradictory how Hollywood movie studios can't release anything on Blu-ray without offering a lossless or uncompressed audio track. Lots of music concert discs feature 5.1 channel 24/96 high resolution audio encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby True HD or uncompressed Linear PCM. The studios would have preferred to just keep using lossy Dolby Digital but the high end consumers who drive home theater technology and improvements in home theater technology had a major shit fit and forced those studios to deliver something better.
Audiophiles have also driven trends with improving how music is recorded and then reproduced in the home. The tyranny of iTunes and lo-fi engineered shit has basically amounted to a giant "fuck you" to all music audiophiles. In return, many audiophiles have shouted "fuck you" back to the music industry by refusing to buy much of any new mainstream music.
It is widely known music sales are far below what they were in earlier decades, particularly the 1980s. Illegal downloads are only one part of the problem, not all of the problem as the RIAA keeps insisting us to believe. Today's music isn't as interesting as it was in previous decades. People have a lot more entertainment choices now than in previous decades. The shitty economy is forcing people to choose between buying a new movie disc or video game or music album instead of having the money to buy them all. Audiophiles traditionally buy a lot more music than the average person. The music industry of today has basically told those cream of the crop customers to get lost.
Regarding DTS music CDs, those things were not a failure. They were fairly popular when they were the best thing available in terms of 5.1 surround music only discs. I have a few DTS music CDs in my collection. The only thing that happened with DTS music CDs is better technology came along in the form of DVD Audio and Super Audio CD. That made DTS CDs irrelevant. Now the DVD-A and SACD formats are arguably irrelevant now that Blu-ray can deliver the same high resolution audio to a far larger install base. Far more people have Blu-ray players than the combined install base for both DVD-A and SACD put together. Additionally, Blu-ray can support 7.1 channel high resolution audio. DVD-A and SACD could not. As technology improves to things like HDMI, It may become possible for Blu-ray to support 5.1 or 7.1 audio in 24-bit 192kHz resolution.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-02-2011 01:42 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
My guess is fears over music piracy.
Plus also, the fact that high end consumer playback equipment and published music recordings is a small market that is already saturated. The iCrap stuff is a mainstream, mass-market product line.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Audiophiles have also driven trends with improving how music is recorded and then reproduced in the home. The tyranny of iTunes and lo-fi engineered shit has basically amounted to a giant "fuck you" to all music audiophiles. In return, many audiophiles have shouted "fuck you" back to the music industry by refusing to buy much of any new mainstream music.
But the way they've driven them has typically been to demand improvements to technologies that were designed fundamentally for mainstream consumers who weren't bothered about quality: hence the Orthophonic Victrola in the 1920s (raising the bar on existing disc technology), stereo LPs, hifi cassette decks to improve a system that was never originally designed for better than dictaphone quality, etc. etc.
What appears to have changed this time is that consumers who are prepared to spend serious money on high quality consumer audio reproduction never really took up digital files to begin with, and have stuck with vinyl and, to a limited extent, high end optical disc systems. If I was whoever has taken over from Steve Jobs, I'd be saying to myself that the cost of trying to launch an audiophile version of iTunes simply isn't worth it, given how crowded the market is already and its limited inherent size. Furthermore, the global economic recession has probably shrunk the size of that market even further, with fewer people around who are willing and able to pay five figures for their hi-fi gear and $30-50 for an album.
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