Do server's belong in high end hifi?

And even your wife will like it !

 

plz,
i've not been convinced by either sacd or dvd-a and any high rez version sold over the internet will have draconian drm that will prevent me doing things like transcoding to wma to put on my phone or possibly even playing it ever again if i happen to change my pc. this is why i use flac - it has no drm component whereas with lossless aac and wma you are at apple or microsofts mercy when it comes to what you can do with the music you;ve bought.
it would be nice have access to an online database of loads of music which i can play whenever i like at high res however i'm not willing to risk the possibility of a day without music due to technical problems. i work from home and listen 8+ hours a day so local storage is very important to me - somethign like pandora or internet radio is good for finding new music but i'd still rather buy it physically soi can do what i want with it.

 

julian, I see now what you mean (I use flac also).

But...I was referring to high res as in the music data would be a lot closer to the res the actual (digital) recording or mastering was stored in at the record companies. Not the tricked up sacd or dvd-a formats. I assume the record companies will release these higher res formats if there is demand and they will cost more than CD res versions of the same material.

The DRM issue is still in its infancy and a lot needs to be done before it becomes a non-issue I agree. For now, the record companies (and movie studios) are still struggling with their business models. These issues will get resolved eventually (hopefully sooner than later).

Regarding having local storage...yep, for the next few years it's still with us, but I'm sure in the (not that distant) future all that material will be on-line and reliable. Like cable or phone lines, no one really worries anymore about their phone line or cable going dead do they?

 

plz,
i doubt that you'll ever get master tape quality digital being released legally. quality is the only real stick that the musico's have to hold over people's heads regarding copying (at present) when it was only possible to copy using analogue it always meant a copy was noticably worse nowadays a copy is pretty much indistinguishable from the original which means the musicos have lost their leverage. drm is an ill concieved fix for that and one i won;t support.
i'd agree that in the future you'll have a terrabyte or 3 of online storage that you can access via whatever device is trendy at that point but i still believe that local storage will not die - for one thing how easy would it be to blow out a few cell toweers and bring a financial district to it's knees if all their storage was online.

 

Each time they bring out a more complex watermark, some hacker crack's it. So they place an even larger one on the disc, taking up even more space. I'd wager the new high res formats will end up being the same, or worse than cd; 75% watermark, 25% music data. Probably corrupt music data at that.

 

kub,
watermarks are pretty much dead now - the current drm strategy is far more scary than that.
wma and aac are proprietory algorythms - i.e. they are the property of apple and microsoft. they work by encrypting (and compressing either losslessly or lossily) the music data according to an algorythm that is suposedly secret. fair enough - however when you buy a piece of music you agree to certain terms - one of which is that the terms can be changed at any time. now for example one of those conditions may be that you are able to transcode your lossless files to a lower bitrate in order to listen on a portable device however if the company in question's profits start to dip they can release an 'upgrade' to their music software / codecs and pmp's which will immediately render any tanscoded music unplayable so now you have to go and buy the music all over again at a lower bitrate. another scenario might be that you are resticted to playing your music on a particualr pc or pmp. what happens if your pmp gets stolen or your upgrade your pc? some software looks at your network cards mac address in order to id your pc so if that fails or you swap it out for a faster wireless card or better network adaptor then you are again boned.
this is why i'm highly dubious about buying non physical music unless it's as flac - and even then i'd still burn a backup as a playable cd - but then that's a lot of trouble for what? a saving of not much really.
all in all buying music online as downloads is just a daft idea at present imo of course.