What does the future hold?

joel,
so you are saying that those who have 10 or so audiophile recordings that they play on their obscenely expensive kit are the ones who have it right then?

dom,
i'm only talking about the ability to have music downloaded onto your hdd from a selection made whilst you are out. not streaming music over a 'live' link. it would still be stored on your hdd at home and you'd then be able to make a 'hard' copy on to a blu-ray disk or into solid state memory.
i agree that internet streaming music is the work of the devil and should be banned but downloading for later play is fine imho. as for digital being sub optimal compared to vinyl, a decent format with a high sampling frequency and floating point data words would be imho as good as if not better than vinyl. my guess is that the 'error' for such a system would be the equivalent to a few quarks being out of place in the groove of a vinyl recording.
cheers


julian

 

Now thats a lot better answer Bottleneck, good one too. I like the way you put people into 4 categorised sections and i think you are right.

 

No. That has nothing to do with anything. So-called audiophiles are so marginal they are totally irrelevant to any discussion about the future or the present of music.
I guess I didn't make my point well enough or you don't see it (which is fair enough; I think it's a generational thing, too).
This is not about hardware, it is about the way we approach music. What music means to us, how we listen to it and... consume it.
FYI, there is possibly* less musical and linguistic diversity on the planet now than at any time in the last 20,000 years.


* no one can be certain, but it seems likely since cultures and languages are being subsumed at a seemingly increasing rate, and the "global" culture is making inroads even in the poorest and once remotest regions (not that most peoples' lives are getting any better for the most part, of course).

 

joel,
i think i understand what you mean - you seem to be paraphrasing that old saw - 'nothing worthwhile is easy' however i don't think this is the case with listening to music. that pastime is (for me at least) meant to be a relaxing thing i do after i;ve finished working. i may of course be doing other things whilst listening to music such as typing this reply, reading or working out however the delivery medium doesnt stop me from sitting there enraptured by some particular piece book lying on the floor forgotten or reply half typed when the music overtakes me. i just find that this happens more often with my current 'jukebox' system as i have a wider selection of music available. i guess we'll have to agree to differ in our opinions.
cheers


julian

 

Joel, your argument is a load of cobblers

If it were true music would have died out with the introduction of vinyl. "Progress only in a simplistic mechanistic sense," as you yourself put it.

Instead, the industrial mass production of convenient luxury heralded arguably the greatest era of artistic creativity the world has yet seen. More importantly, being cheap to buy and easy and quick to use it made the art acessable to millions. This in turn created a huge demand for new art and a self sustaining bomb that produced and is still producing more wonderful music than I could listen to in a lifetime.

Now I can listen to much more of it thanks to the convenience of digital automation, and hopefully massively more once I don't have to go to the trouble of ordering a physical CD, waiting for it to arrive through the post. Simply hunting down music absorbs a huge amount of time that would be more productively allocated towards listenely.

Now people have the shortest possible path (one click) to the best music in the world, the more they are to actually hear it. They're more likely to exploring, which is such a costly and time consuming business that only geeks like me are willing to invest in it seriously. The "entry cost" of becoming a music fan is falling, just as it did with the introduction of vinyl.

I think the fallacy of Joel's argument is that time, money and effort determine the value of something. But these are costs. Value is benefit minus cost, so costs only subtract value.

I value my ambient and dub much more now that I've put it all on to a single playlist that the computer randomly shuffles. Now the music talks to me directly, unfiltered by my prejudices about what to play and how willing I am spend time riffling threw a thousand odd discs.

And any thing used is "consumed." Get over it