I was just talking with my cousin's husband about the state of music this past weekend. He's somewhat of an audiophile and kinda works in the audio industry (sets up audio/video systems for uber-rich clients - projects like Paul Allen's house and yacht). Basically he was saying that we're technically able to create the highest quality, most sonically dynamic recordings ever but because of iTunes and iPods and music on cell phones the sonic spectrum of recorded music has actually contracted - no one is taking the time to produce music to sound good because it's being compressed on computers anyway, so why bother.
So, how's that for a tangent?

That's really interesting.

Out here on the east coast, there's a big upswing in vinyl record buying (noted in stores and newspapers). Boston. College town might contribute to it.

and then there's me:

Beg borrow or rip after years of buying vinyl and CD.
iTunes is great for organizing your home library but I HATE the use of the ipod on the public transit. My hangup. Whatever.

I put my entire collection on my computer and then transferred it to my iPod so I could take it to work, or in the car for long drives. But I kept nearly all my CDs and prefer to listen to the actual CDs when I'm at home. But then I also listen to albums from start to finish in the order the songs were placed on the album - another discussion we had. Apparently "kids" these days don't listen to albums, but rather just songs - and even then they're often just listening to portions of songs! Several years ago when music downloading first started popping up I was worried that it could be the death of the album...seems like my fears are becoming reality. [groan]

urgh iTunes is just horrible. And anyone who actually buys mp3's is nuts, compressed drm ridden pieces of shit that they are.

Fuck, cassettes are the future.

Car manufacturers certainly think so. They keep churning out new cars with cassette decks, which bogles the mind.

because you can't beat a mixtape made specifically for a long car ride.

Damn straight. I like hard media myself, I'm a sucker for packaging etc. So I still buy CD's/Vinyl. I like mp3's cause' I can sample a band. I think THAT'S what is killing the (mainstream) music industry. Before, people just bought any shit, they didn't know. Now they can test the waters and choose NOT to buy/listen to something for free and realize it sucks.

So uuuummm..................I forgot how this tied into Cosmos Hedos?

can't wait for my hedo either.

i agree that people that buy mp3's are quite stupid. and i have nothing against cd's. I kept all my jazz, hip-hop and 80's metal LP's, cuz I've always thought those 3 music types sound more authentic on vinyl anyways. As for CD's, I kept the essentials, but I had so many discs taking up so much space that I never got around to listening to them all. I found myself grabbing the same cd's everytime I jumped in the car. This way, I actually find myself listening to the stuff more since I just put it on random when I'm cleaning the house or whatnot.

By selling my cd collection, i wasn't supporting the whole "wave of the future" mentalitiy. I married with a kid and i've compromised with my family that all my shit will stay in one room, and I'm happy with that. IT just got to the point that the one room ended up not being such a good compromise, since it's pretty damn cluttered. I figured this way, I could get rid of the cd's and still, in a sense, keep them, while having more room for my major obsessions: toys and comics. make sense?

that's why, with all my selling of of cd's, i could never get rid of any of my king diamond or radiohead stuff (OKcomputer and on), because that shit doesn't get the right feel listening to each song individually....

im one of those people
i will always keep my tables an records no matter how much room they take up (wich is way more than toys)
and i havnt even gone the serato route yet either
there is nothing like laying down a really old rare record that crackling popping sound
i think it just the nostaligia
cds i barley listen to unless they have been burned
though if i do actually buy a cd i think i get more enjoyment out of it i love reading through the booklet etc

i agree. old shit belongs on vinyl. all my lizzy borden and venom records sound amazing on vinyl. i've heard some of that stuff on cd, and it has that cheap "digitally remastered" sound to it. awful. it's like watching that shitty colorized version of Phantom of the Opera. And John Coltranes Blue Train....hell, all the blue note records stuff! the record version of these has such a sweet, authentic sound. i couldn't imagine listening to jazz stuff on cd....

ps, sorry i turned this thread into a cd/record dispute. bwana's probably pissed....

cosmic hedo is the shit!!!!!

I have an MP3 of the Cosmos Hedorah.

I just got my Comos and was just wondering if anyone's is also super soft.

yep, soft squishy vinyl.

If I buy a lower quality MP3 "which is pretty rare" I always throw it into this nifty little program I bought called Sound Studio $70 from the Apple store and just load it up and then I save it to 320kbps and usually it makes everything sound much better... you can also make some pretty decent adjustments in i-tunes and raise the volume levels if something sounds low or weak compared to everything else...

been using Traktor to mix at the club for a long time but would really like to try a program called Torq... it's suppose to use up less resources and take some of the strain off of the laptop from what I understand.

I know of at least 3 people who have claimed to have "Set up Paul Allen's A/V systems"... either he had a fleet of yachts, or someone's not telling the truth...

i still enjoy buying vinyl. i especially love that some smaller labels will hook you up with a free download of the album if you buy the vinyl.

ok, putting a lower quality mp3 into a program and upscaling it to 320kbs is impossible. It will still sound shitty.

If you think how mp3's work (compression) the program can't put in any extra information thats not there to begin with. All you've done is inflate the size of your file for no gain. You can downgrade kbps from Wav or FLAC but never upwards.

Woah! Had to go check out the original thread to see how "I" created this one - neat trick Slack!!!

Well, it's a team of people. My cousin's husband works for Paul Allen (Vulcan). He took several trips over to Germany to work on his ocean-liner of a yacht, and was on the inaugural trip across the Atlantic to make sure everything went well while at sea. Also, Paul Allen DOES have a fleet of yachts - I believe his newest and largest is at least his 3rd?
And to now derail this thread with talk of Paul Allen's "toys"...my dad flew on his private jet straight out of his private hanger at Boeing field. Apparently he had several planes/jets/helicopters including some military aircraft, I think he said there was an Apache!

Records still sound Amazing! But cleaning them correctly is the absolute key to maintaining the superior sound over cd's.

But since not everything gets made in vinyl anymore, 20hz-20khz is all we got.
For portable music...its FLAC or bust imo. Like Parka said, there's no possible way of recovering bits lost to the initial compression.

I'm not sure if a hacked ipod firmware supports FLAC but I chose to get a trekstor vibez and a cowon iAudio U3 about 2 years ago since they both supported FLAC natively.

Cowon has a nice U5 out now that looks pretty cool, I prefer flash memory over a hard disk...I just wish I can get more than 8GB

and here I thought I was doing something fancy...

I did not realize you could not give the MP3s a little boost in this way...

shows you how much I know...

Gizzy, you can install Rockbox onto your ipod to play FLACs. Its pretty neat in that it will dual boot in case you still want to hop back to iTunes software. It's also got a working game of Doom. Drains your batteries really, really quick though.

When is the 8-track coming back...