Will hi-fi die with the compact disc?

This is news?

Heh. I just noticed I'm one of the search Tags. I wonder why that is.

comment 1, hilarious.

No one will really notice until speaker technology is advanced enough to catch up to the quality of the sound files. Then there will be a bunch of pissed off people who have to pay extra for their 128 kpbs files to be upgraded.

I laugh when people sell off their cd collections after uploading them to i-tunes. More used cds for me and, noticeable as of lately, for increasingly lower prices.

Like people who trashed their old home movies and 8mm films when they converted them to VHS tape in the 80s... how are those things holding up?

looks like a transcode, someone report it!
i demand v0.

ha ha ha
he he he

One word...flac

This is exactly why I don't buy music online, the vast majority of the music available are all low quality files (mp3, etc.). CDs may seem old-school, but at least you get what you pay for.

That said, the typical iTunes user won't care, & even the iPod itself doesn't have the best playback.

@4:30: Kind of makes you wonder if that's the plan, to charge people to "upgrade" their music files later on. The RIAA would love that!

Gawd... did we REALLY need to draw out the audiophile snobs once again?

There are plenty of labels and bands now offering flac downloads.

The real current problem with flac is its incompatibility with the ipod -- which is basically apple just being assholes about their own failed "apple lossless" and blocking flac plugins. The good news is that pretty much every portable music player on the market other than the ipod offers flac playability.

More than a "high-definition" version of a recording and quality equipment to play it on is needed to appreciate a piece of music to its fullest. The listener needs to focus on the music and not just have it on in the background while doing something else, as well.

'Don't gimme no Flac, Jack!'

Sansui G7000

Sansui S930 Speakers

Technics 1200

....And a shit ton of vinyl.....

Hifi won't die, it's just getting smaller because there are less people who care. But the people who do can and will support high fidelity releases by both buying them and NOT buying inferior product. This is economics 101 and is actually good for the market. Either way, it costs less to market (since the market is smaller, no huge investment needs to take place other than the niche sites and mags). The record companies and promotion can take the $ they spent there and put it towards A: artist signing and development and B: marketing low cost lo-fi to the rest of the world. Everyone, it seems, will still get what they paid for. It will only be an issue if/when the options cease to exist - if low bitrate audio is the only format you're selling, then I'm not buying your product *at all*. Let the free market take care of it - it always works out. My other opinion is if you don't care about the quality of product you're offering, then why should I? Value is only realized at the consumer level.

Does any audiophile know how to plug a mac into a reciever via optical cable or the like so the sound is equal to a cd, is this even possible?

storage space and download bandwidth isn't going to much of an issue in say... 10-15 years. people will laugh at how we compressed audio into mp3's. once you have a terabyte ipod what's the point of converting or compressing anything...

long live the cassette! the highest quality audio possible by humans

Storge space is already ridiculously cheap compared to just 2 years ago. 1 TB external hard drives are about $200 now. That's less than I paid for my 320GB drive like 18 months ago.

"Does any audiophile know how to plug a mac into a reciever via optical cable or the like so the sound is equal to a cd, is this even possible?"

this is dependent on what type of files you have on your computer. if they are flac or lossless then the sound would be comparable to a cd. if the sound is any other compressed format the quality will be lower.

Whatever happened to SACD and DVD-Audio?

Cassettes will never die! right on 529. They just sound better than mp3 (louder, that's all that means). Cassettes are still the dominant audio format in most of the world--in most of the 3rd world that's pretty much the only audio format. All the Polish music stores on Manhattan Avenue have racks and racks of cassettes.

future generations (ie people 2 or 3 years from now) will laugh their asses off that people in the mid-2000's settled for mp3s, mp4s or flac. Can you imagine paying for an mp3? My friends who digitized their CDs and got rid of them in 2003...now they all complain they're bored with music.

DVD-A is still around, its just not being pushed by the DVD player manufacturers.

Anon 5:53. What do you mean "settle" for flac? Its a lossless compression scheme and a file name. The actual sound file is a wav, which can represent any kind of master, be it a digital master, reel to reel, or even your beloved cassette.

mp3, mp4, flac, ogg... will all be the 8-track cassette of our era.

Within a couple years bandwidth & hard drive space will be such that lossless will replace mp3's. mp3 is a space-saving technology, that's all...once space is no longer an issue to the average listener it won't be necessary anymore, and then people's computers & ipods will be full of CD-quality music. Doesn't eliminate the need for quality speakers, headphones, preamping, etc if you want your music to sound good, but most people who are listening to CD's aren't listening to them through good stereos either....

digital downloads are kind of like wine coolers in the late 80s, or pastel-colored sweatpants in the early 80s...no reasonable person doubts that they are the future, but it's really not so hard to find examples of inevitable futures that never happen.

great point 6:17

Please do your research before comparing the MP3 and FLAC formats. FLAC has the same exactly audio quality as CD, it just implements the latest technology to provide lossless at almost half the file size of the original file on the CD.

I personally prefer the Apple Lossless only because it's very unlikely Apple will ever budge on accepting the FLAC format. In a few years when iPods can handle the lossless files, Apple Lossless will be the best option to store the most songs at the best quality.

What time does hifi become obsolete?

MINIDISC!

i heard that listening to clean crisp audio actually stimulates brain growth

we should all hang out

8-TRACK!!!

you people all went the wrong way...Technology is not the problem, people are the problem, mainly greedy landlords, mortgage sales people and lame post-emo kids.

Greedy landlords drove rents sky high when they saw the kids coming. Once I started living on my own I could not afford (or justify) having speakers bigger than my head because i could not afford an apartment wherein I could dedicate copious space to HiFi. Add a wife (or other sane co-habitant) and all that gear is sorta like a friend you can't agree on.

rents and real estate in general has forced efficiency on people and now the days of lining your walls with LPs seems like some tale of 'when people were shorter and lived near water'

but its ok 'cause we gots cd's now...jewel cases anyone? ever really think about this? a jewel case increases the physical volume of every cd by 6.

anyway - what did cd's bring us in terms of music...radiohead? actually cds did bring us most of stereolabs work and that leads to my next point

since 'the kids' have been listening to the dubious fidelity of mp3s - they did not really 'get' where stereolab, sebadoh, and the other lo-fi were going with their sounds - because everything sounded sorta strange anyway and so now Go! Team (good) and Belle and Sebastians progeny (bad) all have this hazy sound aesthetic (both in terms of fidelity and musicality) that at times works but most of the time makes me want to take a blow dryer and clean that damn lint off the needle so the music can really come out.

Of course none of this applies to produced crap which sounds more like ringtones anyway - which seems to be how people listen to pop music nowadays - rendering fidelity a moot point, he said slumping to sleep at the bar.....

That lady from the Telegraph just wanted to get with Peter Gabriel, I bet.

The crappy Telegraph Web site causes my computer to slow to a crawl and Firefox 2 (when I used that to view it) to freeze.

Anyway, I like the following article (link below) that was in the list of most viewed articles.

car fuckers!

The real musical problem here is you.

truth is, i bet no age and deerhunter sound better if you can hear everything their doing, and laptop speakers or whatever don't do them justice.

but you're telling me there aren't and won't always be artists that don't give a fuck? ie jay reatard + black lips? that shit still bumps if you're listening to your brother play it in the other room with your ear pressed up against the wall

You'd be surprised at the number of artists that only want mp3s of my recordings of their concerts, even when I offer 16-bit and 24-bit masters.
I think the only artist who actually wanted the 24-bit recording was John Vanderslice, bless him.

Even at 320kps cymbals and acoustic guitars can get splashy and 'watery' after compression. I recommend Apple Lossless for those who need to save space but don't want to sacrifice quality.

Who cares. I just download one or two songs from whatever new band is hip and then never listen again until the next one.

Vinyl, bitches.

does anyone know an electronics store that will take a look at my grandma's old turntable? i just inherited it and am tech-retarded. i think the central problem is that it doesn't want to make sounds

a properly encoded 320kbps file is nearly indistinuguishable from uncompressed audio (in blinfold A vs. B listening tests), except for things going on in the psychoacoustic realm... which is a whole different discussion. i work as an audio engineer whose done blindfold tests in various studios, with other engineers who have all come to the similar conclusions.

"The real current problem with flac is its incompatibility with the ipod -- which is basically apple just being assholes about their own failed "apple lossless" and blocking flac plugins. The good news is that pretty much every portable music player on the market other than the ipod offers flac playability."

Posted by nyctaper | May 22, 2008 5:00 PM

There are plenty of relatively simple work arounds for this. One I can think of off the top of my head being rockbox.org

Rockbox doesn't work with newer ipods. The open source flac plugin written for ipods has been blocked on the newer models.

Well that sucks.

I'm an low rent audiophile who considers rich audiophiles somewhat funny, but not "snobs". As far as the "blindfold test", its all relative to the equipment and the type of music being played. There are perceivable differences that most people who aren't audiophiles could discern, and sometimes only someone with an ear for it could tell any difference. Just because someone is an audio engineer, doesn't mean they are the end all on audio reproduction. 50 percent of the CD's I buy are mixed horribly, so that is another consideration.

There is a difference, but it can go wrong at so many different levels of production that it all gets lost in the mix, as they say.

The original post's thesis is one that I've taken notice of for the past several years. At the same time we're going into higher definition everything, technology is taking sound the opposite direction.

"Vinyl, bitches."

Hisses and pops FTL.

Here's some truth.

No-one on this planet can tell the difference between a 256 kb/s AAC file and the original 16 bit 44.1KHz source. No one. At all. Ever. No one has ever successfully ABX'd it in a properly run, repeatable test. It has never been done, and never will be done. I'm talking doing ABX tests with original CD PCM, and AAC decoded to PCM, both run through the same DAC, speakers, and amp.

It's all bullshit. MP3/AAC has won, because at above 192kb/s, there is NO audible difference between MP3/AAC and CD, no matter what your obsessive compulsive wanker 'audiophile' friend says.

MP3/AAC is more convenient, it's dead simple to use. It's just better.

I'm old. My CD collection takes up OVER 1 CUBIC METRE. What a God-damn waste of space.

Every one of those CDs is ripped to 256 kb/s AAC, and stored on a gen 5 60GB iPod. And guess what. I have 2 CD players; a Sony, and a Denon. The iPod sounds better than the Sony, and the same as the Denon.

The CD is dead.