Posts by robbery
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Rob, you don't seem to get the technical reasons drm is not feasible. I'll leave that.
:) don't I?
but if I did 'get' it would there wouldn't be 33 pages of periphery discussion now would there?
You don't need to tell me how easy it is to get cracks (hypothetically speaking of course), but if drm attempts didn't have any effect then you wouldn't have 'some' people getting pissy cos they couldn't copy their music easily. making it slightly harder than piss easy does actually have an impact, maybe not on you (you evil pirating downloader type) or me (innocent your honor, a virus must have put those files on my computer) but the people who have better things to do with their time than trying to figure how to work bit torrent or crack a new copy protection failure. -
best leave it.
you're bored and avoiding work just like me mate :)
can you flick me some links to this theory of replacement thing. I just read through the wiki entry on CD specs and development and they didn't say anywhere that it was motivated by the desire to sell the same product twice, not that wiki is the defining history of anything, but they did manage to get most of the boring specs in the article correct,
remember if its not on the internet, it's not true :)
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That was it's key selling point to the record industry and without them it was a non-event.
you got to remember that at the time the recording industry had already started its move to digital technology well before the compact disc was a twinkle in anyone record label exec's eye. 3M and Soundstream both had digital devices used in studios in the early 70's.
rather than being thought of and developed by a bunch of exec's wanting to sell the same product to an already existing market (which is a flawed idea in itself) it was a continuation of developments in studio recording that started way back at the beginning of the 70's. CD's didn't hit the market till 1982.
I personally never felt the urge to replace my vinyl on cd, but did buy new music on disc as it came out.
Its almost laughable to think of a board meeting at a major that went something along the lines of
manager - ok what new projects have we got to make us money.
a&r guy 1 - I've got 4 new albums finishing production from established artists and 5 new signings with good followings who we're going to start recording soon.Manager (rubs hands together ) excellent.
A&R guy 2 - likewise here
Tech guy - how bout we make a new format and sell the same old records to the same people over again.
manager - sounds like a good idea to me, lets go with that.
I mean its not like the old model was flawed. they weren't running out of new music to record and release, vinyl was doing its job ok, but something else had been in use for a while that was going to do it better. They didn't need a saviour in the form of selling old shoes to the same customer, there was plenty of money to be made sticking to the same game plan.
I have to admit your story is definitely a much more exciting way of looking at it, and helps fuel hate toward the industry but the reality is, well kind of boring, however you want to interpret it.
its just the same as selling cans of beans but with cooler packaging.
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was a key driving force behind the CD's development and acceptance by the record industry.
and nothing to do with the advancement in technology? which is what you're saying.
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Hardly an academic wish, Rob...go and track down just about any issue of Music Week, Billboard or Cashbox from the era (I subscribed to the last of those) the replacement philosophy was widely discussed in all of those
yeah I get that point and they can widely discuss it all they like in the media but you and I worked in that industry and it was never a guiding factor for us, and in my case for any of the people I came across in the industry. Nobody I know embraced the change to cd cos they thought they could sell back catalogue,
That's personal experience versus academic conjecture. I always go on what I know versus what someone else tells me they know about me.
I'd go as far as to speak for Trevor Reekie, and Roger Sheherd on that as well. Those guys were all thinking about the next new record they could make, never the old one they could re release.Infact it kind of had a cringe factor to it because it was hard enough to sell the first 1000 pressing of the disc and now you'd have to try and sell a minimum cd run knowing full well that many who bought on vinyl wouldn't buy it on cd. A large part of your argument is that labels like to sell back catalogue because the project cost is cheaper because they've already paid for the recording, which is one portion of the cost of production, a big one but not the only one. the other factors involved in any release and still a cost in a cd re release are artwork which has to be modified for CD, mastering for cd and production of said cd, a lot of the same costs for the original.
It's still not free money, or anywhere near it. -
It's an inarguable fact and to be honest, I've never heard it questioned before.
ok I'm not questioning it was 'an' issue/feature/factor in format change, I'm challenging the notion that it was THE factor, or even a driving force. logic and reason says it was a by product that was favourable to the industry. This is backed up by the fact that no one got prosecuted for dubbing their vinyl onto cd when that all became possible in the mid 90's. surely if the labels were hell bent on getting 2 x the revenue out of one product they'd have plugged and policed that a little. It was a nice little side benefit from an advance in technology, not the reason for advancing technology.
Labels keeping prices artificially high after the initial costs of production had dropped back has more traction but even that story has another side to it.
its true that for mega sellers that the high cost of cds was not justified but for most of the joe average sellers it was pretty much right. does Heinz drop the price of one line of its beans because its making so many that unit costs drop, or does it price it according to what everyone else is charging?Its just another way to demonise the whole industry on the basis of a few instances, and there by justify the disgruntled punters stand point and their argument for justifying stealing.
Were you charging way to much for any of your releases apart from the one mega hit. did you get rich quick off anything apart from that one release? I'm guessing not since I haven't received my invite to say on your luxury yacht ancored off the coast of bali.
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Maybe when CD came out.
yes, when the cd first started its reign.
not now though as you note.
minimum 24 bit and up to 192khz which is based on the 48khz standard. 4 x 48 = 192.
I personally think a conversion to a multiple of 44 from a multiple of 48 is more damaging than a few extra samples so I stick to 44/88/176 units and 24 bit.
The actual difference between higher sample rates and what you get on cd is nowhere near the difference between cd and mp3 and consumers don't seem to care much about that.
HD audio discs have been available for a while but realistically you need to be in a scientifically designed state of the art room with state of the art audio equipment listening intently to the music to really reap the benefits of those advances in quality and lets face it who's got the time in the modern world to do that for long.mastering technology has also increased the definition you can get out of the old 44/16 cd so newly mastered cds can sound better and more detailed than ones form the mid eighties.
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do you not give any weight to the possibility that a CD is just a better delivery medium regardless of the side benefits it may have had for 'replacement'.
sometimes a rock is just a rock.
there may well have been fringe benefits to putting forward a new format but the crux of the issue is that CD was an advance for the consumer, not merely and advance for some scheming money men.
MP3 is an advance for the consumer, but its an advance left un checked that may well destroy the industry it is attached to.
and you're right, all these factors will be regarded in hindsight as key factors, but the reality may well be that even though they are painted in a sinister light they weren't sinister in intent, but the fact that some people chose to portray them as sinister maybe be the clinching factor in the whole thing. History isn't necessarily the truth, its how the loudest speaker chooses to portray it.have you seen american gangster yet?
a compelling 'true' story until you read up on it and find that the main protagonist made most of it up. but it's a hollywood movie now and will most likely be seen as the truth purely because most people will take it at face value, as the story that the loudest speaker chose to write it regardless of what actually happened. -
and why that's relevant is because people use stories like "the philosophy of replacement" to justify theft to themselves, and by theft I mean copying discs they don't already own, not transferring stuff they do own t a new medium.
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I'm suprised you are questioning any of this, it's not really obscure information
I'm disputing it cos it implies that some shady group of suits got together and decided to make the medium of CDs cos they were bored with making new album on vinyl, instead of the much simpler explanation that it was designed because it was a better delivery medium. its an exact copy of a digital master on a smaller disputably more resilient shiny disc. I love vinyl, its size, artwork, and sound but CD was a step forward. Digital files will also be a step foraward once they get the bit rate up, and copy protecting them isn't motivated by record companies wanting to make sure every last one of us buys their full collection to date again, its motivated by trying to stop the wholesale theft of music and thus the demise of a viable support structure to the production of music.
its common sense, regardless of what picture some academic wishes to paint over the top of the events of history.