| Subject: I pay for my CDs, but I download too. |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 14:31:51 07/04/04 Sun
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "RIAA & goofy laws." on 17:09:22 02/01/04 Sun
If I like a tune, I'll buy the CD, not pay for or download for free a poorer quality MP3 version.
Don't get ripped off by I-Pod or other online download music services. Unless you're tone deaf, or never hear the store-bought versions of songs, a store-bought, "off the shelf" CD will sparkle beyond compare to any MP3 version of the song. If you like a song, you don't know what you're missing if you only heard the MP3 version. As far as pre-CD oldies, if you can find an original analog version in mint condition, you'll find the quality & impact of the music is better than even the off-the-shelf CDs.
Why?
Your ear is analog. The microphones are analog, the air that vibrates with sound is analog, & your speakers are analog. Manufactures of some mikes & speakers may call their
product digital, but they are not, & could never be.
Cds: The flaws in digital conversion & compression.
Think of the value of Pi. It's exactly 3 1/7. Put the fraction 1/7 into decimal form, & it's a continuing decimal. The longer the decimal value the more closely it is to the true value of 1/7 but will never be 1/7. So at one point it'll have to be rounded of to the nearest whatever.
This anology can be the best way to to understand digital conversion & compression.
Every sound no matter how simple or complex, must be assigned a digital value for frequency, level (volume), & duration. Even with no intended compression, the digital assignment of these values will almost never be exact, but rounded off to the nearest "whatever". During the conversions, miniscule, or ALMOST inaudible, but audible sounds, or slight varations of the level or frequencies of the sounds may not be converted & written at all into digital for. In another words, some of the softest sounds, & slight dynamic & frequency varations are lost or rounded off to far from the original music.
The giggle made by the drummer, faintly heard in the backround, after conversion & compression now seems to be a moan or door creak, if it can be heard at all.
Just like watching the best quality DVD or HDTV. The fastest, most detailed, complex scenes... the ones that would normally dazzle you most in a film theater, fail poorly because there's too much information for the processors to accurately produce, & it's more information than the compression was designed to handle.
So during the busy scenes, detail is lost or blocky, or there's plently of unrealistic looking digital artifacts. If your TV, is under 27" you may not notice them. But on a modern widescreen, they're quite obvious in any digital movie.
The same is true with audio. The more complex the audio signal is... the stuff that should dazzle you the most, is the stuff that will be distorted the most, altered, or lost during digital conversion & compression.
The compression.
The more compression, the more rounding off, averaging, distorting & altering of the music.
Think about this, I can fit about 14 songs or 78 minutes of MP1 music on a disc. I can fit 170-200 songs, or about 7 hours of MP3 music on a disc. That's a lot of compression, & a lot of the original recording is lost.
Sure, it's damn handy to take my I-river multi-codec disc player ($39 with batteries & headphones, or my Memorex pocket mini disc MP1 & MP3 player ($24 with batteries & headphones-3" disks only hold about 90 songs), anywhere on the go. It's also easier to just download (for free) all the songs I want (that I aready own anyway) from a menu of my search queries at Kazaa, for my portables & burn them to a disc in minutes, rather than juggle my entire music collections to convert to MP3, & burn them on my disc for the week. But for serious, cozy, or dazzling listening, I'll use my 100-disc CD player, full of off-the-shelf CDs, connected to a quality stereo.
And don't think if you burn or listen to music off Sat. or digital cable services, you'll be getting better quality... it's all MP3 or worse. Sometimes it's FM converted to MP3, converted back to FM, back down to MP3, then back to FM. In that case you may actually get a better recording by plugging your old cassette machine into your FM radio reciever.
MP3 is great to cram a lot of songs into a portable or disc to listen to on the go or have in the backround like one would do with their radio, but I wouldn't pay a dollar or so for 1 poor quality song. Forget about those mini hard drive based MP3 players on the market for hundreds of dollars. It would take someone a lifetime to listen to every song just once they can hold on their drives. It would cost more than a down payment on a nice home to legally pay for all the songs they could hold. The people buying these things just aren't doing the math.
A $39 I-river player & a 5 cent disc with 7 hours of music should be more than enough for anybody. If not, hey! just put another 7 hour disc in there. These players will play seperate folders on a disk, have menus, & are programmable just like the I-pod like players. If you want a mini pocket player, get a 3" disk player. The discs are about a dime each & hold 90 songs. My pocket mini memorex cost only $24. The 2 AA batteries in both players last about 7-9 hours! They both have large buffers so can withstand a lot of banging around, & shaking without the music skipping.
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